It comes up when there’s services illegal immigrants will use anyway and you want it to be done properly. For example, you want illegal immigrants to still have a valid driver’s license and insurance as the alternative isn’t “no illegal immigrants” but instead just a generally a society that functions less well (and in the case of driving more costly and less safe).
Yep. This is also why e.g. Portugal has decided to give all persons in the country, no matter immigration or other status, the right to free-of-charge coronavirus tests and treatments without threats of deportation or whatever - simply because the risk and follow-up costs of illegalized persons spreading around coronavirus are higher than any potential benefit.
They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights, but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind. They don't really campaign directly to abolish borders because it would raise obvious and difficult questions, instead they campaign against enforcement: arguing for a world in which immigration rules exist but anyone who follows them is effectively playing a mug's game.
>They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights,
You forgot the obvious middle ground, milk them for every penny.
If we had multiple classes of IDs you'd see every damn government transaction that requires ID come with a surcharge or different fee schedule for people using the variant that can be obtained without being a legal immigrant because those people can't complain.
> but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind
I'm not even an American, I only have a massive dislike against borders that let money and goods flow unimpeded, but not people. The economy, the government, the system should serve the people - not the other way around.
Besides: the official immigration rules of the US are screwed up beyond any reasonable hope for repair (and remember, the original idea behind US immigration policy as to take in everyone as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty!). If one cannot repair or replace a broken system, it is wise to work around it instead of keeping up bullshit - and yes, giving up on enforcement is one such strategy.
That's actually not that wise a strategy. Think of it like tech debt. Working around a bug can be useful if there's genuine time pressure. If you're doing it because you don't think you can fix it, or worse, haven't convinced other people there's any bug at all, then it is inadvisable to keep doing that in the long run.
There are good reasons why the rules for people are different to those for goods and capital. However, you may note that Trump specifically is also in favour of tariffs i.e. impeding the flow of goods. Via FATCA the USA also practices an obscure form of capital controls.
I don't know if getting into a debate about the merits of borders is a great idea for this thread, but, consider at least the following things:
1. Historically people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it). The world in 1800 was a world of sprawling empires. Passports didn't really exist in their modern form. Borders were weak or non-existent. In the past 200 years the number of countries has gone up drastically, often because people fought against those empires for the rights to create a smaller, more localised nation that would be better attuned to their local needs and cultures.
Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?
2. The world at the time of the Statue of Liberty was rather different to the world of today. For one, relatively few people could actually reach the US to do that sort of immigration. The arrival of cheap air travel fundamentally changes the equation for borders and immigration rules, as the flows of people involved are so much larger.
3. Culture is a real thing, a describable thing. The left exhalts it and upholds the benefits of a diversity of cultures. But in practice, cultures don't always co-exist peacefully. In Europe countries are resurrecting internal borders (e.g. Sweden did this just a few days ago) in the wake of yet more Islamist terror attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher that was trying to teach French values of tolerance and freedom of expression. Presumably you're aware of this story. As a consequence even Macron, who is as global-elite-anti-borders as they come, has had a sudden 'conversion'. The left has no coherent answer to how to sustain the values of 'enlightenment liberalism' that they hold dear in the face of large-scale immigration from cultures that doesn't share those values, nor tolerate them.
The left is losing this argument despite that borders seem retrograde, are inconvenient, and so on, because it hasn't yet found any coherent tradeoffs or solutions for the problems that prompted them in the first place. Indeed nobody has: the right doesn't even try. But the left is simply ignoring them and campaigning against the infrastructure of enforcement, which is a childish approach. A similar problem can be seen in the USA with respect to the police: campaigning against the existence of a thing that creates problems, without any answer to how to address the problems lack of that thing would create. It's this kind of anti-tradeoff thinking that eventually led me to abandon the left. It's OK to recognise that a situation is unsatisfactory, yet also recognise that you don't know of an alternative tradeoff that's clearly better.
Small nitpick : "people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it)"
Well people have fought and died for many many stupid pointless things so it hardly constitutes an argument in favour of it. People have fought and died for conquering other's people land, to enforce the "true" religion, for money, for glory...
"Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?"
The more wrong, the more stubborn. More seriously : This a a very abstract reasoning. How do you apply it to WWI? What did "people" want then? Did it matter what they wanted?
It's really not that abstract. Phrased another way, would you want the world to go back to a state where the sun never set on the British Empire? Most people wouldn't, including most Brits, even though it was a large free trade zone (the "Imperial Preference"). There are more borders now, but that's offset by the benefits of localism. The great empires were not famous for their love or respect of local cultures.
WW1 was a good example of where a lot of those countries came from. The empires of the day were very large, not many countries, and the people running the German/Austro/Hungarian/Ottoman empires thought that was great and maybe they should reduce the number of borders in the world a bit more. They were defeated and in the aftermath a lot of new countries sprang up, for instance, the modern concept of countries didn't really exist in North Africa/Arabia until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
And the argument about people from other cultures not always mixing well isn't abstract. That is a lesson being learned in blood. The killer of Paty was an illegal immigrant, that's why Macron is suddenly pro-borders.
The point is, the modern left treats borders as some unspeakable evil, but never make any kind of intellectual argument against them, probably because the moment you do try to grapple with this issue intellectually and the history of where this system came from it becomes complex. Probably also because borders are an aspect of localism and the left historically is a globalist ideology. So instead they just attack the infrastructure and skip the whole thought process entirely. It's anti-intellectual.
