![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The grain of truth in the Trump-Sessions border control policy
The way Jeff Sessions has presented the family-separation policy in recent weeks is "we're just following the law. Bringing a child with you across the border does not protect you from the consequences of your actions."
Which actually makes a certain amount of sense. We wouldn't want a situation in which illegal immigrants use their own children as human shields to protect them from the consequences of their actions. If you imagine someone in Central America planning to go to the U.S. and deciding whether or not to bring hir children, you could see such a person thinking "if I have a small child with me, the border patrol will treat me better than if I don't." Which would indeed be fairly reprehensible behavior on the part of a parent, and to the extent that the border patrol does treat people with children better than people without, it's not good for the rule of law. Treating immigrants with children the same as immigrants without children avoids incentivizing that reprehensible behavior.
The question is, how common is that scenario in real life? My impression is that the vast majority of people fleeing Central America and heading for the U.S. are (or at least claim to be) fleeing gang violence, government oppression, or domestic abuse. For someone in that situation, whether to take your children is not a question: of course you're going to take your children rather than leaving them to suffer the same violence that you're fleeing. The decision that Sessions wants to avoid incentivizing is not a decision at all for most asylum-seekers. Like the voter-fraud commission, this policy is a solution to a nearly nonexistent problem.
Any immigration-screening policy will have false positives (people excluded from the country who should be allowed in) and false negatives (people admitted to the country who should be kept out), and like any decision procedure, it takes careful tuning to balance the two. If you approach immigration policy from the assumption that brown people are fundamentally shiftless, lazy, and dishonest, as Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump have both evidently believed for many decades, you'll inevitably see the "human shield" scenario (not to mention the "terrorists and gang-bangers trying to expand into the U.S." scenario) as very plausible, and thus be very concerned about false negatives. If you also basically don't care about the welfare or value of people who don't look like you, you'll also inevitably undercount the problem of false positives, and thus reach a much more restrictive immigration policy than would actually be optimal. Like the voter-fraud commission, this policy is all about avoiding false negatives and totally discounting false positives, because that looks strong and macho.
Of course, that's all about the purported reasons for the policy. I suspect that the real reasons are (a) to scare poor brown people out of trying to come to our country, even legally; (b) to stick it to poor brown people because we can; and (c) to make liberals wet their pants in outrage, distracting them from the more lasting damage the Trump administration is doing behind the scenes.
Which actually makes a certain amount of sense. We wouldn't want a situation in which illegal immigrants use their own children as human shields to protect them from the consequences of their actions. If you imagine someone in Central America planning to go to the U.S. and deciding whether or not to bring hir children, you could see such a person thinking "if I have a small child with me, the border patrol will treat me better than if I don't." Which would indeed be fairly reprehensible behavior on the part of a parent, and to the extent that the border patrol does treat people with children better than people without, it's not good for the rule of law. Treating immigrants with children the same as immigrants without children avoids incentivizing that reprehensible behavior.
The question is, how common is that scenario in real life? My impression is that the vast majority of people fleeing Central America and heading for the U.S. are (or at least claim to be) fleeing gang violence, government oppression, or domestic abuse. For someone in that situation, whether to take your children is not a question: of course you're going to take your children rather than leaving them to suffer the same violence that you're fleeing. The decision that Sessions wants to avoid incentivizing is not a decision at all for most asylum-seekers. Like the voter-fraud commission, this policy is a solution to a nearly nonexistent problem.
Any immigration-screening policy will have false positives (people excluded from the country who should be allowed in) and false negatives (people admitted to the country who should be kept out), and like any decision procedure, it takes careful tuning to balance the two. If you approach immigration policy from the assumption that brown people are fundamentally shiftless, lazy, and dishonest, as Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump have both evidently believed for many decades, you'll inevitably see the "human shield" scenario (not to mention the "terrorists and gang-bangers trying to expand into the U.S." scenario) as very plausible, and thus be very concerned about false negatives. If you also basically don't care about the welfare or value of people who don't look like you, you'll also inevitably undercount the problem of false positives, and thus reach a much more restrictive immigration policy than would actually be optimal. Like the voter-fraud commission, this policy is all about avoiding false negatives and totally discounting false positives, because that looks strong and macho.
Of course, that's all about the purported reasons for the policy. I suspect that the real reasons are (a) to scare poor brown people out of trying to come to our country, even legally; (b) to stick it to poor brown people because we can; and (c) to make liberals wet their pants in outrage, distracting them from the more lasting damage the Trump administration is doing behind the scenes.
no subject
Of course, the current crisis is a made-up problem of Trump's own manufacture. There is *not* a "flood" of illegal immigrants streaming across the border, and they are *not* causing a crime problem in the U.S., because they are *not* more likely to commit crimes than citizens or green-card holders. He made up all of that because it sounded like it *could* be true, and it drew applause at campaign rallies.
OTOH, there is a real, longer-term problem: 11 million people living in the U.S. who are afraid of being deported, so they avoid any interaction with police or any government official. They don't report crimes they witness or suffer, including gang violence. They don't report unsafe working conditions, sub-minimum wages, or wage theft. They don't report abuse and harassment from employers or landlords. All of which makes it harder for citizens and legal immigrants to do the same: "if I complain, my job might go to an illegal immigrant who can't complain." All of these problems stem not from the fact that they're immigrants, nor from the fact that they speak foreign languages, but from the fact that they're "illegal"; you could make these problems go away instantly by making them all legal, or by sharply reducing the emphasis on deportation -- the exact opposite of what Trump wants to do.