I disagree with the entire premise that illegal immigrants who have evaded capture for long enough should be ignored. From where I sit, they should be the first targets, very publicly banished from the US, forbidden on pain of death from ever setting foot on US soil again. Anything less that that will encourage illegal immigration. Now, if they have been well behaved while here, I am open to the idea of them being free to choose a destination which will accept them if their initial homeland is problematic (and remaining in ICE custody for a time while attempting to establish a destination), but they can't stay here.
I knew that would be a controversial point, but with which particular part of my argument do you disagree?
Do you think I am wrong to say that America has become their homeland, that I am wrong to say that banishing someone from their homeland is a sin without just cause, or that I am wrong to say that illegal entry is not a sufficient cause for such a severe penalty?
The last of those options. Premise: No criminal should be allowed to benefit from their crime *after being convicted of having committed said crime*. The benefit of illegal entry into the United States is living in the United States. Therefore, a punishment whereafter they stay in the United States is not a functional deterrent.
Wouldn't you say that the punishment for a crime ought to be reasonably proportioned to the harm caused by that crime? For example, even if it were necessary to achieve deterrence, it would be unjust to have someone executed for, say, falling into a patch of your neighbor's flowers while playing ball (a la Wesley Crusher), right?
It seems to me that the harm done to us by a single act of illegal immigration, while serious and punishable, does not approach the life-ruining harm inflicted by permanently taking a man away from his family, friends, parish, job, etc.. We should punish illegal immigrants (hence my suggestion of garnishing wages and serving time), and I think making that making punishment severe enough balances the scales of justice and serves as adequate deterrent, even though the criminal does also get to enjoy the fruits of his crime. (If it's not enough deterrence, I suppose then garnish the wages more!)
That is an approach we take with quite a few crimes. If a dude beats up another dude for committing adultery with his wife, we can't take away the wounds he inflicted and we can't take away the satisfaction he derives from revenge, so he will enjoy the fruits of his crime, but we CAN make up for those fruits by inflicting other, proportionate penalties on him (like several years of jail).
Just because we do not know the identity of the man who was robbed of the opportunities that the illegal immigrant has taken advantage of, does not mean that the benefits the illegal immigrant has earned were not at the cost of some citizen who would otherwise have legally earned them.
I think I also need to deny the first claim. Not because my position needs it, but for the same reason that I cannot admit that two men are married, whatever the civil law of the land may say. The lie at the foundation of their claims "this is my homeland" or "this is my spouse" will corrupt like an unconfessed mortal sin.
Why do you think it's wrong? I think I sketched out some decent reasons in the article for thinking it's right. You are correct, of course, that getting that first step wrong would poison the rest of the argument, so it's reasonable to object there.
Does the federal government actually have the power to mandate E-Verify? I imagine it does under current interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, but from an originalist standpoint it seems like a stretch.
This is an interesting question, and I have not considered the answer. It's always taken as read that Congress can do this, and I never stopped to think under what power.
Were I to defend mandatory E-Verify, though, I think I would defend it on the basis of the *foreign* commerce clause rather than the interstate commerce clause. Hiring illegal immigrants is a form of commerce with foreign nations, and Congress cannot regulate what it cannot detect, so the necessary & proper clause enables it to do what it needs to do to detect it (within reason).
This is a very interesting theory, but something feels off about it to me. My basic intuition is that if you look at Trump's base of support, it's largely in areas with *low* foreign-born populations, which seems like it would be surprising on your view: the idea is that your community is being changed by incompatible or unfamiliar cultures that come with the foreign-born population, so it would be kind of odd if the areas with the smallest foreign-born populations are also the most supportive of the right-populist anti-immigration candidate.
Of course, I wanted to check this intuition, so I ran a quick correlation between state foreign-born population percentage and Trump vote percentage in 2024.
My results match my initial intuition: the r of foreign-born % to Trump vote % is -0.56 (p < 0.00003). Spearman's rho matches: -0.64, in case you were worried about Pearson's r with this dataset.
You could probably run the same thought on county-level data instead of state-level data, but this is a bigger project than I was ready to undertake this morning. My intuition is that the effect would be even stronger there, since immigrants tend to live in urban areas [citation needed] and one of the biggest splits right now is urban-rural [citation needed]. I don't know whether the Know Nothings had a similar distribution or not, another thing worth checking I suppose, if reliable data is available.
Does your theory have an explanation for this? Maybe national news/media means that people all over the country feel the effect, so it goes beyond one's own community? Or some kind of sorting effect where people get angry about immigrants and leave to low-immigrant areas (I'm skeptical this happens in large numbers, but maybe)? Or maybe when foreign-born populations get high, they start to filter into those non-urban areas and the local max is very low, so it triggers this even if the local max in urban areas has not been reached?
I disagree with the entire premise that illegal immigrants who have evaded capture for long enough should be ignored. From where I sit, they should be the first targets, very publicly banished from the US, forbidden on pain of death from ever setting foot on US soil again. Anything less that that will encourage illegal immigration. Now, if they have been well behaved while here, I am open to the idea of them being free to choose a destination which will accept them if their initial homeland is problematic (and remaining in ICE custody for a time while attempting to establish a destination), but they can't stay here.
I knew that would be a controversial point, but with which particular part of my argument do you disagree?
Do you think I am wrong to say that America has become their homeland, that I am wrong to say that banishing someone from their homeland is a sin without just cause, or that I am wrong to say that illegal entry is not a sufficient cause for such a severe penalty?
The last of those options. Premise: No criminal should be allowed to benefit from their crime *after being convicted of having committed said crime*. The benefit of illegal entry into the United States is living in the United States. Therefore, a punishment whereafter they stay in the United States is not a functional deterrent.
Wouldn't you say that the punishment for a crime ought to be reasonably proportioned to the harm caused by that crime? For example, even if it were necessary to achieve deterrence, it would be unjust to have someone executed for, say, falling into a patch of your neighbor's flowers while playing ball (a la Wesley Crusher), right?
It seems to me that the harm done to us by a single act of illegal immigration, while serious and punishable, does not approach the life-ruining harm inflicted by permanently taking a man away from his family, friends, parish, job, etc.. We should punish illegal immigrants (hence my suggestion of garnishing wages and serving time), and I think making that making punishment severe enough balances the scales of justice and serves as adequate deterrent, even though the criminal does also get to enjoy the fruits of his crime. (If it's not enough deterrence, I suppose then garnish the wages more!)
That is an approach we take with quite a few crimes. If a dude beats up another dude for committing adultery with his wife, we can't take away the wounds he inflicted and we can't take away the satisfaction he derives from revenge, so he will enjoy the fruits of his crime, but we CAN make up for those fruits by inflicting other, proportionate penalties on him (like several years of jail).
Just because we do not know the identity of the man who was robbed of the opportunities that the illegal immigrant has taken advantage of, does not mean that the benefits the illegal immigrant has earned were not at the cost of some citizen who would otherwise have legally earned them.
Although that's true, I don't see the relevance to the question of proportionality.
I think I also need to deny the first claim. Not because my position needs it, but for the same reason that I cannot admit that two men are married, whatever the civil law of the land may say. The lie at the foundation of their claims "this is my homeland" or "this is my spouse" will corrupt like an unconfessed mortal sin.
Why do you think it's wrong? I think I sketched out some decent reasons in the article for thinking it's right. You are correct, of course, that getting that first step wrong would poison the rest of the argument, so it's reasonable to object there.
Does the federal government actually have the power to mandate E-Verify? I imagine it does under current interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, but from an originalist standpoint it seems like a stretch.
This is an interesting question, and I have not considered the answer. It's always taken as read that Congress can do this, and I never stopped to think under what power.
Were I to defend mandatory E-Verify, though, I think I would defend it on the basis of the *foreign* commerce clause rather than the interstate commerce clause. Hiring illegal immigrants is a form of commerce with foreign nations, and Congress cannot regulate what it cannot detect, so the necessary & proper clause enables it to do what it needs to do to detect it (within reason).
That's my knee-jerk response, anyway.
This is a very interesting theory, but something feels off about it to me. My basic intuition is that if you look at Trump's base of support, it's largely in areas with *low* foreign-born populations, which seems like it would be surprising on your view: the idea is that your community is being changed by incompatible or unfamiliar cultures that come with the foreign-born population, so it would be kind of odd if the areas with the smallest foreign-born populations are also the most supportive of the right-populist anti-immigration candidate.
Of course, I wanted to check this intuition, so I ran a quick correlation between state foreign-born population percentage and Trump vote percentage in 2024.
My results match my initial intuition: the r of foreign-born % to Trump vote % is -0.56 (p < 0.00003). Spearman's rho matches: -0.64, in case you were worried about Pearson's r with this dataset.
You could probably run the same thought on county-level data instead of state-level data, but this is a bigger project than I was ready to undertake this morning. My intuition is that the effect would be even stronger there, since immigrants tend to live in urban areas [citation needed] and one of the biggest splits right now is urban-rural [citation needed]. I don't know whether the Know Nothings had a similar distribution or not, another thing worth checking I suppose, if reliable data is available.
Does your theory have an explanation for this? Maybe national news/media means that people all over the country feel the effect, so it goes beyond one's own community? Or some kind of sorting effect where people get angry about immigrants and leave to low-immigrant areas (I'm skeptical this happens in large numbers, but maybe)? Or maybe when foreign-born populations get high, they start to filter into those non-urban areas and the local max is very low, so it triggers this even if the local max in urban areas has not been reached?