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I actually want to be educated here, because my stance is that there should be a road to cheap and speedy citizenship, and that immigrants should assimilate into the system.
My gut says that seeking asylum isn't paying for someone to smuggle you over the boarder. It would require you going through an actual boarder checkpoint where you would do the paperwork to enter the country as a refugee.
I know Republicans are assholes who have been obstructing that, but my gut tells me there is the legal way of entering the country and the illegal one.
Hiding in the back of a pickup truck and buying a fake Juan Martinez social security card doesn't feel like asylum seeking, it feels illegal.
For context, I invoke the fake Juan Martinez social security card because when I worked at the Arizona Department of Education, there were at least 3000 Juan Martinezes with the same social security number attending Arizona public education, which I thought was HORRIBLE and extremely dehumanizing to those children, and it wasn't the US government that did that. It was the coyotes and parents illegally immigrating that did that.
I would say that the legitimate process of seeking opportunities has been intentionally made to look illegal by waves of xenophobic policy from both Rs and Ds who have created an immigration system that's designed to generate workers without a legal foothold. If there was a functional way for people to seek the life they want, they wouldn't need to resort to fake IDs and hiding in trucks to get a job. But then industries would have to pay them legal wages.
A lot of people want to create a distinction between someone who's fleeing full-blown war or starvation vs someone who's fleeing poverty. I can't see how it is a crime to flee either. It is just a reality that humans will try to escape suffering, monumental suffering and everyday suffering - legislation and bureaucracy can accomodate or ignore that but it won't change it. So when we ignore it, we know that the black market will step in.
More broadly it suits the needs of capital to restrict the flow of labour as much as possible. Labour free to seek the best conditions means upward pressure on wages, lower margins and less leverage for capital.
A large part of this is being driven by illegal trafficking operations that recruit desperate families looking to give their families a safer life. Republicans have chosen to demonize both the families as well as the traffickers. It must suck living a life incapable of empathy for others less fortunate.
Anyways, this is actually a pretty good read on it, despite it coming from CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/us/migrant-surge-travel-agencies-smugglers/index.html