Kurplop wrote: the virtual open door policy that we have now is a national mockery. Your hospitality invites a guest into your home but when they enter through a closed window it's trespassing.
The number of undocumented immigrants in the US since the great recession has actually been going down, as more undocumented immigrants return home than new immigrants arrive. I therefore agree that electing Trump would be the surest way to reduce the number of immigrants: flush the economy down the toilet, and no one will bother coming anymore.
More seriously though, the dramatic rise in undocumented immigration to the US after the 1980s was mostly caused by stricter border control. Let me explain, as it’s somewhat counterintuitive, and a large complex set of problems...
The US has imported seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico since at least the 1940s (during WWII and until the mid-1960s, this was a official government policy, called the “
Bracero program”). For decades, these seasonal laborers have been undocumented, but they are an essential part of American agricultural production, and if they were suddenly cut off the agricultural system would face a very severe shock, with fruit etc. rotting on the vine, and significant increases in food costs. Therefore, there has never been any serious American effort to block seasonal agricultural workers from finding jobs (or for that matter, there hasn’t been much serious effort to block other types of employers from hiring undocumented immigrants), and GOP pundits and politicians are mostly being disingenuous (i.e. lying to their supporters) when they talk about undocumented immigration.
Anyway, for a long time, such seasonal workers would work in the US farms during the picking season, and then would return home to their families in Mexico during the off season. This worked out fairly well for everyone, and the number of undocumented immigrants living full-time in the US was fairly low. There was some increase (small by retrospective standards) in undocumented immigration during the late 60s / early 70s, and the president and congress talked about it a bit, but nothing too much was done. Then in the 1980s, two things happened.
First, there was a severe economic crisis in Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) caused by massive amounts of “dumb” international lending at low interest rates from international banks flush with money coming from oil profits during the 70s, with poor analysis of creditworthiness or repayment risks which left Latin American countries deep in debt (Mexico in particular was run very corruptly [with plenty of official and unofficial US support for the corruption] but was convinced it could repay the debts with continuing high oil prices), and then LA countries were left completely unable to pay when oil prices collapsed and the interest rates on international debts rose sharply with the contraction in available money to lend. This hit Mexico double, because the country was heavily reliant on oil revenues itself. The attempt to hold the peso’s value against the dollar broke down and the currency devalued rapidly, and the economies throughout Latin America went into general recession. The 1980s are still talked about as the “lost decade”, when GDP fell dramatically and forced high unemployment rates. US and International pressure prevented Mexico from defaulting on its loans, as it clearly should have. It didn’t help that many other commodity prices also collapsed during the same time, putting millions more Mexicans out of work.
Second, US states started cracking down on immigration, as a larger number unemployed and starving Mexicans started looking for work in the US. As formerly easy-to-cross places started to be blockaded, more immigrants were forced out into the desert, where many would die of dehydration, etc. More generally, the process of crossing the border became much more expensive, with a need to hire experienced guides to smuggle people across.
Blocking the border up had the counterintuitive effect of increasing the total number of immigrants, because to cross required taking out expensive loans back at home (from local loan sharks who know where your family live and aren’t afraid to threaten them with physical violence). So as each new group of immigrants came across the border to work seasonal agriculture jobs, they couldn’t return home at the end of the picking season, because they still hadn’t fully worked off their debts. Instead, at the end of the picking season, undocumented Mexicans were forced to find other jobs, for example in restaurants, meat packing plants, textile or furniture factories, etc. When the next picking season arrived, these immigrants had no reason to go back to agricultural labor, as their new jobs were better paid and much more reliable/secure. As a result, American agriculture had to import a new batch of undocumented farm laborers. Overall, making the border increasingly difficult to cross had a kind of ratchet effect: there was a constant pull of new immigrants into the country, but then once they had arrived in the US, they were unable to leave, for financial reasons. Since they needed to stay in the US for years or even decades to pay off their loans, many of them ended up settling down more permanently on the US side of the border, e.g. getting married, having families here.
The aftermath of NAFTA drove immigration even more. The concept of NAFTA was that low-end industry would move to northern Mexico, and for a while that’s what happened. Shoe factories, textiles, furniture, toys, etc. located near the border on the Mexican side. But after a few years, increasing trade liberalization with China and other Asian countries bankrupted many of the Mexican factories, because Mexican labor is still more expensive than China, or Vietnam, or Thailand, or Bangladesh. Even worse, NAFTA destroyed Mexican agriculture, because Mexican farmers couldn’t compete with heavily subsidized US agriculture. Mexico started importing large amounts of corn from Iowa, and Mexican corn farmers went out of business, and with no other available labor in rural Mexico, many of them decided to migrate north.
Overall, trying to analyze international economics and geopolitics using metaphors like whether you should lock the door on your house is locked is naive and fundamentally misleading. Sometimes the folks pushing such interpretations are just ignoramuses (Donald Trump), but often they are being disingenuous (Dianne Feinstein and Bill Clinton, or various “serious” Republican politicians and “thought leaders”).
There is absolutely no cost-effective or reasonable way to fully secure a 2000 mile long border, and border control doesn’t solve any of the fundamental causes of immigration (just like the solution to alcohol abuse is not prohibition, and the solution to terrorism is not bombing civilians in the hopes of killing “terrorists”).
I know a lot of undocumented Mexican immigrants, and every one of them would love to follow an official recognized “legal” process. Likewise, almost none of them would have immigrated if they could find jobs in Mexico which would support their families. The problem is a large, systemic problem, and the only real solution involves stabilizing and growing the Mexican economy, investing in Mexican industry, growing a Mexican middle class, improving security and strengthening state power in Mexico, and so on. Building a giant wall across 2000 miles of desert is a fool’s fever dream.
If (to take a clearly unrealistic example) the US had taken all the money spent on the Iraq war, and instead invested it in infrastructure projects inside Mexico, today we would have neither ISIS nor immigration to worry about.
with Clinton we have a proven [foreign policy] history, I think mostly of failure and irresponsibility.
Oh give me a break. In broad strokes, Clinton is going to provide exactly the same foreign policy America and Western Europe have been pursuing for 50+ years. With respect to “responsibility”, she’ll be somewhere between Obama (reasonably responsible and pretty successful overall, albeit too drone happy, still stuck with a mess he didn’t start in the Middle East, and not willing to properly sanction the excesses of his predecessor) and Bill Clinton/George HW Bush (reasonably irresponsible, but not to the obvious war criminal level of Reagan, Nixon, or Bush Jr.). She’ll mostly listen to the Defense Department and the State Department and the CIA/NSA and the US Chamber of Commerce, and end up with policies somewhere in the middle of their recommendations. Arguably, American foreign policy for the past 50 years has had many failures, but it’s a known and reasonably stable quantity. Clinton has a very solid grasp of historical facts, and has established relationships with the US foreign policy establishment and foreign leaders. She’s tough under pressure, thinks carefully before talking, and is a pretty good negotiator. She’s too hawkish/interventionist for my taste, and doesn’t have an especially obvious concern for human rights or democracy, but probably a bit better than the average US president on both fronts.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric about foreign policy is a mix of straight-up fascism and hopeless ignorance. He’s going to bar all Muslims from entering the country, spend 500 billion dollars rounding up and deporting 11 million undocumented Mexican immigrants (who he characterizes as “rapists”) and build a giant border wall, declare bankruptcy on the US debt (to stick it to the Chinese, supposedly), bomb the shit out of the Middle East, back out of treaties he finds inconvenient, punish multinational corporations who fire American employees (in some unspecified way), and tell Europe and Japan they should start financing the US military if they want to keep our protection. He says we need to bring back torture, intentionally assassinate the innocent families of anyone he thinks might be a terrorist, etc. It’s pure id, untethered from any kind of mental filter. Sometimes he stands by his foot-in-mouth statements, and sometimes he walks them back a bit after facing backlash from the GOP (as with the declaration he would default on the national debt, or his suggestion that we might stop supporting Israel).
As president he surely wouldn’t be able to do half of what he talks about, but even so, his presidency would be an unmitigated disaster. You really want the second coming of Mussolini to have his finger on the nuclear button? No thanks.
