Comment by loafa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loafa | Hacker News Reader

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I don't really want to derail the conversation into the virtues of corporal punishment, but I'm a big fan of that as a cost-effective method that everyone can fear equally. (Prison is, perversely, more pleasant for the sort of person that usually goes to prison than for the sort of person who doesn't.)

It can't just be "deportation", though. The penalty for stealing a car isn't just that you have to give the car back. The punishment for being found in the country illegally has to be severe enough that people are actually discouraged from making the attempt (or to deport themselves if they're there at the moment).

In Australia, our illegal immigrants tend to wind up spending a long time in an immigration detention centre while awaiting trial, which is strictly speaking an administrative need but winds up working as a pretty good punishment. I'm not sure if this scales up to the American system though as you have a lot more people you're gonna need to process.

If you really wanted to stop undocumented workers, punish the employers. One Trump cabinet pick recently fired a house hold employee because of their status. That sort of thing use to be disqualifying. Not any more.

That's a good start, we need to work both ends of the problem.

Mind you, since the government doesn't have any reliable means of determining whether somebody is in the country legally or not I'm not sure how we can hold employers responsible either. The only way we could hold employers responsible is if there's a reliable system which allows people to check on others' immigration status at any time. And is that what we want?

> I'm a big fan of [corporal punishment] as a cost-effective method that everyone can fear equally.

But not everyone can fear it equally. A pregnant woman would fear it much more; so would someone older, perhaps with bad joints, or other health problems.

> A pregnant woman would fear it much more

But here's the thing, in his example (Singapore) women are not caned at all, pregnant or not.

I wonder what punishment he'd suggest for an illegal immigrant migrant worker who's a woman.

Um, your solution to illegal immigration is beating people?

Singapore uses the cane, which is painful but controllable and doesn't cause actual injury. Not like a "beating" as you characterise it.

> and doesn't cause actual injury

Yes it does.

The US has plenty of existing immigration detention centers: https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities.

Not really big enough for millions of people, though.

And I'd love to see how the already-hysterical US media would respond to the sudden building of prison camps big enough for millions.

How do you think they'd respond to government-sanctioned beatings as punishment?

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