How many of those, you mention, are taken advantage of by ‘work finders’ and ‘crew bosses’, who maybe working together to take advantage. Also, I tried to convey the other concerns, having knowledge of how the US immigration system works, or maybe be in an urgent situation that causes them to overlook the time that it may take.
I notice you didn’t respond to the situation it could place children in, that may have a legal status according to US laws.
The Popes and bishops statements appear to be statements of compassion and concern for families potentially being ‘split up’. Even those that speak on the subject of the legality of immigration status have not openly endorsed the laws to support a mass deportation, but rather speak on the reform
“Mass deportation” is something nobody has proposed, but which those who support illegal immigration like to pose for dramatic effect, like a bogeyman with which to scare children who won’t go to bed when they’re told to do it.
Many, if not most, illegal immigrants “self-deport” all the time, and for various reasons. Some illegals have been deported, however, in trickles here and there.
If families are “split up” it is totally the parents’ choice to do it. If the parents are deported to, say, Mexico, they are entirely free to take their child with them. Nobody forces them to “split up” the family.
And what happens then? Well, if the child was born in the U.S., the child almost certainly has dual citizenship; in the U.S. as well as in the parents’ home country. In the case of Mexico, the child is definitely a citizen of both.
To what, then, is one entitled if one is a U.S. citizen? Well, as a child, not very much except the right to live in the U.S. under the guardianship of someone or other. When the child becomes 16, he has the right to work in the U.S. At 18, he’s entitled to vote. At all stages, he may or may not have the right to receive (through someone else) welfare benefits. What he does not have is the right to confer legal residence in the U.S. on his parents. No American citizen has any greater right than that.
In Mexico, he has the same rights, essentially, according to the Mexican system.
What has the child lost if his parents return to Mexico? Well, he has lost the present ability to be better off financially than his peers in Mexico, but only relatively speaking and in a fairly narrow way. That’s it. Nothing more. In Mexico, his parents will earn about 1/3 of what they would have in the U.S. Their cost of living will be about 1/3 as well. Their employment prospects in Mexico are better than those of American citizens living in the U.S.
The really big advantage of working in the U.S. as a Mexican national is the ability to earn the higher wage but spend it in the lower cost country.
Now, I could understand the impulse to relieve poverty if the home country is Haiti, where people really are living in miserable conditions. Even Eastern Europe, perhaps, where average income is lower than Mexico’s. But Mexico is in the top 1/3 of nations worldwide when it comes to earnings per capita. If the same privilege that some urge is extended to residents of all nations at Mexico’s income level or below, that would be most of the world’s population, most definitely including China and India.
Unless this country is prepared to take on most of the world’s population to give them the same “arbitrage advantage”, which it certainly can’t, the whole argument fails except in the most extreme and limited situations such as that of Haiti. Perhaps churchmen eager to relieve poverty would do better to encourage Americans to sponsor Haitian immigrants than to argue for the unearned, unsponsored right to legal residence of people who, in their own countries, are better off than most of the world.
Barack Obama’s Kenyan father took him off to Kenya as a child, then to Indonesia. In that circumstance, Barack Obama was in exactly the same position as the American born child of an illegal alien who is deported. He was with his parent in lands not of his birth, and could not, himself, confer legal U.S. residence status on his father. What is difficult to understand is why, exactly, people seem to think the children of illegal aliens should have greater rights than Obama had while living with his father or, for that matter, the rights any other American citizen has.
gasp