Your "a country committed to law and order would not deport illegals" argument is predicated on the idea that we should accept that there will always be such huge enclaves of them w/in our borders that we should build policy around protecting them especially. Poor foundation for a policy to convince people who are anti-illegal immigration.
If people who are anti-illegal immigration refuse to interact with the fact there are more than ten million people in the United States illegally, and refuse to consider what effects various enforcement approaches will have in light of the fact those people exist, then I don’t think they can possibly put forward any policies that achieve their goals. You can’t get what you want by just closing your eyes and pretending ten million people aren’t here.
Because those people do exist and are here, the administration’s enforcement policies (both the policies themselves and the uncertainty surrounding them) will have the effect of ensuring that lots and lots of violent crimes go unreported or unsolved because the witnesses or victims have more to fear from the government. It does not make sense to consider this an anti-crime or pro-public-safety approach to immigration; it is neither of those things.
I am curious what alternatives you see to ‘accept that there will always be such huge enclaves of them w/in our borders’. As far as I can tell, we have two alternatives: try to deport them all, which will fail and produce all of the problems I described in the original post (including dramatically increased rates of crime as a large share of the populace is known to be unprotected by law, lowered rates of police capacity to investigate crime, a huge strain on law enforcement resources, a massive increase in federal spending to try to fund such a huge-scale ongoing mass deportation scheme, and no substantial reduction in the undocumented population anyway), or give them a pathway to remain in the country legally.
I understand that some people favor the first one because it seems unfair to them that people who broke the law can have a legal pathway to U.S. residency when the vast majority of people in the world, even if they do everything right, will never have any chance at all at U.S. residency. I agree that this is unfair, of course. But I think people who think we should ‘just’ solve this by deporting everyone and then enforcing the borders more stringently are massively underestimating how many resources would be required to even partially accomplish this, how very partially it would be accomplished, and what the massive costs (to all facets of society, but I’m talking here specifically about the massive costs to order, public safety and the rule of law) would be.
Heh. There is of course, a straightforward and obvious way around this dilemma: a one-shot amnesty declaration for all illegal/undocumented immigrants presently within the country, followed by strict border enforcement.
(Not that I actually support such a plan. To be clear. I am generally pro-open-borders, and certainly not worried about the Immigrant Threat. But we’re trying to work within a model where fear of the Immigrant Threat is a real and salient motivator, so…)
Border security is an attainable goal for the US, if a difficult and expensive one. Yoking it to “get
rid of an already-embedded population of ten million, without
destroying your own civic society or bankrupting yourself or committing atrocities” makes it totally impossible. If you’re really convinced that controlling the flow of immigrants is crucial, that there are future catastrophes to be averted, the only viable strategies involve cutting your losses and moving forward rather than endlessly trying to re-fight the battles you’ve already lost.
Of course, the immigration-enforcement hawks won’t do this. They can’t. They’ve lost all credibility. There have already been three large-scale amnesties in recent memory: Simpson-Mazzoli, Section 245(i), NACARA. Each one was accompanied by a promise that this was really the last time, that we were going to be serious about enforcement from here on out. Each time it was a blatant lie, because none of the people in the government actually wanted to cut off illegal immigration, they just wanted to pacify the nativists for a little while. The nativists in question got more and more embittered by this dynamic, and eventually “amnesty” became a dirty word.
So now the immigration hawks are stuck trying to do things the stupid way. Good luck with that. I look forward to the illegal-immigrant-free paradise that is surely in store any month now.