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Yep, I'd be pretty satisfied by this outcome. My objection to this deportation is pretty much the same as (and milder than) the objection I have to, as @Dean pointed out above, the intentional killing of American citizens without a trial.
Maybe not anymore but I don't think this would have blown up like it did if the place he was shipped to wasn't somewhere we were specifically prohibited from sending him.
I mean you're talking about 1 in 30 people living within the US, who came here over the course of decades. It's not reasonable to expect for them to all be deported over the course of months. The number of illegal immigrants in the US has stayed pretty constant over the past couple decades, so I expect that just enforcing existing laws and executing existing processes will be enough to reduce the number of people living here without legal status. And I don’t see any particular reason this has become an emergency that needs to be resolved this year, and historically the executive granting itself emergency powers to deal with an ongoing slow-burning problem has not gone well.
...?
Which numbers, specifically, are you thinking of?
Generally when I hear this argument, it refers to articles like this one, which presents arguments like the prominant graphic one that the 'undocumented' migrant population has remained relatively constant in the US since 2008 (~12 million.)
However, they tend to bury the categorization schemes like this-
However, one of these categories is notably not like the others. 'Adjust to legal status' is a legal category shift, not a departure (or death) of the person.
If you provide a temporary legal status to a million illegal immigrants, your country's population has still increased by a million people, even if you offset that number by a million legal-category grants. This is a false equivalence of categories that avoids dealing with the implications and insinuations of absorbing a million peoples who arrived illegally, mostly by handwaving the numbers away as no longer counting.
Further, even the 'removed by DHS' category is subject to statistical chicanery. Or as a former president once admitted, "a little deceptive."
During the Obama administration, for example, the Obama administration's deportation statistics conflated different actions that made the number of deportations appear high even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US decreased. That sort of mismatched occurred because at- or immediately-within border returns were publicly equated to deportations. Moreover, the Obama administration counted removals that previous administrations wouldn't have. This was a recategorization that let Obama claim a hard-on-illegal-immigration reputation even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US- i.e. deportation of people who got past the border crossing phase- dropped by 40%. This practice resumed with the Biden administration
So when the (often pro-migration) studies make claims that the migrant population is generally steady, it's always important to see how they address the issue of re-categorization of migrants (redefining illegal arrivals as legal residents no longer tracked) and the conflation of deportation types.
If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.
Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.
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Why do you think this is true? There was a huge spike in illegal and quasi-legal immigration during the Biden administration.
Huge relative to the number of illegal immigrants already in the country? I will repeat the question I asked Dean:
If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.
Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.
Speaking as likely the only person in this forum who has ever dug ditches alongside illegal immigrants, I would expect it to be much, much lower. If you've been here for 11 years and the best you've got is waiting outside Home Depot, you probably utterly suck.
And that's beside the point. The number of people who are estimated to have come in during the last 4 years is comparable to the total prior illegal population.
Do you think all of the previous ones dipped during the Biden administration?
I expect this statistic double-counts people, because I find it quite doubtful that the median length of time that people have been living here illegally is 4 years or less (which it would have to be, if more than half of the people who are currently living here illegally came in the last 4 years).
I don't dispute that Biden's immigration policy was bad BTW. I specifically dispute the claim that before Trump I illegal immigration was not an emergency, but between the end of Trump I and the start of Trump II, it became such an emergency that it now requires resolution within months, and so we must set aside rule of law and due process concerns.
Why? Is there literally anything you're hanging this on aside from raw hope and vibes?
I live in California, I interact with people who are not here legally on a quite regular basis. Thinking about e.g. the people I know who have a new partner/housemate, or got a new nanny/gardener, and then filtering down to those that are not here legally, they're mostly people who have been here for a while. Substantial selection effects, obviously.
But also census data says, of foreign-born non-citizens, the distribution of dates of entry as of 2023 was
As of 2021 the same data was
So that's an increase of 1.7M non-citizen immigrants in the 2 year period from 2021 to 2023, with an increase of 2.6M who entered after 2010 (and a decrease of ~900k non-citizens who entered before 2010 over the same time period, who left/died/gained citizenship). And keep in mind that in a normal year 700k to 1M green cards are issued. So I don't see space for half of illegal immigrants to have come over later than 2020.
Where are you getting your data, aside from vibes?
But we literally know of two Biden programs that brought in that many by themselves, at the same time as border-crossings hit unprecedented highs. So the numbers won't pass the smell test
Mind that those numbers are over 2 years or half the term. Unless you're saying there were 6M+ distinct people who immigrated illegally during Biden's term?
Edit: also, for the claim that over half of all illegal immigrants came here in the last 5 years to hold up, we'd have to say that the census under Biden was underestimating in a way that previous censuses didn't. In the absence of better data, I'm inclined to trust the census to at least get the relative proportions correct.
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Land of opportunity standards have been dropping though. I know a bunch of illegals who came over 15-20 years ago, and a lot of them have their own lawnmowing/landscaping/general services businesses now. (God knows how they manage the finances.)
But now the new guys coming over don't have as many niches left to fill, except being cheap labor for the last cohort. I see a lot more of them going for dead end jobs and never climbing out
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