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44 points bikenaga | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.35s | 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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nox101 ◴[] No.41875521[source]
Is don't know if it's a problem or if it's related but in Los Angeles, the city is covered with illegal food stalls setup on sidewalks. I think that's an issue. For one, it takes customers from the stores they set up in front of.

I'm happy to hear arguments this is unrelated to illegal immagration and is a net positive.

the idea that immigration is always a net positive seems to have been challenged recently

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...

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1. southernplaces7 ◴[] No.41875736[source]
How terrible.. Let's enforce draconian ID checks, destroy families, corral people into human warehousing centers and then aggressively throw them back into the hell they escaped from over the border..... because some Los Angeles residents (and residents of other cities) cant stand the site of a food stall on their otherwise "perfectly clean" streets.

If those food stalls weren't offering an attractive service at a good price, they wouldn't be stealing customers from anyone anyhow. The restaurant owners aren't owed an income and customers aren't a product to be "taken away" or given. They make their own choices that others decide to serve in this context.

Among all the arguments against illegal or legal immigrants, this has got to be one of the more pedantic and absurd examples.