Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.
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Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.
Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.
Deterring irregular economic migration? If the government adopts a non-formal policy of not prosecuting non-criminal non-violent workers, it's implicitly saying it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble. You might think this is fine because free movement of labor is good or whatever, but that's not what most Americans want.
I feel like we should be honest - Americans are perfectly comfortable picking and choosing when laws get enforced. We do it all the time. We don’t treat every law as sacred. Enforcement is selective in a million other areas, from antitrust to wage theft to pollution. Nobody insists those must be pursued to the letter every single time.
So why single out immigration as the one area where “the law is the law” trumps any rational or humane appeal? It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference. One that just happens to line up with race and class anxieties rather than some universal devotion to the rule of law.
I think there's an implicit cultural preference when people argue in favor of more immigration though. It's also just assumed immigrants themselves don't have cultural preferences when it seems they do. On the one hand there's an argument made against cultural preferences but on the other we see things like ethnic neighborhoods such as barrios develop and then those are defended and diversity is said to be our strength. So I don't think it is consistent to be pro immigration and anti cultural preference.
Of course we do! We don’t even pretend otherwise. I went to a Bangladeshi wedding in Toronto a couple of years ago. A friend of the groom’s family said to my dad that it was too bad my brother and I couldn’t find Bangladeshi women to marry. This is probably not the median view among Bangladeshis in Canada, but it’s within the Overton window—to the point where our response to this comment was to say something ambiguous about the place where we live having few Bangladeshis. And most Bangladeshis I know still marry within the community even in the U.S.
But of course there is a double standard here. Brown people aren’t treated as having moral agency. Bangladeshis in America can express extreme in-group preference and nobody will say anything. But it’s utterly taboo for whites to do the same.