05-04-2011, 04:30 AM
Grace62 wrote:
Nice shift away from the Bush era policy of work-place raids - hauling the immigrant workers off to jail and ignoring the people who hired them and profited from their labor. Go after the employers, it's a far more effective and efficient way to reduce the number of illegals working in our country.
I realize that i'm stepping into a quagmire i may well regret, but there are many solid economic and political reasons that going after employers doesn't work either. And as someone who has worked around this issue for a while, i'll say my general spiel about terminology. "Illegals" is not a great term to use to describe unauthorized immigrants, because legal status is not established de facto by being here without papers. Immigration status can only be determined by a judge, and even if someone is determined to be "out of status," that is to say not authorized to be here, this is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Everyone gets due process and their chance to plead their case for why they should be allowed to be here. Describing people as "illegal" carries a connotation of criminality, which is inaccurate. "Undocumented" or "unauthorized" are better, more appropriate terms.