High school valedictorian reveals undocumented status in speech

So who's going to decide what benefits the country? You?

Economists.

"We find that in a metro area, an increase of foreign STEM workers during a decade by 1% of total employment increased wages of native college educated by 4-6% with small effect on their employment. It also had non significant effects on the wages and employment of non-college educated. These results are indication that growth in STEM workers spurred technological growth by increasing the productivity of (and demand for) college educated"

Source.

"Because of these factors, economists have found that immigrants raise average wages slightly for the United States as a whole. As illustrated in the chart below, estimates from opposite ends of the academic literature arrive at this same conclusion, and point to small but positive wage gains of between 0.1 and 0.6 percent for American workers

Immigrants also affect the well-being of U.S. workers by affecting the prices of the goods and services that they purchase. Recent research suggests that immigrant workers enhance the purchasing power of Americans by lowering prices of “immigrant-intensive” services like child care, gardening, and cleaning services."

Source.

If they are an economic benefit on average and have clean criminal records why would you deport them? Even if we look at illegal immigrants as a whole they commit violent crimes at a rate less than native citizens. So why would we deport them? What is the reasoning?

But it makes just as many horror stories as it does success stories, if not more

Anecdotal.

How do we determine which children will be benefits to society and which ones won't?

We don't we determine on aggregate based on economic research. If you don't have a criminal record and the location you wish to immigrate to is economically stable then you should be allowed in. You don't work off anecdotes and circumstances, you work off aggregate data.

We do that by having immigration applications.

Great and while that process is fixed we can make the well reasoned decision to say that we shouldn't be deporting people who are succeeding simply because our broken system tells us to.

People who stay in the country illegally and wait here in the shadows while their applications are processed bypass that system and don't allow there to be any oversight.

So we already acknowledged that the oversight is failing but yet we're mad about people "bypassing" that oversight. These people filed 7 years ago, they aren't hiding anywhere.

as well as the failures that turn to gang violence and low paid menial labor that just provides a drain on limited resources.

You should probably read some actual academic studies on the topic because is simply bullshit.

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