Quote Originally Posted by Canadian Visitor View Post


In point of fact that is not what I LOL'd

This is what I was LOL'ing.

Clearly if fighting crime is your priority, the answer is to keep all the illegals and deport legal Americans instead!

LOL

My point was to puncture the balloon that this issue is a crisis BECAUSE most or an inordinate number of illegals pose a criminal danger to Americans.

Clearly that is not the case.
Clearly, native-born Americans are more likely to murder and more likely to steal as per the stats.

Therefore if one's concern was crime-focused then one would support deporting native-born Americans and keeping the illegals.

Of course that's not what I'm suggesting. Rather I'm pointing out how silly and erroneous the argument being made happened to be.

You can oppose illegal immigration with perfectly valid arguments such as the impact on wages, particularly in low-skill and entry-level positions.

You can oppose illegal immigration because you like to see adherence to the law.

You can oppose illegal immigration because you wish to limit certain expenditures the state may incur as a result.

You can oppose illegal immigration because you see it as unfair to law-abiding immigrants and refugees.

All are legitimate points of conversation.

What is not legitimate is to argue that illegal immigrants writ-large as a group pose a material risk to the general public; that is patently false!



Irritated would be more like it.

I see the posting of things that either erroneous or misleading and it bothers me.

Its a choice on the part of a poster to say something they know to be wrong in order, in their mind, to further their argument.

In point of fact, it weakens their argument.

You don't need to correct what isn't substantively wrong.

You don't need to add superfluous flotsam to your arguments.

There are a whole bunch of perfectly good arguments against illegal immigration.

Stick to those.

Then having established that, we move on to a more constructive discussion.

What would actually result in less illegal immigration?

[[hint: a wall would do next to nothing)

What does one actually do about all those who previously arrived illegally?

[[ I know your answer, and this is where we fundamentally disagree, for the simple reason, your idea will never come to pass. Neither political party nor the current president will go for mass deportation. As such, to me, the only valuable discussion is one that is realistic in terms of its implement ability. )
You continue to be, in my opinion, extremely patronizing.

Violations of border laws are crimes; either misdemeanors or felonies. We can stop there but did your information consider how many years illegal aliens have been in the Country vs. lifelong Americans?I don't have those statistics; maybe you do. If, for instance, the average illegal alien has been in the "U.S." for seven years and the average Americans has lived here 35 years, then your statistic is only valid if Americans commit 7x as many crimes per capita.

I disagree with you that , in your words, "illegal immigrants writ-large as a group pose a material risk to the general public." First, the legal and more succinct term is "illegal alien" not "illegal immigrant". Alien just means "non-citizen" so "illegal non-citizen" means the same thing without horrifying the PC crowd. Example: three 9/11 terrorists had overstayed their visas. Were they "non-citizens" or "immigrants"? I think they were non-citizens. You suggest they were immigrants but who made them immigrants? Such is the value of succinct legal language. [[I can be patronizing too.)

Those 9/11 crew members were extreme. The other millions of illegal non-citizens, however, do pose a material risk. Unless you deny supply/demand, they drag down American wages, take jobs from Americans, and receive social service and educational resources dedicated to Americans requiring either more taxes or reduced services for American. No one claiming to be "green' should support the extra infrastructure and demands on mineral and food extraction that tens of millions of extra people require. As a foreigner, I don't expect you to care about our Constitution but our Constitution says that naturalization law must be established by congress and must be uniform. One set of laws for legal aliens and another for illegal aliens is not uniform.

"What does one actually do about all those who previously arrived illegally?"

President Reagan gave amnesty to 3.6M illegal aliens to solve the problem once and for all in return for promises of border security. The promises were not kept. That didn't work. There are many options from imprisoning cheating employers to removing all health and educational freebees. The only thing on the table right now is a wall or fence and Democrats will not either meet the President half way on even a fence at half of Trump's $5.7B request so the government remains closed.