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.
Similarly with immigration, the purpose of the legal formalities is to constrain immigration volume. If you think those volumes are not high enough, you can advocate to increase them. In 60% of polling this issue, Gallup has found that the support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34%, and was under 10% from 1965-2000.
As to the rationales for limiting the volume of immigration, they are two-fold. One, people don't buy the argument that immigrants are good for them economically. Economists have lots of theories about public policy that people don't buy, like the idea of getting rid of corporate taxes: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Two, people have cultural preferences and want to limit the scope of cultural change. That's a perfectly legitimate rationale for limiting immigration. People in the Bay Area would be pretty upset if internal migration made Mountain View culturally more like Alabama. People in Wyoming would be upset if immigration made their town more like New Jersey. And those are people in the same country!
You are defending a criminal.
- it is not normal for the military to be sent to cities and locations that are run by political enemies to round up people
- putting people in concentration camps (that's what they are) is not normal.
- deporting people without due process is not normal
- using the military for policing duties is not normal
You're a lawyer. All of this should horrify you.
The USA was on the right path with decreasing immigration by making its neighbors more wealthy. Guess who ended that? The Trump regime creates problems which then only the Trump regime can solve, which is a game older than politics. And you're falling for it, hook, line and sinker.
For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
> The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.
The US is an outlier in relying wholesale on an illegal workforce without representation and without healthcare or access to the legal system to keep their economy afloat.
> For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Sorry, and given that this is a point of law, you are utterly wrong on this, which makes me wonder what else you are wrong about where you are so confident.
https://www.vera.org/news/what-does-due-process-mean-for-imm...
Have a read, and maybe adjust your priors a bit.
> Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
You keep saying that, here and elsewhere. But it just isn't true.
> As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
That is very much not true and you know it. The biggest problem with US immigration law is that it is (1) ridiculously complex (2) dealt with by understaffed entities (3) kept in place because industry and agriculture more or less depend on it and (4) effectively makes the country a vast amount of money.
If you're so horrified by it then you can blame your parents for picking a country to emigrate to that was soft on emigration. You can't pin this on the emigrants, many of whom were in the USA well before you were even born.
Meanwhile, you're on the record as a lawyer that argues incessantly on behalf of a government that is doing their level best to destroy the justice system that you've grown up in and that you - ostensibly - support. An extrajudicial assassination or two - let alone 11 - doesn't even cause a raised eyebrow, and mass deportations without so much as a chance of legal review doesn't either.
> Maybe the problem is you?
You mean: because I hold a minority opinion I'm the one that is wrong? No, that's not how it works, not here and not in the general case. The fact that someone holds an opinion and whether or not a larger group of individuals holds a different opinion is not how you determine where the problem lies or who is wrong.
You do that by careful analysis of the underlying facts. And for NL those facts are quite complex, far more complex than Mr. Wilders and his merry band of incompetents makes it out to be. But that doesn't matter for him, in that sense Trump and Wilders are one and the same: push the fear button, as hard as you can and there will be plenty of people that vote for you.
To assume that populism is automatically right is a fairly big error and history is rife with examples of proof of that so I take it you won't be asking for citations.
But it wasn’t true. It was a conceptual mistake closely related to George W. Bush’s erroneous belief that he could turn Afghanistan and Iraq into America through laws on paper. And that’s had tremendous downstream consequences.
I have absolutely no idea where you got this utterly bizarre notion of what went on in the Netherlands in the last 50 years or so. This is so far besides the point that you probably should just take the L and move on. But on the off chance that you are open to some input:
Syrians and Iraqi people in NL are here predominantly as refugees.
> Had that premise proven true, nobody would know Geert Wilders’s name.
No, we've had Geert Wilders like persons in different guises in the past. None managed to convert it into a life-long jobs program for themselves though.
> But it wasn’t true.
This has to be the mother of all strawmen ever on HN. You are just simply clueless about this.
> It was a conceptual mistake closely related to George W. Bush’s erroneous belief that he could turn Afghanistan and Iraq into America through laws on paper.
That too is completely disconnected from reality as documented in untold millions of pages of history.
> And that’s had tremendous downstream consequences.
Yes, there were tremendous downstream consequences. But you utterly missed the connection about the causes, which in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq go back to 1839 or so.
But, in an interesting turn of affairs, the same groups that were screaming 'foreigners!!! they'll take our jobs!!! they'll take our women!!! they are not Christians!!!' about Indonesian people in the 60's, Surinam people in the 70's, Turks in the 80's, Moroccans in the 90's, Poles, Romanians, Latvians, Armenians, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Afghans in the two decades after that are perfectly ok with it as long as it allows them to cling to their fears and stoke the division. Never mind that those first waves are now all but indistinguishable from the rest here.
There still is a massive disadvantage to being non-white, so Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians have an easier time of it. And it will take a long time before that difference has been leveled, if ever. Unfortunately.