The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border

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...

Illegal immigrants would have to be really stupid to commit crimes; after all, they jumped through huge hoops just to get into the country, so of course they're going to keep a low profile.

What I'm curious about, however, is how many crimes are committed by their kids? One thing I've noticed about immigrants in many countries is that, while the actual immigrants (the "first generation") went through hell to immigrate (illegally or legally), and generally are extremely hard-working and want a new life, their kids aren't the same. The kids didn't grow up in the old country and don't know what it's like there, and don't understand their parents' sacrifice. But in the new country, they frequently don't fit into the society (particular if they come from an extremely different culture and ethnic background), and then this can lead to big problems later, like joining criminal gangs.

There are some differences by a demographic, but by and large, The stereotype of the hard-working immigrant parents pushing their children harder to succeed is accurate.

I don't know if they work as hard as their parents, but they have higher social mobility and lifetime income then their native economic peers.

Besides that data-driven point, My personal take on the original question is that the children generally don't work as hard as the parents, but that is simply a regression towards the American mean.

That said, just like not all people are the same, not all immigrants are the same. It is a broad classification that by definition includes both doctors and human traffickers. It's pointless to talk about immigration policy without getting into the details

Do they? Can you provide a citation to back up this assertion, in France?