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Notes -
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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