If you want to reduce illegal immigration, in this model, you need to either increase the cost or reduce the value of immigrating. Most policy levers at the government's disposal affect the cost. It's difficult to reduce the value from status, esp with the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Well, this isn't quite right--you can reduce the expected value by reducing the probability of success, but as we'll see these levers mostly have the same issue as cost levers.
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The problem with these levers, from an anti-immigration perspective, is that many of them are quite cruel; and the resulting suffering typically occurs within the US (where people care about it, vs idk let's say Yemen which is too far for empathy to apply apparently).
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So, anti-immigration forces are kind of stuck. The only levers easily available are the kind of cruel that is unpopular, so they can limit (to some extent) immigration only by playing monsters. Meanwhile, pro-immigrant forces can play a double game.
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The first advantage is that they don't have to defend immigration per se, which might be unpopular (idk who looks at data even its 2019). Instead, they can simply point out that anti-immigration methods are cruel, and increase immigration in this way.
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The second advantage is that policy changes that can be implemented by executive fiat are relatively blunt and cruel compared to a broader program. So, pro-immigration forces can actually make further progress by blocking relatively not-visibly-cruel levers in the legislature,
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leaving anti-immigration advocates with the option of only (i) quitting the field, or (ii) calling their bluff and generating visible cruelty. If (ii) occurs this is in some sense worse for a genuine pro-immigrant platform than cooperating on finding non-cruel methods,
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but in practice it's not a loss because (i) it hurts the outgroup by making them look bad and (ii) the people who end up in cells for months aren't members of Congress so fuck em amirite
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I don't really see a way out of this. Neither side wins by backing down. Good luck!
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Replying to @eigenrobot
can you explain the colonialism point because I'm still lost on that one? colonies were a state/form policy, immigration doesn't appear to be like that at all in my mind.
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Hardly! Often the state tried to stop immigration, see British attempts to stop 18th century movement of white settlers across the Appalachians
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Replying to @eigenrobot
is Mexican immigration into the US a state policy?
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