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Illegal immigrants are an important mechanism of wage suppression, asset inflation and shifting the outcome of elections, and I think US society would be substantially improved if the hiring of illegal immigrants was made into an offence which explicitly pierced the corporate veil and lead to such extensive asset seizures and punitive prison sentences that every single illegal immigrant was unemployed overnight in fear of said regulations.
I get where you're coming from, but Americans keep voting for politicians who don't do that. They keep voting for politicians who either think that it shouldn't be done or politicians who say it should be done but then don't try very hard to actually do it.
Polls for decades have shown that Americans are very against illegal immigration, but we only have two parties and neither will do anything about it. They finally voted in Trump and they pulled out all the stops. He tries to limit Muslim immigration and some judge in Hawaii shuts it down. He doesn't get his wall either. The fact is there is nothing Americans can do to stop illegal and mass immigration short of a coup. I'm not saying that to fed post, but just using common sense. How else could Americans stop illegal immigration if elected officials, the media, and the deep state prevent anyone from really doing anything about it?
Trump could (and should) have sicced federal law enforcement on the businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Everyone knows who does it, everyone knows where the live, and they have attachable assets. Illegal immigration sceptics on both sides of the political fence know that this would work, and that more security on the border probably wouldn't (not least because ~1/2 of all illegal residents were originally overstayers and not border-jumpers). The vast majority of illegal immigrants come to the US to work illegally, and if people stopped employing them they would stop coming.
He didn't, because businesses which employ illegal immigrants are a key GOPe constituency, and at that point he was still trying to work with the GOPe. And the MAGA base didn't care.
We still see far more people calling for fences and deportations than we do calling for universal e-Verify. I despise people who try to psychoanalyze political opponents, so I am not going to speculate on why this is. But part of the reason why politicians (even Trump) don't actually try to reduce illegal immigration is that the voters who say they want less illegal immigration don't expect them to.
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By prioritizing the issue (as @WhiningCoil pointed out in https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166846?context=8#context, while Americans care about these issues they might not tend to prioritize them) and consistently voting for politicians who will act on the issue.
I'm sorry, but that's just straight up not true. The US doesn't have a system where people can vote on issues straight up, but when they have been given the chance, they have voted against illegal immigration. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_187
Within days, the deep state shut it down. Just like Trump's Muslim ban by some judge in Hawaii or his wall. It is literally impossible to stop illegal immigration democratically in the United States. If it was possible, it would have ended by now.
I don't think it's impossible. People would just have to consistently vote for politicians who actually prioritize the matter. But Americans for the most part, even if they want to stop illegal immigration, do not care about the issue enough to make it a dealbreaker when it comes to who they vote for.
The problem is even when they vote for politicians who say they will oppose illegal immigration, those politicians often turn out to be liars when they get to Washington.
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