Luz shares her apartment with her husband, also from Mexico and also undocumented. They met in America. He works in a bar. They have a young daughter who was born in America and is therefore a US citizen.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.