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44 points bikenaga | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | 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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1. gotoeleven ◴[] No.41875784[source]
These numbers you're quoting are so laughably implausible that I had to check and it turns out that you are wildly misinterpreting source [3] as some sort of representation of illegal immigrant crime nationwide. [3] gives a break down of a very specific selection of arrests, "U.S. Border Patrol Criminal Noncitizen Arrests" which total 15,608 YTD in 2024, and then these 15608 arrests are broken down by crime. This should have been a big siren in your head. How many arrests are made by law enforcement in the US, per year, do you think? Well it's around 7 million. So 4-5 orders of magnitude more. So this is some tiny subset of arrested criminals, apparently the ones that CBP, a federal agency, arrested. And they give stats on murders by this tiny subset, and give 27, and you compare that to 20,000, which comes from those 7 million arrests. Fake news.