That happens occasionally. But it mostly doesn't happen. Mostly, the people who end up with criminal charges are the illegal immigrants. If you dig into the numbers it tells the story of a vanishingly small number of companies (like hundreds per year out of millions) getting scrutiny. The industries which get the scrutiny are the ones where people could end up dead or injured (construction, meat packing, etc.). (According to Gemini - grain of salt)

It's an argument in favor of stronger immigration enforcement against employers.

Reducing illegal immigration is extremely simple and inexpensive -- toss a few Big Ag CEOs in something like "alligator Alcatraz". There's no step 2.

Well, as it happens these immigration court judges were appointed by previous administrations, and they were intentionally slow walking every case. The Trump admin fired a bunch of those judges earlier this year, was sued, won, and now the cases are actually getting processed.

The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).

People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.

Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.

We already have paths to citizenship, people just need to wait their turn. People with skills we need can already get in under programs that exist for that purpose.

We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.

It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.

Bernie used to be anti immigration for exactly this reason.

At the risk of a committing a "No True Scotsman" here... it isn't a properly left wing position. Or at least it hasn't been for most of the history of the left.

I strongly believe all people are equal, and we should not apply different ethics based on national borders, race, sex, etc. They should be able to come work any jobs, and be treated the same as citizens.

America itself brought in the <undesirable> people from the <bad> countries in Europe throughout the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s - Irish peasants, Jews, poor and uneducated Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Norwegians.

It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.

Something for you to consider.

I tried to be as charitable as possible.

> I don’t mean that.

So you actually think the USA, the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, is unable to police its borders? That is the only alternative to what I said (which is that they are able but not willing).

> I’m saying you do have to control the borders and you do have to deport people who break the rules and enter our stay illegally.

Again, nobody really denies this, if I interpret you charitably. But the question is always how rigid the laws should be, how many other rights you are willing to sacrifice in order to hit the "deport illegals" metric. If you overstay one day, what happens. If you overstay due to a medical emergency, what happens. If you are in danger in your home country and need to enter illegally in order to claim asylum, what happens. How much of a soviet-style "papers, please" dungeon are you prepared to turn your country into in order to find all the illegals.

You will never ever police any crime to 100%. Immigration is very hard to police effectively without adding literal military-style checkpoints and sending in the gestapo (as is happening in the US). Besides that, if you look at the big picture, the vast majority of these people are harmless and have perfectly reasonable reasons for wanting to come. Remember that it is an accident of history that you get to live in a rich country.

The US in particular has had massive unregulated immigration through most of its history, by the way, and it didn't cause the place to burn to the ground. So please keep a bit of perspective.

Sure, but when 1 party blocks that continually due to racism (and kills programs put in place like DACA that help the situation), then funnels money to "law enforcement" specifically for the thing they helped make illegal, then it's fair to criticize the "law enforcement" as a tool of racist politics (and make no mistake, before anyone comes claiming racism isn't the reason for it, Stephen Miller has plenty of choice quotes stating that's exactly why he is pushing for ICE deportations).

Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.

The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.

We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.

The point is that families didn't just evacuate when it turned into US territory. There are very strong ties to Mexico in the southwest that will never go away.

Do you have any evidence that contemporaries of irish catholics thought that they irish werent white?

If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization

This is patently wrong. And just look at images from the time. There are many Italians, especially from the south which was the main immigration areas - Sicily, Sardegna, Lecce - who are less white than many Latinos.

> The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true

To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum

> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:

citation needed

> The type and character of the immigration matters

No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter

> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK

What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.

SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.

Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country

> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own

Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.

But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...

Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?

> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.

That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.

South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.

Only if they have a deportation order. There are scenarios where people are in an in between state or have the ability to challenge a deportation order

Of the half-dozen or so attempts at immigration reform in the past 25 years, every one of them has been blocked by Republicans.

IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.

You're mixing up cause and effect. The police in America aren't more dangerous and powerful because they have choices, they have choices because they are dangerous and powerful.

There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.

[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/tennessee-man-jailed-charlie-kirk-po...

I do actually think that we shouldn’t have laws we aren’t willing to enforce, so we agree more than you think. I’ve been against states unilaterally legalizing it for years because I worried what happens when states buck laws that I do agree with, such as voting rights or basic protections for all people.

The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.

Sure but you don’t have to be an asshole about it and deprive people of civil and moral rights.

But deporting families and nonviolent people who have been here, tolerated for decades and contributing to society, is not "Protecting America".

What is telling a federal judge who has placed a hold on someone's detention that "No, we're ignoring that and have put him on a plane anyway"?

Or "No, we won't be turning that plane around."

I think you mean selectively enforcing some immigration law.

And what do you call targeting people based on their skin color?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/10/immi...

Just legalize murder and you will have no more criminal murderers.

> where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies

Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.

Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).

Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.

The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous

We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country