sorry for the rant but this opinion is just one that I completely disagree with. tldr when our actions have had a destructive impact on a nation's economic or political well-being, we should not gripe about taking their people in as some minor form of recompense.
y'know, I get really fucking tired of both sides of this issue. No, I do not think we should blindly accept anyone from any nation who happens to sneak inside illegally. I think that opinion is insane, so I just cannot agree with the left that we should allow anyone and everyone in. we have a process which has problems, the real answer should be to make that process better.
With that being said, if we are the direct cause of the increase in people coming to our nation, then we need to accept them almost without question. as it relates to South America, we are the direct cause of people leaving their country and coming here in at least five different cases that I know well: Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Mexico, and Panama. let's look at the history of this rise in South American immigration.
just to remind you, sir, amnesty is a very conservative principle (Ronald Reagan was a primary proponent of it). people are often viewed as the best resource for an economy that has the infrastructure to provide jobs. Mexicans mostly come to this country nowadays because of NAFTA, and the maquilladora factories on the border. NAFTA has made it so we ship our subsidized grain to Mexico and put nearly all their farmers out of work. they cannot afford to compete, lose their land, and often sell to criminals to fund them moving somewhere else, which has strengthened the drug cartels. they sell to criminals because those are the only buyers, and that barely earns them enough to hire a coyote to smuggle them into the US.
and those who don't move, because they want to stay where they were born, are forced by those now stronger cartels to either grow drugs on their land or be murdered, so crime has risen again as a result of NAFTA flooding cheap crops into Mexican markets.
US companies have purchased factories in Mexico right at the border, in the Free Trade Zone, which pay workers similar wages to those of Chinese workers. they work in these shitty factories called maquilladoras where they make barely livable wages, and this is in Mexico (so it doesn't take much money to survive in the first place compared to the US). they live and work within a few football fields of the border oftentimes. they have shitty services because their government is corrupt because of all the aforementioned crime, because an agrarian economy flooded with cheaper shit will not survive.
a lot of the people who came across the border before were from guatemala, chile, and nicaragua. in nicaragua, we took down the revolutionary army called the sandinistas because they were socialists with our US trained Contras, who learned how to kill at the School of the Americas, since renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Reagan used the sales of illegal drugs in US ghettos to fund the war effort. this is now known as the Iran-Contra scandal. many of the worst dictators in history were educated right here in the United States in the school of the americas. many were extremely corrupt and murdered tens of thousands of people, some more. they destroyed their own countries and all these dictatorships lasted until the 1990s.
in Chile, we bombed the democratically elected ruler salvador allende on 9/11/73, which people think is the reason that bin Laden chose that date in 2001, sort of as a reminder that the US does this same kind of thing. we sent a bomber to drop bombs with the intention of murdering their newly elected head of state, salvador allende. the man we allowed to take over as ruler, Pinochet, stole over $100 million (that we know about) in his 20 years as leader, and killed many thousands of people in the country. the nation had a free market economy which Milton Friedman himself said was a great example of his economic system. it was a cataclysmic failure because not all economic systems work in all places. so people from Chile and Nicaragua and guatemala would flee to the US in the mid 20th century.
in Guatemala, US-installed military dictatorships ran the nation until as recently as 1996. All of these governments involved constant murder, backstabbing, and US military support. they would "disappear" political opponents regularly and no revolutionaries could fight US military grade supplies and training.
I think the people who are so staunchly against some path to citizenship really don't understand that we've created the recent rises in illegal immigration from the south. yes there have always been people coming across the border illegally, but the rise in recent years from Mexico specifically is because of the impact of NAFTA. furthermore, I'm not saying they don't commit crime at higher rates, but the incentive to commit crime is higher in a place where your existence there is already a crime. might as well steal in a place where living is illegal to begin with. they'd have more invested in obeying the law if they were naturalized, so that they wouldn't inherently be criminals. and they get paid so shitty off the books that they have even more incentive to steal just based off need.
and they aren't using this money from themselves. 1/3 of the economies of the aforementioned nations is based on money sent back from the US. literally 1/3, sometimes more in some cases. that is insane and tells you how poorly these other nations are doing from the decades of political infighting which our own government supported and sowed the seeds of.
and I'd like to see how their crime rates compare to other low class groups by racial demographics to see if there is actually a larger percentage of crime commited by them, or if it is just another example of lower class individuals being more likely to commit crime.