The survey asked respondents, “What do you think should be done about immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally, but have committed no crimes while here?”
Across the board, respondents are virtually split, as 41 percent said those illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay, while 40 percent believe they should be deported. Another 19 percent remain unsure.
Results drastically vary by party identification. Most Democrats, 68 percent, believe that those illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country, and only ten percent said they should be deported. Another 22 percent remain unsure.
Nearly three-quarters of Republicans, 72 percent, believe those illegal immigrants should be deported, while 14 percent said they should be allowed to stay, and 15 percent remain unsure.
A plurality of independents, 42 percent, believe those illegal immigrants should be able to stay in the country, followed by 38 percent who believe they should be deported and 20 percent who remain unsure.
In the past, I’ve always been in the hardass camp — break the law, no matter when, and out you go.
However, I’ve recently softened my stance on this, after asking myself a question:
What if someone came over here (granted, illegally), but has over the years become a model “citizen”, working hard, paying taxes, maybe even raising a family. Should the heavy boot of the State be applied to his (or her) ass?
If you consider the question then the key, I think, is in the phrase “over the years”. In other words, how many years?
Here’s my thought. Assume that the person came over at age 24. Now, twenty years later, they’re in their mid forties: spouse, kids in high school, working hard in a decent job, and most importantly, never convicted of any serious crime — not even drunk driving. In other words, the person has proven themselves to be a decent member of society, and in fact, perhaps a better “citizen” than many a native-born citizen who lives on welfare, has been a general fuckup and definitely not someone you’d want to see marry your own son or daughter.
It’s even more compelling should the illegal immigrant have come over at age 40 and is now facing retirement. Who’s want to deport a sixty-year-old back to a country they’ve not seen since their youth?
Unfortunately, however, all bets are off if this illegal immigrant has used forged documents (SocSec card, driver’s license etc.) to enable them to have worked here all that time. That’s a criminal act — forgery — right there.
The question is: how have they managed to live and work here without such documents? The answer, regrettably, is that they probably couldn’t have, unless their employer has been incredibly lax or else has deliberately turned a blind eye to their status.
I have to tell you all, though: the thought of tossing someone out after they’ve lived here for twenty years, worked hard and tried their best to stay on the right side of the law… that tossing out seems pretty harsh to me.
You will note that I’ve used the period of twenty years as a cut-off point. I wouldn’t accept less than twenty, and the higher the number (25, 30 or 40 years), the greater I’m inclined towards leniency.
So, for the purposes of this argument, you can put me in that “Republican: 15% Unsure” category.
Comments are welcome.
The most I’d be willing to go for your ‘model’ residents is something I’ve called a Purple Card. You can stay, work legally and pay taxes. You have to transact any business with any level of government in English. If you take a Purple Card instead of deportation, you have no path to citizenship (except maybe voluntary military service). If you commit any crime that gets you arrested, you are gone; no appeal. However, we have millions more that need deportation (everyone that came during the Biden administration for starters) before we get around to considering something like this.
I am in the deport them all camp for the following reasons.
1) Breaking the immigration laws isn’t the only law they have broken. In order to work they have had to have obtained some sort of fake identification to get a social security number. That is fraud to get the documents and fraud with each and every employer.
2) getting the fake ID and using it is also fraud for getting a bank account, mortgage, loans, buying a car, renting an apartment.
3) this is also fraud on the school system and putting more students onto the system. This one might be gray area because children born in the US unfortunately have birthright citizenship and should be getting educated.
4) the illegal immigrant is going to get healthcare at some point so again they commit fraud.
5) if they ever use any public services, food stamps, registering a car etc, that again is fraud.
No, no matter how “law abiding” an illegal immigrant is after illegally crossing the border, their entire life is built upon crime.
Too me this is like robbing millions of dollars from a bank and not being caught. I don’t care how much of that stolen money you use to improve society, every accomplishment is built upon that crime and most likely more crimes are committed.
“…their entire life is built upon crime.”
Yup. Fruit of a poisonous tree, including their children. Any consideration of remaining here has to include some form of punishment/payment, because at the very least, they took the potential place of a legal immigrant.
Kim, this just proves that despite your blustery, gruff exterior, you’re really a softie inside. You’re just a decent human being, we all knew that. The problem is that hard cases make for bad law. And you’ve become a victim of the weaponization of compassion.
The problem is the people you mention are not the only hard cases. The illegal alien gets all the press coverage and the caterwauling and tears. But there are other people hurt by illegals, who do not get the fawning coverage by the press. They get no coverage at all, as a matter of fact. A quote from a timely American Thinker essay just today. —
[quote]
Some argue that illegal immigrants pay taxes. That may be true in part, through payroll deductions, sales taxes, and even property taxes indirectly. But this argument misses the deeper point. Every job held by someone unlawfully present is a job not held by a citizen or legal resident. That displaced American, now unemployed or underemployed, may rely on public assistance, Medicaid, SNAP, housing subsidies, funded by the same taxpayers who are told illegal immigrants are “contributing.” The net effect is not neutral. It’s a fiscal and moral deficit.
So why do many families still support illegal immigration or oppose enforcement agencies like ICE? The answer lies in emotional framing, ideological signaling, and media distortion. Compassion is weaponized. Enforcement is demonized. And the cost, both financial and structural, is buried beneath slogans and
[/quote]
The article estimates (range is wide due to lack of hard data) anywhere from $2,200 to $6,000 per family in services provided to illegal aliens, and negative impact on services for citizens and legal immigrants. Reagan tried to make a deal with the Democrats over this and got swindled. Frankly, I think the approach laid out in the Kristi Noem commercials is the right one, despite the cases that tug at your heartstrings. Those that jumped the line can self-deport, we’ll give them a plane ticket and $1,000 (I’d give them $5,000, far less than the cost of them staying another year, and a more compelling incentive) and the chance to apply for entry the right way.
I feel for the law abiding immigrant as much as you do, but I don’t fall for the weaponization of compassion which you see in this issue, the Izzies and the Palestinians, the Muslim immigrants in Europe. The problem is we screwed this situation up six ways to Sunday, and now there is no easy solution. Republicans have been as complicit as Democrats in creating this mess and still would be were it not for Trump.
They need to go. All of them. They can go easy and maybe come back, or they can go hard, it’s there choice, but go they must. Otherwise you’re substituting one hard case at the expense of another. The weaponization of compassion Jedi mind trick doesn’t work on me, maybe because I was trained as an Economist. I deal in hard reality, which often sucks, but I don’t let emotion cloud my decisions. We are in a bucket of shit here created over decades. It will cause some trauma to clean it all up, but clean it up we must. After which there need to be hard consequences for businesses who skirt the law on this issue by hiring illegals. Not with just fines but with orange jump suits for company execs.
The situation is untenable but it must be addressed with hard choices. The article I quoted from is here.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/10/a_hidden_tax_what_americans_are_really_paying_for_illegal_immigration.html
“… there need to be hard consequences for businesses who skirt the law on this issue by hiring illegals. Not with just fines but with orange jump suits for company execs.”
Bingo!
JQ gets it! Bravo.
No purple card. We don’t need to create more immigration laws to fix those who circumvented the current laws. We make too damn many laws in this country, and then don’t enforce them. But any new law would create tens of thousands of new GOV bureaucrats, again at our expense.
It sucks, it looks cruel and heartless, but they need to go, they need to go now, and we need to enforce REALLY enforce current immigration law, by the letter. When we get there, we can talk about creating new laws.
This is always the case, “We need a new law!” Remember when we needed “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”? Nope, we just needed a new president who shut down the border crossing inside a week.
We’re too inured to proliferation of laws that then don’t get enforced. We need about 20% of the current laws on the books, and any legislative fixes should start with scrapping what is being “reformed” and starting from ground zero. The law, followed by a fixer law, followed by another fixer law just makes it impossible to understand the laws and creates wasteful jackbooted thug bureaucrats.
I’m old too, and maybe a little more compassionate. But I can’t get past the “illegal” part.
The suggestion is that the longer a criminal is illegal the less illegal it is. I say it’s the opposite.
Ask yourself, “Why is it illegal for a foreigner to move to the US in the first place?”
Smallpox. Yellow Fever. Plague. Syphilis. Tuberculosis. You don’t need to exhibit symptoms to be a carrier. Immigration control isn’t just an economic issue.
.
JC and JQ pretty much covered all the relevant points. Hard no, kick them all out. No grace period. And end birthright citizenship – that was never intended for its current use, it was a catch-all for allowing freed slaves to become citizens. After about two generations (enough to ensure all freed slaves were covered), this amendment should have been sunset and deleted. I don’t care how law-abiding they appear, since the “law-abiding” ones simply provide cover for the criminal class, much the same way the crying Palestinians provide cover for Hamas. And yes, every one of them is a drain on the economy, even the so-called law-abiding and hard working ones.
Note too that I just had to file a fraud claim with the state of Texas since some asshole took my SS # and filed for unemployment benefits. And pretty much everyone in my family has been a victim of hit-n-run from an illegal with no license, no insurance, and no traceable tags on their vehicle. Teenagers can’t get part time jobs anymore, locking them out of valuable learning, since the illegals have taken over every minimum wage position available. We now have to lock our doors (house, cars, etc.) at all times, something our parents would never understand. Used to be able to park your car anywhere in town, in the summer, windows down, unlocked, and never worry about it. The amount of damage they cause is way higher than the numbers that get published. Fuck them all. I’ve completely run out of compassion.
Curious, how did you find out someone had hijacked your SSN?
That has happened twice over the past 5 years with my bank debit card, which is a pain in the ass to deal with.
I came home, checked the mail, and had four separate envelopes from the “Texas Workforce Commission” basically stating that “I” had applied from unemployment compensation and here’s all the introductory information. Since I didn’t apply, someone else must have did it. Since you need a SS # to apply, I’m pretty sure that same someone else now has my SS #. It’s a logical guess, I don’t know 100% exactly what the chain of events were that led to me getting all the mail. I notified them of the potential fraud and supposedly they will investigate.
Thanks. I received notification that my debit card was violated from a text message from my bank. They asked if I had purchased several thousands of dollars work of construction materials in Kuwait.
Half an hour later I got another text asking if I rented a hotel room in San Diego. The bank cancelled my old card and issued a new one. That one too became violated a couple years later.
For me, the question pivots on intention sustained by action: did they come to be Americans? Were they our own, separated by circumstances? Or are they members of a cultural invasion force and election fodder?
Hard to tell all that. It’s a thorny problem, to be sure.
I understand your reluctance. However, that is exactly the kind of decency our enemies weaponize. Biden proved that when he let millions in easily but made it hard to deport them. Too bad we cannot set up a kind of exchange program where any illegal who meets your criteria can stay if there is some citizen loser we can get rid of.
Count me as deportation friendly…..UNLESS.
I vote for every one that fits the OP’s category of time & behavior, we arrange a personnel swap. One Guatemalan maid/gardener, for one purple haired Portland douche bag. I think we can turn this into a win-win.
I was pretty firm in my position, I thought. However, this idea has me considering it! Lol
In addition to what the others have said, let’s remember all of those illegal alien invaders have had ten, twenty, thirty years to follow a legal pathway for citizenship, and they have refused. They do not want to assimilate, they do not want to follow the laws, so I say deport them all!
Nah, send ‘em back.
Next question?
By all means get them all out. However, given the limited resources of those who are trying to get them all out, who gets prioritized? Pretty clearly it’s so far been the ones that are already caught up in the criminal justice system, especially the gangs and chronic offenders. (Also a couple large corporate show busts.) That’s a great place to start and may consume all the get-em-out resources for some time. What’s next? My fear would be they go after the easiest targets next which, sadly, are probably the folks that do the least damage … the productive ones embedded long term and assimilated in our society. Kim’s model citizens. It would be a shame to prioritize those folks above the really dangerous ones, the divisions of military age men who are laying low and keeping their noses clean, even joining our military, waiting for “go time.”
Deport them all
The ones I know are all unapologetic. Half seem to think things are better in Mexico. I think they all need to go back. The few that might be salvageable but I really think they are slowly degrading society as a whole. I would send the all back. And I would not separate families.
I do not see Myself as overly harsh. I would also like to something with those entitle airheads that are doing there flat out best to destroy the greatest country in the world.
“A cask of wine with a turd in it is a cask of shit. A cask of shit with a drop of wine in it is a cask of shit.”
They came illegally, they’ve lived largely illegally by stealing the identities of dead people — and thereby stealing from the proper heirs of the deceased — or by creating fictional lives using illegal means.
The rule of law MUST be observed here; otherwise we’re no better than a banana republic. The Left understands that if you create enough grey area by normalizing illegal behavior you can shape society in ways that would have been unimaginable to us in the past — and we’re watching it happen in real time. Doxing of ICE agents and their families and active resistance to Immigration enforcement raids are but the most current manifestations thereof.
Kim, you and New Wife came here legally, achieved your citizenships legally and have lived by the rule book, despite the difficulties in doing so. Softening your stance kind of suggests the soft racism of lowered expectations. They COULD have done so as well; they made either a conscious decision not to or were too lazy, too complacent, or too reliant on the cracks in the apparatus to do so.
The birthright citizenship/anchor baby issue needs resolution as well through clarification of The Fourteenth Amendment, but that’s a matter that probably should be addressed by the Supreme Court, and sooner rather than later.
Those of us who were born here (legally, rather than dropped by a pregnant Guatemalan matron) don’t really understand the privilege we were given by the profound vision of our Founders. I thank my great great grandparents that I wasn’t born in some pestilent shithole south of the Equator and/or east of the Prime Meridian. We are truly blessed and should never forget that.
I appreciate your apparently new-found humanity on the subject and would never think to soil my Esteemed Host’s premises, but I’m taking a hard pass here.
Apologies.
I may have mentioned this here before, but bear with me if you remember this..
My grandpa had a farm on the Brazos, because his father had one nearby, and his father, and so on, going back to the establishment of the Texas Republic. So a solid hardworking American. When his sons went off to to other things, his workload became very hard because he sure wasn’t going to downsize his farm. He would occasionally hire illegals. He didn’t call them that. He had another word he used that started with “wet”. They would show up on his farm asking for work. No FICA was withheld from paychecks because there weren’t any; there was just cash at the end of the week and a bunk in the ramshackle extra house he had.
This lasted until they burnt it down because they didn’t want to cut and split firewood, so they put a uncut log in the fireplace. At that point he would only hire the undocumented that lived off the property (which were pretty much non-existent). He was a hard man from a line of hard men. He was difficult to work for (as me how I know), but was always fair in his pay.
How would my venerable grandpa respond to such a question? Given the poor quality of the vast majority of illegals coming over, he would probably say ship them back, its not worth the paperwork to keep them because they are surely burning this house down.
Oh – and small point on granting citizenship for military service. Anyone who has been here for more than 20 years, probably is too old to serve. Anyone who is young enough to serve better be able to be a verified good guy based on a verifiable past record in their home country, or that’s a no go. We have enough rot in our military without importing it.
I believe the Romans hired barbarian mercenaries to fill their ranks in the army and I don’t believe that worked out well for them.
I don’t have firsthand experience but a buddy of mine who was an Army lifer, said we already do have “undocumented” in the army because it helps fast-track citizenship. I dunno myself but thought the same thing about the Goths in the Roman Army.