Citizen>I'm against crimes like murder.I know of a world-famous physician who filed 1,000 applications to enter the US legally, and got selected in a lottery. What sense does it make to block someone as educated and motivated as he, while allowing others to enter without even a check of their background or any records of them? Maybe some people feel threatened by having top-notch immigrants to compete against, but that just shows that they don't realize foreign competition also affects wages.
jordan8>What if murder were suddenly declared legal (i.e., not a crime)? If it didn't silence the "I'm against murder" crowd, then they're racist.
Of course it wouldn't. Simply saying you're against it because the law says it's illegal is no argument, it's a way of avoiding an argument (and I've already pointed out the primary argument it's meant to avoid). WHY are you against murder? WHY are you against illegal immigration, why is it bad? Surely it's not simply because it's illegal, or because illegal immigration doesn't adequately screen out drugs or criminals. What should immigration policy try to achieve, what should it try to prevent? What is a nation? These are some of the questions the immigration control movement needs to answer, and right out loud.
Allegedly tightening up illegal immigration while increasing legal immigration is the exact program being offered by the President today, while other powerful forces push an even more extensive and radical loosening of immigration practice and policy. If we go from having, say, one million legal and two million illegal immigrants per year to having three million legal and zero illegal immigrants per year what really is the difference? Anti-death penalty types used to argue that hanging and the electric chair were too cruel so the states came up with lethal injection. If you argue that the point is legality pro-immigration forces will come up with legalization. It's really about numbers and numbers is really about culture and politics, legality is a technical point. (Screening for quality is a canard since the system really wants peones, and for every doctor who had to apply 1000 times there are a hundred voting immigrant citizens who can't read English.)