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44 points bikenaga | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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jmyeet ◴[] No.41875480[source]
This is actually a decent article but it misses a few things.

People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.

The article points out that if you really wanted to address this (made up) problem, you'd go after the employers. Nobody does that. It has been tried, however. For example, the Alabama agriculture sector collapsed when they tried [1].

Chicken farms are notorious for bad practices. Underpay undocumented migrants. When they start demanding safer working conditions and more pay, you simply call ICE for a sweep, pay a token fine and then start with a new batch.

Undocumented migrants, from the perspective of employers, are about cheap labor and suppressing wages. The easiest solution for this is to document them. We used to do this. It was called the Bracero program [2].

Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.

Construction and agriculture are utterly dependent on undocumented migrant labor.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[3]: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...

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parineum ◴[] No.41875652[source]
> in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens

Two thoughts on this. First, you appear to be comparing all homicides to homicide convictions. I'm not sure what the national conviction rate is but it brings that number down.

Second, if those unsolved murders, I would suspect that illegal aliens would represent a disproportionate number, given that they are more difficult to find and can easily return home to escape conviction.

Even accounting for that though, it's still a relatively small amount in total but I have no idea what those rates would be like proportionately.

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1. adgjlsfhk1 ◴[] No.41875725[source]
almost no illegal immigrants can easily return "home".
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2. parineum ◴[] No.41876054[source]
It's significantly easier to flee to where you are a citizen than it is to flee to where you need a passport.

Maybe "easily" wasn't the right phrase but significantly easier, especially in a mental/personal sense.