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They could stop illegal immigration if they wanted to though. This isn't some impossible task. There just isn't political will among the elites. Pakistan deported over a million Afghans: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistans-plan-expel-over-1-million-afghans-living-country-illegally-2023-10-31/
Are you trying to tell me the US couldn't do this if they wanted to? The government just doesn't want to for [insert reason here]. You didn't agree with mine, which is fine, but I hope you don't think the US actually couldn't if there was the political will.
And I mean they kind or are Machiavellian manipulators, considering it's an extremely unpopular thing politically yet they've managed to let mass immigration go on for over 4 decades, completely reshaping the demographics permanently of this country. Trump got elected to finally do something about it, and he was unable to do anything to curb it. Part of that is on Trump's incompetence, but more of it is that very powerful people and institutions resisted and thwarted him every time.
One of my favourite trolls is to ask people who claim that this would be an impossible task to just go on the record as saying that it'd be impossible for a government to round up and deport (or otherwise deal with) 6 million people.
I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).
This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.
Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.
I appreciate the historical information - thank you for giving me some interesting material to read and learn about. However I have to disagree with a point you've made in your last paragraph. Specifically...
This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds. The sheer amount of data and processing they have, along with their access to Meta and Google's advertising databases means that they'd be able to organise the deportation and identify the illegals in a single SQL query.
Those people are correct! That doesn't change anything about it already existing, however.
Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.
Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.
How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?
The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.
I am not quite sure you understand the depth and level of tracking that's taking place here. This Winston Smith character must have had no interactions with the financial system, no bank account, no driver's license, no on-the-record job, no interaction with the political system at all, no tax events, no phone, no internet usage and no education. How many Mowglis do you think there are in the USA?
You haven't presented anything that their panopticon wouldn't be able to resolve, and even then the amount of reaching you had to do in order to find extreme edge cases that might throw up a challenge means that it would be a trivial job for a single field office to spend a week going through the outliers. How many people do you think fall into those weird edge-case categories? I don't think that number is high enough to make this an actual problem in practice.
How do any of those establish citizenship? Lots of non-citizens have US bank accounts - I had one when I was working dubiously legally in the US (technically I was an academic visitor being paid a per diem rather than salary) with no SSN. Driver's licenses explicitly don't require proof of legal immigration status in most blue states (and no state actually checked immigration status for new license applicants when Winston Smith first got his). An on-the-record job requires an SSN, but even if we ignore the possibility of a fraudulent SSN application made back in the days when the checks were less stringent (as I am positing Yossarian did), having an SSN just proves that you were in a legal status that allowed working at the time you got it (and lots of illegal immigrants are doing on-the-record jobs using SSNs that don't belong to them). The only thing on the list which would be evidence of citizenship is voting, and the same people who want to get tough on illegal immigration tend to believe that large numbers of non-citizen immigrants are voting illegally given how lax the checks are.
If you are a natural born US citizen who has never had a passport, the only original document that proves your citizenship is your birth certificate. (The situation is even worse in the UK, because we don't have birthright citizenship, so to prove citizenship you need not only your birth certificate but information about your parents' immigration status at the time you were born. The flip side is that a much higher percentage of British citizens have had passports at some point in their lives, giving them simple biometric-enhanced proof of citizenship, because we are a smaller country.)
The panopticon didn't exist when the events that distinguished Winston Smith from Yossarian happened. I agree with you that the NSA is probably able to verify the citizenship and/or immigration status of anyone who most recently entered the US after the panopticon was put in place post-911. But as most illegal immigrants stay in the US (they can't get back in if they leave), that leaves out a lot of people. The reason why the debate around the Dreamers exists is because the anti-illegal-immigration right is explicitly not willing to do another general amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been in the US for decades without getting caught.
What matters is that these events establish a record of that person existing which can then be tied in with other sources of information (remember that the panopticon had {and most likely has} direct access to the marketing and advertising databases maintained by big tech). When you combine all that information with the metadata that the system will also be scooping up, you can very easily correlate all of these events to a single person - and then that can be tied in with the government information that does exist. The sheer scale and scope of the panopticon is such that in order for someone to escape it, they have to live a life with so little interaction with society that the number of people who can fall into edge-cases like this is going to be so small as to be a rounding error. I'm not going to deny that someone could fall through the cracks of the panopticon (if you're a hobo who has never known any life other than hitching rides on trains then you might slip on by), but the number of people who do is just not big enough for this to be a serious objection.
The panopticon has reached back in time and includes all older records and data that have been digitised. They may not be able to tell you exactly where either of those two went and had lunch in 1975, but any significant, documentation-generating events will be recorded and on file at this point.
Yes, IIRC the main reason why was that this already happened - the anti-illegal-immigration right was told that they'd get enforcement in exchange for amnesty, gave the amnesty and then didn't get enforcement. I find it hard to blame them here - if we were playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma, and you just hit "defect" I'm not going to believe you when you say "Ok I pressed defect last time but I won't do that again, come on just trust me bro".
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What's the problem? Let them stay if it's ambiguous. The optimal number of illegal immigrants in the country is not zero.
Agreed. But the noises that Trump is making now, and that the British Tories were making in the leadup to the Windrush Scandal, are that a de facto amnesty for long-term illegal residents is precisely what they don't want. The problem is with the actual behaviour of anti-immigrant populists, which tends to be "if you have dark skin and no papers we're coming for you". (Joe Arpaio's immigrant roundups in Arizona also caught significant numbers of US citizens by mistake, which is why the Feds eventually stopped co-operating with him.)
A bureaucratic process that takes care not to deport Winston Smith is going to struggle to deport anyone who has been physically present in the US for 10+ years. And empirically that isn't good enough for a grandstanding right-populist government.
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"They could, and then we'd Nuremberg them and throw their ideas out of the Overton window" doesn't strike me as a solution to immigration, though. Certainly not a final one.
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