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It's not that they would make the US look bad abroad. It's that they'd look bad in the US. There are plenty of people who like the idea of not having to see, e.g., homeless people or immigrants but who aren't going to support actually rounding them up en masse. In many cases weeding them out from the general population would require invasive enforcement policies that would anger voters who support Doing Something. (This is a pervasive element of politics - people like the idea of a problem being fixed or a certain outcome being achieved, but balk at the tradeoffs involved in actually doing it).
Yeah but the rest of the world isn't the leader of the free world. America's narrative is that it is spreading freedom and democracy and human rights. If the border starts looking like the Gaza Strip, homeless people are being carted off to prison etc. you'd see foreign governments take advantage of that. The global elites are more or less in agreement on this issue of immigration too and I think actually truly believe it, so they aren't going to change. They'd be embarrassed among their peers, which I think they care about more than what voters and their fellow countrymen think. The only way to change it would be to replace it with people who are America First i.e. don't care about the U.N. or Western Europe or NGO's opinions. Plus they'd have to tell a bunch of legal organizations to get fucked (foreign and domestic). It would be a massive endeavor.
I do agree that home front is also a problem. Leftists would be agitating and you'd see newspapers like the Guardian crying about it from day one and trying to get sympathy for migrants. You'd either have to have discredited these organizations so much that nobody cares what they think, or straight up jail and beat them into submission. Then you'd also have to have a population that is okay with that as well. Because right now, as soon someone comes into enforce the law, every left wing newspaper in America is going to be talking about kids in cages and people dying at the border with AOC photo ops. It would have to be a whole paradigm shift that is really unreasonable to expect unless something extraordinary happens.
American voters, left or right, do not give two shits about what any of those think. What is important is how American voters regard themselves. Your average middle-class suburban conservative doesn't like immigrants, but they also won't like hearing stories about abusive migrant detention centers or, say, migrants killed up by mines as I've seen advocated for here and elsewhere. You have some hardcore anti-immigrant types who fantasize about CBP shooting asylum seekers, but they're a small minority compared to people who just hope a symbolic middle finger to would-be immigrants will overcome the overwhelming economic incentives and aren't prepared to resort to the inhumane measures or extraordinary costs required for effective immigration enforcement.
This is probably true, but not in the way nativists think. Western countries all share a similarity in that they have a highly educated, aging population that demand standards of living, social security, etc... be maintained (and actually increase) despite declining labor force participation, retirees that are living longer than ever, and a workforce with a disproportionate aversion to manual/menial labor.
The only country of note that has bitten the bullet on avoiding immigration despite the factors above is Japan, and they've paid for it with economic stagnation. Political elites have to try to square the circle, and they've calculated (almost certainly correctly) that even if they're nominally anti-immigrant that they can't afford the political and economic costs of actually cutting off immigration. Again, there might be a minority who is happy with that outcome, but your average voter isn't going to be swayed when the politicians tell them this is what they asked for. So instead you get the status quo - capricious, half-assed enforcement which gets more capricious or more half-assed depending on whether the party in power is notionally against or for immigration.
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Why not? Isn't that exactly what happened with the homeless problem when Xi came to visit California?
No, that was more or less a continuation of standard practice, i.e. disperse homeless encampments when they become too noticeable, but don't actually do anything to address homelessness. It nicely illustrates the point: people don't want to see homeless people or have to deal with them, but they're also not willing to support throwing thousands of people in prison for vagrancy or spend money to build sufficient shelters.
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