Should illegal immigrants ever be separated from their US citizen children?

[Comrade Grumpy]

36. Sounds like the Tea Party platform.

Better yet, why don't we pass comprehensive immigration reform? Provide legal status, maybe not citizenship, to those who have already made lives here and create a work permit program for seasonal laborers. Now, we have a situation where, because of increased enforcement, people who would have gone back home for the season just stay here because coming back is too risky and difficult.

And people are not "pouring in" anymore. Immigration is responsive to economic conditions. Check with ICE and and BPS and they will tell you that the number of people they're grabbing is way down.

Of course, now we criminalize them. Before about 2006, we often just sent them home. But now, we have a whole system of privatized immigrant detention centers and assembly-line justice where these wannabe laborers are turned into felons.

I suggest you check out Tom Barry's "Border Wars" for a progressive perspective.