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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity.

This is the goal of fewer people in power than you think, and keep in mind there is more border than the one between Mexico and the US. Most undocumented people have flown here and simply overstayed their visa. On the other hand, congress has been saber rattling about the southern border my entire life and has done little about it. It's useful as a wedge issue though, so from time to time, you'll see some spending a lot of money on walls and towers that just aren't very effective (and maybe callously separate some kids form their families).

On the other hand, undocumented people pay billions in taxes, work for cheap and make services (like dining, construction, landscaping, cosmetology, etc.) cheaper. The monied and political classes want to keep this status quo.

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It's true that government has been willing to be lax in terms of border security because they want to exploit illegal immigrants as basically slave labor. Personally I think having a large underclass of easily exploitable poor people who don't have the rights and protections the rest of us enjoy is abhorrent and morally unjustifiable.

It has led to this situation where token gestures are made, largely to appease the Americans living in/near border towns and suffering under the weight of the negative consequences.

I don't know how long they'll be able to pay lip service to the problem though. There will be literal billions of climate refugees coming in the near future and they won't be economic migrants looking for higher wages. They will be genuinely desperate and for them getting past the border of another country will be a matter of survival. With a well secured border and carefully regulated immigration the US should be able to take a lot of those refugees in without being overwhelmed by them. If we're not prepared for it in advance, what we'll be left with will be far from the status quo the shortsighted have been trying so hard to preserve.

Parent listed several benefits (to the rich or unethical) of illegal immigrants, and why the powers that be want to keep it that way.

You agreed that it's a precarious and generally bad situation for the immigrants to be in, and objected on moral grounds,

... but then jump straight to the negative affects that local citizens are supposedly suffering from, without actually listing any that are unique to those border towns.

Undercutting workers would be nationwide, as would any adverse affects on the healthcare system. Being in the states illegally means you avoid going back and forth across the border - so being in a border town doesn't strike me as relevant to a discussion about illegal immigrants.

So I'm earnestly asking, which issues affect border towns more than any other place in America, considering most illegal immigrants are overstaying visas instead of trying to sneak through the US-Mexico border?

Any large unexpected influx of people causes havoc on a city. It strains hospitals, social services, schools, etc. It's becoming a problem in places far from the border, but border towns at commonly used crossings get hit first, harder, and repeatedly. People overstaying their visa don't swarm into towns in massive numbers in short windows of time.

There is no shortage of news stories about the issues.

Examples:

https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2023-05-01/texas-bord...

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/03/texas-cities-confron...

https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/small-south-te...

https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/humanitarian-crisis-the-m...

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/21/texas-migrants-borde...

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/19/1232383832/schools-face-big-c...

https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/eagle-pass-texas-declares-stat...

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167645456/border-towns-are-f...

How does border security or limits on immigration prepare the US for taking in large numbers of climate refugees? The US's strengths when it comes to immigration is specifically that we're relatively easy to get into for a rich country, because we have a generous family reunification visa program, and thus have large support communities for basically every immigrant population you can think of.

In other words, the US is already way more prepared for climate refugees than, say, the EU is. Though, to be fair, the US is also going to have a lot of internal climate refugees, too.

> How does border security or limits on immigration prepare the US for taking in large numbers of climate refugees?

By making sure that when those refugees show up cities aren't already overwhelmed by migrants also by helping the government keep track of how many people are here and how many are entering so they can make informed decisions about how many refugees we can accommodate.

How can you make political hay out of a solved problem?

Solving it, now that would be a BIG PROBLEM! If it's not immigrants then you would have to blame someone else and/or more explicitly cite race/ethnicity/religion.

Seriously, when you have a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years, that's both hilarious and dangerous.

> a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years,

Plus all of them somehow managing to cast totally-undetectable votes in elections, traveling to specific swing states, for no direct gain to themselves even though getting caught would mean deportation, while uniformly maintaining superhuman levels of discipline and secrecy. /s

electoral votes and number of representatives are allocated based on census numbers, which have nothing to do with citizenship status /!s

I'm not sure how to parse the sarcasm in that one. It's literally true, and counting people (rather than voters) is reasonable when you look the history of US demographics.

Are you saying it would be scummy for some folks to rail against certain groups while happily accepting their contribution to local census numbers?

Not "totally-undetectable". Nineteen foreign nationals were caught voting in 2016 in North Carolina alone.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/19-aliens-charged-voter-fr...

Those are just a few of the ones who used their own names. An unofficial analysis by CBS "showed [at least] 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade [2006-2016]."

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/2-investigators-chicago...

We know the problem exists. We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation, but the Democrats oppose that fiercely. They demand extensive evidence be provided before an investigation will be allowed, then ignore what evidence is available.

> Nineteen foreign nationals were caught voting in 2016 in North Carolina alone.

I am very amused at how you trying to present that as a Big Scary Number. It's as if some carnival barker is hyping up the ferocious lion, king of beasts, and then pulls the curtain aside to reveal confused Pekingese.

> We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation

A false dilemma. State-level investigations are entirely possible and are also within the power of the most vocal doom-sayers to trigger... So why don't they? Because they do not want those investigations, which have a nasty habit of disproving the wild claims they've been peddling to motivate their base.

Demanding a national investigation is an excuse for inaction, firstly because it's legally incoherent with how states manage elections, and secondly because whether Louisiana can detect/stop a berjillion false-voters streaming across the border has nothing to do with requiring a report on how New Hampshire is doing.

> I am very amused at how you trying to present that as a Big Scary Number. It's as if some carnival barker is hyping up an amazing attraction and then pulls the curtain aside to a puzzling disappointment.

It's more like you're lying about what I said. I offered that as an example showing that the problem exists and can be detected.

Isolated investigations with limited resources, facing official opposition, naturally find only isolated cases. We won't know how widespread ("scary") it is without better investigations.

> State-level investigations are entirely possible and are also within the power of the most vocal doom-sayers to trigger

> Demanding a national investigation is an excuse for inaction, firstly because it's legally incoherent with how states manage elections

Both statements are simply inaccurate. The federal government sets the rules for federal elections, federal courts oversee them, and federal courts have blocked state-level investigations.

For example:

AP: Texas can no longer investigate alleged cases of vote harvesting, federal judge says

https://apnews.com/us-news/texas-ken-paxton-fraud-crime-gene...

> I offered that as an example showing that the problem exists and can be detected.

An example [0] suggesting ~0.0004% bad votes in an election is not a meaningful example unless you want to sneakily redefine "the problem" away from "significant numbers of bad-votes may change results" to a pointlessly bland "some nonzero number of bad-votes happen." [1]

If cases are as persistent and widespread as those politicians claim, it should be much easier to find similarly-large-scale evidence. (For example, their mythical "buses of illegals.")

> federal courts oversee them, and federal courts have blocked state-level investigations. For example [...]

That "example" is nonsense.

1. It has nothing to do with non-citizens (or felons) registering to vote or casting ballots. The thing Texas "can't investigate" is an entirely separate crime the state recently added to their books, involving a different set of people doing different things.

2. The reason they're being blocked from prosecution is because they passed a shitty law with a crime that might unconstitutionally restrict freedom of speech, not because the state doesn't manage and audit its own voter-rolls and election systems and enforce existing criminal statues.

____________

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ednc/pr/nineteen-foreign-nation...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

> not because the state doesn't manage and audit its own voter-rolls and election systems

It only does so under federal regulation and supervision, as proven by the fact that federal courts recently blocked three states from removing non-citizens from their voter rolls.

Regarding the example: once again you've raised irrelevant objections to an example that proves the federal government manages federal elections and blocks investigations into voter fraud. Your objection? That investigation was about a different kind of fraud.

Regarding your first point: once again you've demanded proof be provided before an investigation. Now that's "an excuse for inaction"!

Demanding a national investigation is certainly not "an excuse for inaction" as you claimed; it is in fact a call for action.

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