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.
Here you're conflating "law" (the rule supposed to be followed) with "policy" (the mechanism used to enforce that rule). One can be broadly in favor of controls on aggregate immigration and still horrified at the means[1] chosen.
You really don't see how reasonable people might disagree with you?
[1] In this case[2] rounding up working engineers doing a job we all agree we want done via means that have been the norm since the 50's.
[2] The literally masked secret police force and salvadoran gulag things are sore points too.
Quite a few people by now, as a percentage of the total given the numbers involved. Oh, sucks to be them I guess...
> My understanding is the number of legal citizens and residents detained and deported is nonzero, but close.
Well, those people would be the innocent ones then, and 'close' isn't good enough for legal purposes. Wouldn't it be just too bad if you were the one to be deported as a result of one of these razzias? Or would you see your own deportation as taking one for the good of the country?
> Everyone being deported broke the law in some form or another.
Allegedly broke the law.
Would you forego all law enforcement in your own country because of a nonzero error rate?
Yes, but there is 'close' with trying to get it as good as you can and there is 'close' without even trying. With is obviously better. To me, at least, even if it is slower.
> The alternative is giving up on all legal action, because every single one is fallible.
No, the alternative is to do your very best and to only disrupt lives when you have to, not just because you can. That's harder than just black and white and that is where judges come in and why people have a right to due process.
> Would you forego all law enforcement in your own country because of a nonzero error rate?
I don't think that's the choice. The choice is between having law enforcement that is bound by rules and law enforcement that is not bound by rules. The latter is - to me - unacceptable. I think everybody has a right to due process.
The last time we had a regime in NL that did not agree with that thesis is still very much in living memory here so I don't think you're going to find a lot of takers for Razzias and mass deportations. If that were to happen here in NL I'd find the nearest barricade and join the resistance. And I'm pretty sure I would not be alone in that.
It especially seems like pearl clutching in the context of this article. What would the NL do if Tesla or some such was found to be employing hundreds of illegal workers without proper visas? Would they be deported and would you grab a molotov join the resistance?
I think most reasonable people can agree officials should be bound by rules and law. There as substantial difference on what people think those rules are.
There is also a huge subset of people that care nothing of the law, and think deportations are illegal because they don't agree with their politics.
With as massive difference that we don't do razzias by masked people arresting as many people as they can to meet their quota.
See, we still have a functional legal system here where you can get your day in court, even as an immigrant, illegal or otherwise. Not that there aren't voices like Trump's here in NL, clearly we have those idiots here too. And unfortunately they are doing well in the polls. But for the moment, there are still crucial differences between NL and the USA when it comes to the rule of law.
> They also have a history of being much tighter immigration enforcement than the USA.
That depends. There is first of all the massive difference between six different groups of countries:
- the neighboring countries of Luxembourg and Belgium with whom we have been in a kind of mini-EU for many decades
- then there are the main trading partners France, Germany and until recently the UK with whom we had very good reciprocal relationships.
- Then there are the - mostly former - colonies.
- Then there are the countries in the Schengen area of the EU
- then the rest of the EU countries.
- Then we have some long running friendship programs with for instance, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan
- Then we have exceptions for students from all over the world
- Then there are refugees from war zones
- Then there are refugees for other reasons (for instance: because they are persecuted in the country they are from for their religion or sexual preferences)
- and then there is everybody else
As you can see, it gets complicated.
If NL would find that Tesla was employing hundreds of illegal workers without proper visa's I'm fairly sure that they would first look at what the actual damage is and how the situation could be addressed. There likely would be a joint effort by EZ and Immigration to work out what should be done and this would then be implemented. At no point anywhere in that process do I see a razzia of a construction side as even a remote possibility.
> Would they be deported and would you grab a molotov join the resistance?
That's not how resistance works here in NL, but if they did start violence against what we call guest workers here, then yes, I would definitely come to their defense and so would a couple of hundred thousand other Dutch people. Simply because we are more than happy to serve as check on our authorities when they start doing inhumane stuff.
> I think most reasonable people can agree officials should be bound by rules and law. There as substantial difference on what people think those rules are.
Well, one thing that is simple is that there is an automatic right to due process here, no matter what the crime. And that right to due process includes a right to appeal and then if you have had your day(s) in court and have lost then in fact you can be deported and this does actually happen.
> There is also a huge subset of people that care nothing of the law, and think deportations are illegal because they don't agree with their politics.
That could be, but I don't personally know any such people.