I have just added two new labels for this site:
I put the first on four recent posts written because of me thinking about the so-called migrant crisis.
I hate Trump's ideas for handling the border problems but I'm not anti Trump and I'm not against reasonable policing of things. I just don't think you fix stuff with policies that boil down to "the beatings shall continue until morale improves."
To be clear I'm also not pro Trump. I spent the entire election joking "vote none of the above," which comes from the movie Brewster's Millions.
I also am absolutely certain you don't fix things by REWARDING problem behavior. So perhaps what needs to happen is some combination of helping Central and South America to achieve more economic stability AND stronger enforcement of the border.
One solution I'm not seeing in the press that MIGHT help: Work visas.
I have read some articles over the years and some illegals don't want to live here. They come here for part of every year to work jobs most Americans don't want for higher pay than they can earn where they live, then go home again.
Most Americans don't WANT to work harvesting food from the fields and without immigrants, farmers have difficulty finding enough workers.
During COVID-19, a European farmer had to go on Facebook and beg locals to please help him bring in the harvest before it rotted in the field because Pandemic restrictions denied him access to the workers who normally did that.
Similarly, the construction industry can't find enough Americans to build our buildings. They hire a lot of illegals, often under the table as "day laborers" and sometimes this leads to horror stories like some guy accidentally cutting his fingers off and getting dropped back at the day labor site rather than taken to a hospital.
This would be less likely if they had a work visa and weren't here illegally and I've read articles where illegal immigrants have explicitly said "I don't WANT to live in the US. What I really want is to work there LEGALLY for part of the year and I wish the US gave me the option to do that by providing work visas for people like me."