Your aegument is with the WAPO.
lol
1) Washington Post is not a monolithic entity, where every single article must toe the party line. While the paper is generally center-left, they run op-eds and hire columnists from across the spectrum and from different points of view. (That should already be clear from the reaction to the OP mistakenly calling Thiessen a "liberal" solely because he writes for the WaPo.) At any rate, I'm certainly not obligated to agree with everything they publish.
2) In this case, I'm not disagreeing with the authors all that much. I'm explaining to you an article that you apparently did not understand.
You're arguing for something that discourages even attempting to enter illegally. That's the purpose of a "Wall".
I'm arguing against something that will not keep out undocumented immigrants, will definitely not keep out drugs, and will be an environmental disaster to boot.
For example, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants entering the US aren't crossing the southern border. They are flying in (mostly from Asia) and overstaying their visas. Good luck stopping
them with a wall.
By the way, if you really want to reduce the undocumented population in the US? Then
relax border crossings and/or set up a guest worker program. Yep, that's right. Before we had extensive controls, undocumented immigrants would come to the US for a few months, work, and
go home. When a government clamps down on the border, it makes it more difficult to come and go, and the result is that undocumented immigrants
stay in the United States.
Another way to reduce the undocumented population?
Stabilize the nations where immigrants are leaving or fleeing. For example, the vast majority of border crossings were Mexicans -- but as Mexico's economy improved, the number of Mexicans crossing fell dramatically, and now
more Mexicans are leaving the US and going back to Mexico, than are immigrating to the US (with or without documentation). If you want to stop Hondurans from showing up in Tijuana? Then let's try to stabilize Honduras.
Thus, the
real purpose of the wall isn't to keep out brown people. Its real purpose is as a political gesture, an oversimplified answer to a complex problem. It's a sop to nativists who are too stupid and/or don't know enough about immigration to realize it won't work. That's why the vast majority of Americans don't want it.
BTW, I've seem studies that appear to claim what you did that "Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans" but the methodology of those studies wasn't clear.
I guess you didn't actually read them. Seems like a pattern.
This is from the Cato Group, which is a conservative think tank. And yes, they describe their methods.
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/irpb-4-updated.pdf
Here's another paper, which did a longitudinal study. It found that "undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative." And yes, there's a whole section on data and methods.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9125.12175
While I would agree that more research is needed, it's not
that hard to find reputable papers which explain their methodologies.
Leaving aside the obvious 100% crime rate among illegal immigrants to start with.
:roll:
Illegal entry to the US is a misdemeanor.
Oh, and all those families fleeing Central American and applying for asylum?
They are legal immigrants. A refugee has the legal right to cross a border and stay in the US until their case is heard. If they're granted asylum, they are here legally. There is no legal requirement for them to apply in advance at a port of entry, and refugees requesting asylum is a basic human right.
But regardless of the numbers, whatever crimes illegal immigrants committed here shouldn't have happened.
And if Woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would have happened!!!
The reality is that we're not going to substantially reduce crime rates by kicking out all the undocumented immigrants. That's a xenophobic fantasy.
By the way, we should note that the impulse to kick people out, yeah, it just causes more problems. For example, Trump's favorite boogeyman, MS-13, actually
started in the US and spread to Central America because they were getting deported. (They are also less than 1% of all gang members in the US, and responsible for less than 1% of all gang homicides.)
So, like I said: Undocumented immigrants coming to the US is not a crisis. The real crisis is the inability of the US to deal with immigration, violence in Central America, and inhumane border controls and detentions.
