Undocumented crossings at the southern border is at an all time low. The percentages of crime (with the exception of not having documentation) committed by the undocumented is at an all time low, especially compared to the percentages of those same crimes committed citizens.
And the local police will arrest and convict people for committing those crimes (hopefully) based on the evidence available, no matter if they're documented or undocumented. Just being undocumented does not mean one is going to commit other crimes.
Honestly, Mexico and Central America actually have a worse problem with firearms from the U.S. being smuggled across the boarder to support the gangs and cartels in their country than we have with drugs and criminals being sent across the borders.
Most immigrants that are undocumented and remain undocumented in the U.S. come across legally and overstay visas. Others - especially those who come over in the border states - come over to visit U.S. citizens who are relatives and stay, for whatever reason.
I have lived on the southern border most of my life - and amongst immigrants. Spouses and adopted children are also an issue - getting a green card because one is married or because some nice American Family adopted one has never been immediate or automatic as it is in most other countries, and many U.S. citizens don't seem to realize this or don't seem have the time to go through the hoops - and don't tell their kids or spouses that maybe they shouldn't act like they're U.S. citizens and able to have mental issues or small violations on their records because they're going to get deported as soon as the government found out their "sponsors" never filed the paperwork for the to make them naturalized citizens.
This hits very much home for me as my neighbors and several other people who identify as "Californio" - as in a family that has been living in the state of California since before it was a state have relatives across the border. I know a family of five siblings all born at home over the 1950's and 60's where the youngest two are Mexican citizens just because when the border was last re-drawn - in the mid 1960's, putting their house and half their land in Mexico. So when a Mexican sibling is close enough to help for a U.S. sibling during a family emergency for a couple months, they can't just head over the border like the rest of us can - they need to get a visa. And visas to visit family members are much harder to get now, because of DSH's crackdown on brown people.
Not to mention there's quite a few U.S. citizens living across the border while they work here, because that's all they can really afford. About a quarter of my shipyard workers lived around Tijuana or Tecate and were constantly getting hassled by DHS or ICE at the border crossing, no matter their California driver's licenses, DoD identification, work badges with the required citizenship status indicators, or Social Security/VA cards indicated, because of Hispanic surnames or because they looked vaguely Mexican.
I can understand your point- it's always been against the law, and we should all be careful to follow the law like responsible people do. People just shouldn't decide that due to culture or tradition, or need, that they can just break the law and get away with it.
But the law needs to be reasonable and also applied equally. And it's not being applied equally, it's being targeted against ethnicities for political expediency.
Not to sidetrack your position, but what I suspect is happening is that a manufactured crisis of undocumented labor is actually an effort to get rid of the people doing critical shit jobs (agricultural/field labor, heavy manufacturing, service work) and replace it with prison labor. There's more money to be made by investors using tax dollar subsidized rehab (i.e., parolees or trusted prisoners) or prison labor in general to do the work than there is hiring undocumented labor to do the work. And investors are leveraging out the smaller shoestring agricultural and light manufacturing businesses that have been the primary employers of undocumented workers.
Prison labor is already being used (and has been for at least two decades) for call centers, light skilled and semi-skilled component manufacturing; just wait until they have trustees out in the fields and in the slaughterhouses - or in chain restaurants and hotel rooms - doing work under an overseer who probably gets kickbacks for turning a blind eye to regulations or oversight of the workers. All for around dollar a day, and the investment corporations that have their subsidiaries use such labor get all sorts of tax breaks on top of the subsidies the government pays for the "use" of that labor.
Haele
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