So? Smart people can figure out that they can be made "illegal" by the stroke of a pen, even if they've complied with every rule they've encountered so far.
Not really. If government fiat takes away my US visa, and for some reason does so instantaneously with no grace period, then I'd still only be an illegal alien for the few days it takes to get my affairs in order and fly home. The kind of tech worker who's employed full time at github isn't in a remotely comparable situation to someone who's in the country illegally.
It's not actually that easy to revoke someone's citizenship. I know many people who came to the US legally that are vehemently opposed to illegal immigration precisely because they followed the rules and don't see why others shouldn't have to.
visas on the other hand are incredibly easy to revoke, or simply not renew. and you're employer has to support a greencard petition if you're e.g. on an h-1b. i know of at least one person's GC application that got torpedoed after his relationship with his manager soured. especially if they have families, employees on a visa simply aren't going to speak out.
> employees on a visa simply aren't going to speak out.
I know many people with visas that are against illegal immigration. Don't assume that everyone who's not from the US hates ICE and supports unfettered immigration.
This touches on my greatest frustration with the national debate about prosecution/tolerance of illegal immigration:
One of my main reasons for opposing illegal immigration is that it's contrary to the rule of law. It subverts the democratic process, and makes suckers of anybody who does try to follow these laws. I'm actually a big fan of legal immigration.
But I rarely (never?) hear this distinction made in public statements by advocates of illegal immigration. At least in public, they seem to assume that anybody who opposes illegal immigration opposes all immigration, and even worse, does so out of ignorance or bigotry.
Assuming I'm not the only person with my particular views, that conflation is infuriating. I can only hope it's done unwittingly.
As the war on drugs has also demonstrated, there is only but so much behavior-shaping you can achieve with people via the law.
If a law is consistently and chronicallhy broken (and especially if the harm for breaking said law is minimal), at some point one must ask if the law is too incompatible with human behavior to justify enforcement or existence.
I don't think anyone "soft on illegal immigration" is against legal immigration. But they may very well be against the laws as they currently stand, because the laws are demonstrably shaped by racist intent; the national quota system used to decide people per year from each country where very much structured out of fear of a "browning" of America.
For many of these people, the legal route isn't available, or in the case of people fleeing Syria, Guatemala or Honduras, they are seeking asylum, which is legally a different route.
Yeah, that certainly tempers my views. I'm sympathetic to breaking U.S. immigration law because it's the only option for keeping one's family safe from a war zone.
I'm much less sympathetic to people breaking U.S. immigration law because they want greater economic opportunity for themselves or their children.
That said, I can't argue back to first principles why my preferred balance of virtue maximization / vice minimization is objectively better than anyone else's. So if we're being completely honest, I can't advocate even my own position in good conscience.
That's absolutely not how it works. People either have valid immigration status and/or citizenship, or they don't. There's no trick to suddenly make people "illegal".
