US immigration law belongs fairly high up there on any list of injustices in the world. Many people mostly reject the idea that someone’s legal rights should depend on who their parents are or what color their skin is, but accept that it is effectively illegal to hire anyone who doesn’t have the right paperwork, which is incredibly difficult to get if you didn’t happen to be born in the right country.
Most economists think the country would be much richer and better off if it were significantly easier for people to get permission to live and work here, but instead it’s nearly impossible. And millions — arguably billions — of people who want to live and work here live in poverty elsewhere instead because we have made it illegal for Americans to choose to hire them.
And on top of all that, enforcement of immigration law is typically excruciatingly inhumane. Children are taken from their parents. Widespread brutality and sexual assault take years to address, if they’re addressed at all. Most of the people who die in ICE custody are young and healthy and should not have died. Some of the worst elements of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement have since been changed — for example, after a 2018 outcry, there were changes to the policy to take young children from their asylum-seeking parents — but families are still routinely sundered forever by deportations, and the US-Mexico border is still effectively enforced in part by “you will probably die of dehydration while trying to cross it on foot,” and the legal system surrounding immigration is confusing, expensive, and often deeply unjust.
This has affected many people I…
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