You combat immigration by making your country an undesirable place to be. This applies not only to those wanting to come over but also to those who are already living in the country.
If your society is good, you will have people trying to join it by any means necessary. Legally or illegally. You're better off offering a path to above-board contribution than you are trying to lock things down.
I agree. I think it was the Attorney General who stated that separating children from parents was meant to act as a deterrent to those who hadn't yet entered the country. I'm not sure it has any value at all in processing the people who have already been detained here (if anything, I would expect it to complicate and slow that process). He clearly wants the United States to be viewed as unwelcoming and willing to hurt people, including children.
Well... they're both self-evidently untrue sweeping statements. The idea that everyone who has a problem with illegal immigration ultimately just hates "brown people" is ridiculous. I can't think why it even needs explaining that it is.
Well, here's one example that just came up today: President Trump was explicit about his travel ban being a "Muslim ban." He wasn't even trying to obfuscate. Also, the distinction between illegal and legal immigration is a little bit of a misdirect, because we decide who's legal and who isn't, and why. Trump, for one (and, by extension, everyone who supports his policy position on this issue), is saying that we need to redefine who's legal and who isn't, and he's specified Muslims and people from "[stuff]hole countries" as people who should be deemed illegal, and people from Norway as who should be legal.
I don't understand why you can't have all of the things you want and strict and well thought out immigration regulation.
I don't, either.
Every country has a limited set of resources and a limited number of people it can theoretically accept each year as immigrants. It would be amazing if we had unlimited resources, but we don't, so there's of course going to be practical limits as to how many people can be accepted. As such it makes perfect sense to figure out the regulations that work for your country and stick to them.
Right, and here in the US, we haven't really done that. We've made immigration harder than it needs to be, and some of us want to make it even harder, and to draw distinctions among the people applying, based on religion and country of origin. We are
miles from figuring out what works. Frankly, I'm not convinced that everyone in this country even wants to figure out what works - there are people in the US who are very frank about wanting the country to be White and Christian.
Maybe your disagreement is with the word "strict"?
It is, yes. Sorry, I should have spelled that out.
I'm not saying that this should imply that we only let in 5 people a year. It just means, make sure that the people being admitted are the people we want.
Right. The debate in this country is about what we want, although not everybody is honest about that (claiming that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes is one smokescreen that people use, for example). The president of the university wants her graduates; other people want low-cost labor; President Trump wants fewer people from certain countries.
We can only let in so many people a year, so we have no choice but to prioritize who gets let in and who doesn't. This implies strict immigration regulations, so that the whole system can function smoothly and the country doesn't end up in a position where we're taking on too many immigrants, or too little... or taking on too many immigrants who just can't figure out how to integrate into our society. It's why we mostly take on well educated legal immigrants here, as far as i know anyway. This is an investment in the future of this country, you need a solid plan for that, and you need to be strict about enforcement.
The integration question is an interesting one. I'm more of a "salad bowl"-guy than a "melting pot"-guy, if you know those terms. One of my political science professors was a hardcore melting pot-woman. She was from Lithuania originally, if I remember. I wonder if people who've immigrated are more likely to support the melting pot model, while people who were born here are more into the salad bowl model? I'm just thinking out loud.