DACA: We The People need to understand that Withholding Mercy is not necessarily Immoral.

Well, lets stick to the subject if you do not want to expand the discussion to Melania's visa record.

Does DACA cover many Muslim immigrants? Hardly any.

Does it provide many manual laborers? Yes.

So what's the problem with allowing them to stay? DiscoGary should support the DREAM act, shouldn't he?

Close to 10% of the workforce in CA and TX is illegal immigrants. How it got to this point is crazy. The only solution is increased enforcement (the cost of which needs to be wholly born by those who hire illegal immigrants). If the fines are steep enough, the problem will solve itself (people will not hire illegal immigrants if the disincentive is high enough). Or, if CA and TX need those employees, they need to petition to increase the number of workers that they can get via legal channels (work visas, naturalization, etc.) as they have done in Europe. The fact is that they did not come to this country through legal channels.

What are the real, not imagined, problems with DACA and illegal immigrants in general?

I've read a lot of replies here from people who think they understand how all this works together but really do not.

If someone comes to the US without papers and gets a job, pays taxes, contributes to society in a positive way, sends their kids to schools with 'legal' citizens kids where they assimilate into the culture... where are the problems here? I mean real problems not the imagined ones that I often read from posters here.

comedyrelief wrote:

Or, if CA and TX need those employees, they need to petition to increase the number of workers that they can get via legal channels (work visas, naturalization, etc.) as they have done in Europe.

They have been lobbying for the increase of work visas for years, if not decades. The problem is that people like Sessions, Cotton and Purdue are adamantly against it. (So is Trump, except many H2-A and H2-B workers are hired by his business.)

Just Another LRC Idiot wrote:

There are virtually no Muslims among the DACA beneficiaries. So why are people discussing about Muslims on this thread?

I didn't mention them specifically, but I did mention that cultures who think their own beliefs are superior to the law of the land are a bigger threat to the US than low-wage earners. Someone took that to mean "Islam" and ran with it. Weird, right?

DiscoGary wrote:

Count Chocula wrote:

If you don't already know, you should look up the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam. That said, I realize that the majority of Muslims probably are not extreme orthodox believers that follow their religion to the letter.

We keep making the mistake of thinking that Muslims don't mean what they say, or that most of them aren't that extreme.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/

In 17 of the 23 countries where the question was asked, at least half of Muslims say sharia is the revealed word of God.

I don't want to derail this thread, which I started to do (and apologize for), so this will be my last response on the topic.

I had that survey in mind when I wrote my post. It certainly is sobering, but I have a couple issues:

-The only Shia-majority country in the poll is Iraq, so most of the conclusions drawn can only be related to Sunni countries.

-While a majority of respondents said sharia is the revealed word of God and that sharia should be the law of the land, fewer agreed that it should apply to non-Muslims living in those lands.

-What percentage of Christians believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God?

Your link is a very informative source for those who have not seen it before.

The only thing I would contribute to this (fair) question is that the Bible explicitly tells Christians to obey the law of the land (remember that NT Christians/Jews were Roman subjects during the time of Christ). I have no idea whether or not that is a concession made in the Koran.

Feel free to derail threads all you want. What else do we have to do today? lol

Trump is virtually throwing thousands of pages of the CFR and USC into the trash because he believes that the statutes and regulations are arbitrary and unfair to businesses. So, when talking about whether DACA recipients should be held to the letter of the law, it is only fair that immigration law should undergo the same scrutiny as environmental laws and other areas that have been the subject of swift executive actions.

US immigration laws are incredibly unfair and the US immigration system is unconscionably slow and unfair. The US limits the number of green cards (legal permanent residency) it issues by country. That means that it can take up to two decades to a green card common from Mexico, but as short as ninety days from a country like Sweden or France where there is little demand because most people get in the country through an employer. But temporary work permits are very easy to get because of the need for farm and seasonal labor. So, hundreds of thousands of people come to the US from south of the border to work every year on temporary work permits. Some overstay there visas and do not go home because they can make so much more in the US so that they can send a more money home than they could ever make in Mexico. Instead of waiting for 20 years to get a green card, they just live as undocumented or illegal immigrants. Eventually, their family wants to reunite with them and crosses the border illegally. They stay and have children or bring children with them. Thus, the current immigration process from south of the boarder is completely unfair and unjust.

You can ignore this injustice and ship as many people back over the boarder and build a giant wall. But that will not stop people from coming back. For most people who cross the boarder illegally, climbing a big ladder and shimmying down a long rope is one of the least intimidating obstacles on the way across the boarder. Getting raped by Coyotes (the human traffickers, not the animals), being held for ransom, being sold into sex slavery, getting killed by drug traffickers, or dying in the desert or a hot container truck are all far greater concerns than having to climb a wall (or going through a tunnel under the wall or riding in a boat on the ocean to the US coastline). All you do by upholding an unjust law is spend billions to uproot people, causing economic chaos in immigrant communities and resulting in the vast majority of the immigrants coming right back over the boarder. A big nothing burger.

Or you can recognize that the law is unjust and do something about it. If you get the wait time to get a green card down to a year, illegal immigration from south of the border would all but stop. No one would want to risk rape, torture and death crossing the border illegally when they can just navigate a reasonable immigration process. Granting amnesty to people who came into the country illegally would get 10-12 million people out of the shadows and into jobs where they pay their taxes.

People losing their factory jobs in the Midwest are not waiting in line at Home Depot in Austin, Texas to get day labor work. Illegal immigrants are not taking jobs from citizens. They are doing the work citizens refuse to do.

Precious Roy wrote:

People losing their factory jobs in the Midwest are not waiting in line at Home Depot in Austin, Texas to get day labor work. Illegal immigrants are not taking jobs from citizens. They are doing the work citizens refuse to do.

I don't want to cherry pick data, but I think this study is pretty good:

In summary, not enough American workers apply to these jobs anyway. To be fair, this is a seasonal job with a temp visa, so I do not know if illegal immigrants were explicitly working here.

You're focused on the "revealed word" part of the article, which came up first so I understand that. The more disturbing parts come later where it shows significant majorities of Muslims who think Sharia Law should be the law of the land. Anyone who thinks like that is going to have a hard time melting into American society because Sharia Law is incompatible with our laws and civil liberties. We certainly can not import large numbers of people who think like this or we risk creating areas of the country where the culture is corrupted by parallel Sharia legal courts. This is happening in Europe.

Diversity of talents, ideas, and abilities is good as long as everyone agrees to play by the same rule book... our rule book. It doesn't look like Muslims want to play by our rule book. This is a case where diversity is bad.

Gotta ask... wrote:

What are the real, not imagined, problems with DACA and illegal immigrants in general?

I've read a lot of replies here from people who think they understand how all this works together but really do not.

If someone comes to the US without papers and gets a job, pays taxes, contributes to society in a positive way, sends their kids to schools with 'legal' citizens kids where they assimilate into the culture... where are the problems here? I mean real problems not the imagined ones that I often read from posters here.

Thank you, and to the poster below with the farm study.

There are minimal demonstrable negative impacts of illegal immigration, and a great many benefits.

It's a hysteria with little reason behind it. They don't take American jobs, don't suck on the welfare state more than usual, and a great many pay taxes (more would if we would legalize them).

Much of these arguments start from an assumption that our current immigration situation is bad and must be fixed. I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is the case.

It's valuable to examine first-principles when we get too far down the rabbit hole, but I'm suspecting that this 'immigration is bad' viewpoint is simply dogmatic and will NEVER be changed.

I wonder how long the Romans thought this way? I wonder when they realized their mistake?

thejeff wrote:

Harambe wrote:

Thank you, and to the poster below with the farm study.

There are minimal demonstrable negative impacts of illegal immigration, and a great many benefits.

It's a hysteria with little reason behind it. They don't take American jobs, don't suck on the welfare state more than usual, and a great many pay taxes (more would if we would legalize them).

Much of these arguments start from an assumption that our current immigration situation is bad and must be fixed. I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is the case.

It's valuable to examine first-principles when we get too far down the rabbit hole, but I'm suspecting that this 'immigration is bad' viewpoint is simply dogmatic and will NEVER be changed.

I wonder how long the Romans thought this way? I wonder when they realized their mistake?

I wonder how you know what the Romans thought. I wonder why you think there was one reason and only one reason for the fall of the Roman Empire. Do you time travel?

Well I think what he was trying to say without just saying it was why did you put all that time and effort to point out all the crimes being committed by the poorest and weakest of the world yet didn't even bring up the crimes of the strongest and most powerful of the world? I think the reason is an an American and capitalist you have reference for the powerful and disdain for the weak. That is what most would call a lack of morals AND a lack of mercy.

Almost everyone, right or left, is morally superior to exthrower.

thejeff wrote:

The point of divergence is whether or not repealing DACA is Moral. Let's agree on this: to withhold punishment of criminals would be an act of Mercy. Mercy ≠ Morality; it is perfectly moral to punish wrongdoers, even if loved ones are affected by the punishment.

Therefore, if you want to argue that we should continue DACA, that is fine. Just please refer to your wishes as an act of Mercy, not Morality, because there is nothing moral about withholding punishment for a crime.

Another way to frame it would be that people differ in how they view or define morality. For some, morality is based in a firm sense of right and wrong, of rules imparted by church, law, cultural values, etc. For others it is more based on empathy, i.e. the "golden rule" of treating others how one would want to be treated. This distinction became apparent to me when I spent a couple months around a psychopath who constantly derived pleasure from making people around him uncomfortable but also fervently argued that he was more moral than all those around him because he did not drink and did not believe in premarital sex.

That's an extreme example and not meant to argue in favor of an empathic foundation for morality over a rule-based foundation. And yes, I understand that the two are not always mutually exclusive and frequently people do benefit from 'tough love.' I also believe that we don't choose who we feel empathy towards, which is another way of saying we don't choose who is 'us' vs 'other.'

Good bump. It is always a good laugh to see a thread get buried when the liberals are confronted with their hypocrisy.

With that being said, liberals are quite bizarre in the arrogance of the their delusion.

Why don't you ask cheating Melania who jumped ahead of law-abiding wanna be immigrants?