It's not really about blame though, surely, it's just about upholding the law.

The child of an illegal immigrant is there illegally, they're not to blame, but they're illegal residency surely shouldn't be supported.

An analogy might be distributing inheritance evenly, because "children shouldn't be blamed for what their parents did [and how much they made doing it]".

Some people might argue we should do that... but even they'd surely agree it's pretty extreme.

Just seems like a rather ambivalent relationship with immigration law to me. But hey, that's just my outsider's point of view!

>but they're illegal residency surely shouldn't be supported.

Then provide 0 medical services, CPS services, police services, or legal system services. If you have someone here illegally, especially a child, being targeted by a predator, it sucks. Really bad. But to offer them any services paid for by the American people is supporting their illegal residency.

I find that most people who push for the view of not supporting legal residency in cases such as school care or even medical care are still willing to do so when you talk about the illegal resident being the target of a predator. This makes me think that either they don't fully accept their own logic or that there is something else at play that they didn't expand upon.

Some people see the law as unjust and not their responsibility to uphold.

Kicking a person out of the only country they've ever known is pretty harsh when they've done nothing wrong. The inheritance analogy falls pretty flat for this. Consider instead if the law said that children of murderers must be imprisoned along with their parents. If you came across the child of a murderer who had yet to be apprehended, would you report them?

Oh I see. Still sounds mad to me though, I mean what's the alternative appending something like

    > or, you are under 18, and not to blame for your illegal residency

to citizenship requirements?

That is already there in the laws. Overstays under 18 years of age are not penalized when you subsequently try to legalize. Otherwise there is a 3-10 years ban which takes some legal effort to overcome. Furthermore to legalize one must qualify through job or family and this can be a tough barrier for many.

You usually don't need to be a citizen to go to school. Many college students come from other countries. Requirements for a scholarship need not mention citizenship.

Also, unless there's a law specifically against it, there's nothing to prevent colleges from admitting or giving scholarships to people who have broken laws. You generally have to go out of your way to find out what someone has done. A college that only accepted people who hadn't broken any laws wouldn't be admitting most high school students.

Excluding people doesn't happen automatically - you have to actually make an effort to do it.

From a more detached point of view, the question is whether law ought to be enforced irrespective of how it is violated. Many people would say yes.

Vanishingly few would experience that detachment for anything they were personally involved with.

Possibly so, which is why decision-making is so often delegated to those who have no personal involvement.

This is how people get shipped to ovens.

"Just executing the law, bro"

In this case it would result in their being repatriated to their countries of origin. Usually these are ovens only in a figurative sense.

Well, let's not bring the Nazis into it. If you're deporting people to Syria or Somalia or some other dangerous place (which they sometimes have no memory of), it's quite bad enough.

Legal terms (like "country of origin") are abstractions that often hide what that consequences of a decision actually are.

If we applied that to driving laws, people would revolt. As long as people have a reasonable expectation to not be directly impacted, they usually don't care.

If we applied this to traffic laws, people would insist upon traffic laws that better reflect the way they wish to drive.