Immigration Reform
This is a tragic story. Our Immigration enforcement system is seriously fucked up. This has nothing to do with national security, but rather a system that tolerates substantial error because it doesn’t care about the parties unfairly affected by arbitrary and sloppy enforcement. I seriously don’t understand what policy goals are advanced by tolerating an administrative agency that is as incompetent as DHS. This IS NOT just a partisan issue. Check out this opinion from the Conservative pragmatist Richard Posner.
Tolerating these kinds of errors as innocuous is basically equivalent to admitting that the administration is allowed to do indirectly what they can’t do directly (keep people out of the country who they don’t want in (for whatever reason) even when the law will not tolerate their deportation). Enforcement matters. And the more we tolerate this kind of bullshit, the more the Administration is emboldened to try to get away with whatever the fuck they want.
There needs to immigration reform, but a solution can’t focus solely on false negatives. And it’s hard not to ascribe the worst motives (desire to preserve a certain kind of identity) to people who only care about false negatives and ignore the false positives that our system quietly endorses.
