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Notes -
I think context you are assuming is fully baked in, is in fact not baked in at all, so I think it's perfect you bring this up. What you probably realized mentally, maybe took for granted, but didn't actually state (causing confusion), is that the current immigration system is also accompanied by a lack of effort to reform said system. As an illustration, Trump claims that he's pro-legal immigration, but the proof is in the pudding: have Republicans introduced a better legal immigration system? No. They haven't even tried. They also almost never talk about it (or at least the leaders don't). You need to explicitly state something to this effect, rather than just say "it's an obstacle course" and rest your case, because "the immigration system is an obstacle course" might be true but is not enough to actually end up with POSIWID.
Some Republicans could easily say "no no, we still want to fix the legal immigration system, any inaction is just " and so we're right back to the importance of intent, where we started. They might say "the system is broken due to too many band-aids" and we dodge the intent discussion overtly, but it's still lurking around because inaction also betrays intent (albeit much more loosely, so I acknowledge this leap might be logical but is potentially weaker).
Or, maybe there was some other latent assumption and I misidentified it. Either way, while POSIWID is what I'd term an occasionally-useful psychological re-framing tool (thus, worth talking about in the loosest sense) it's not actually an argument.
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