I don't know how the amnesty process would work in regards to getting people documented because I don't work in a field that requires that knowledge. There's probably some type of process for that which I don't know about and it's probably reallllllllllllllyyyyyy long and in some hard to find document on a government archive somewhere no?
Alright, this part warrants a separate post altogether. Without being facetious, let alone incendiary toward this statement, all I'm gonna say is that you've got a
rude awakening coming if you think that amnesty at the scale you're talking about is even remotely feasible. Unlike the rest of the world, the USA
does not have a singular form of documentation that incontrovertibly proves that you're a US citizen. There's a reason why "two forms of ID" are always required when doing basically anything like cashing a cheque or signing up for a driver's license. You would think that RealID, let alone Enhanced ID, would've fixed this problem. Sadly, the RealID programme doesn't count as an all-in-one proof of citizenship
despite being pushed back year after year until Trump started playing hardball and siad "enough's enough."
Think back to the DOGE firings from earlier this year. Remember what Scott Bessent said about most of the federal systems being ancient and written in COBOL? Just because we have
some things that are computerised on the federal level, that doesn't mean that
everything is computerised. In essence, we went from social security numbers being kept on hard copy and forcing a government stooge to sift through dusty file cabinets to having that same government stooge keying stuff into a command line that's probably the same age as his great-grandfather. Let's be perfectly blunt here: this sordid state of affairs
is not unique to the federal government alone. It also applies to basically all levels of state and municipal government in the USA, albeit in varying and haphazard stages.
Amnesty, at the scale you're talking about where tens of
millions of illegal aliens theoretically either get green cards
or citizenship, is a logistical nightmare to the point where the more pragmatic solution
is to deport them altogether. It's a running joke about how immigration courts are backed up for decades since Reagan...
but that's legitimately the goddamn truth, even today. My parents naturalised, I'm a born and bred American, but I can tell you this: they damn sure didn't get naturalised overnight. The process took literal
decades because they had to prove their residency for X amount of years, renounce citizenship of their countries of birth, study the basics of civics that build up the US citizenship exam, and
then receive their certificates of naturalisation.
You could argue that if the logistics are a nightmware with the current systems we have in place, we could try sidestepping that with a fastrack path... but therein lies the problem. The Biden administration tried doing that with the CBP One app, and it was an unmitigated, runaway disaster. Instead of sheltering in Mexico while waiting for their cases to be heard, migrants were allowed entry into the USA
against current federal law, which the Biden administration sidestepped with "temporary protected status" while giving migrants their court dates to appear on. This
does not work in America because we, as Americans, live in a high trust society... and most of these migrants come from low-trust countries where the judiciary amounts to kangaroo court systems.
If I, as a Venezuelan migrant coming into the USA from Mexico under Biden's tenure, have my court case adjudicated and it turns out that I'm not allowed in the country because of a felony I committed... what incentive do I even have to get the fuck out of the USA when the
enforcement of immigration law in the USA became so laughably pathetic that I could walk around in broad daylight in front of a neutered ICE, work off the books, and send remittances back to my family trapped in Venezuela? This is just
one example, a highly cherry-picked and arbitrary example to be sure, but multiply that by the magnitude of immigration we saw during the Biden administration.
These fastrack paths that sidestep current immigration law also facilitate some of the
worst human trafficking while emboldening cartels that facilitate such trafficking in the first place. That's another angle that you fail to take into account, JFYI. Let's say that I paid a smuggler network to get me into the USA, I'm given my court date and TPS by the federal government, and I'm able to work however I can. There
are still legal barriers to me working a proper, tax-paying job. Since I paid a smuggler to get me into the USA, I now have to work on the black market to earn my scratch, and then use Western Union, MoneyGram, or anything else along those lines to pay off the cartel that got me here in the first place. Even then, who's to say they won't keep extorting me after I paid off my debts? Bear in mind that I'm speaking as an able-bodied man; the picture becomes infinitely more grim if I was a girl or a woman in this example, since the option for sex trafficking immediately means that I'd get funnelled into prostitution under pain of getting beheaded and my death footage being sent to my family back home via WhatsApp.
You wanna know why I keep saying you drank the bourgeois, neoliberal Kool-Aid, homie? It's because you're thinking in idealistic, abstract terms that ignore the material reality of shit happening on the ground right now, and the material reality of our past. I might not be a bleeding heart leftist anymore, but I'll be damned if I let someone say "amnesty is pragmatic" and get away with it.
