zlacker

This is a genuine question. I want to immigrate to USA, but currently there is no easy way to immigrate to USA. On the contrary Canada has a fair immigration system that allowed me to stay, work and eventually be citizen.

Why don't people push for a fair immigration system in USA instead of abolishing ICE? What exactly am I missing here?

>>johnce+(OP)
Pushing for legislative and political changes would very much be the right path to go.

As far as ICE goes I think people are understandably shocked by ICE's actions that have been extraordinarily cruel under the current administration, so ICE gets a lot of attention.

>>johnce+(OP)
Years and years of messy and disingenuous arguments, with a lot of straw men involved, so politicians can generate a continual moral high ground.

>>johnce+(OP)
Because there is a rather large disagreement on what "fair immigration" looks like, plus, if I'm being cynical, its an amazing issue to raise money on.

These days, neither party is all that stable. There are many voices trying to redefine both and the reasonable people in the middle are not being listened to. I honestly don't know the final resolution.

>>johnce+(OP)
Funny enough many on the right in the US want to change the US immigration rules to be more like Canada or Australia’s rules, ie admission is based on work and skills criteria more so than family ones. The left leaning people oppose this because of how it would de facto change the ethnic makeup of immigrants.

>>johnce+(OP)
ICE only was founded after 9/11, and given that in their short history they've caused so much suffering, it's not unreasonable to demand that the agency be shut down.

>>coolre+u4
ICE was a consolidation of United States Customs Service, the criminal investigative, detention and deportation resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Protective Service.

>>johnce+(OP)
>but currently there is no easy way to immigrate to USA

The USA has the most immigrants than any other country in the world at almost 47 million residents. That's 4 times higher than the second place country. And the vast majority of them came perfectly legally. For every one person that immigrates to Canada, 6 immigrate to the USA. I don't really know what people are asking for here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

>>johnce+(OP)
A better question is, as countries approach a birth rate < 1; why have complex immigration systems?

>>swebs+u6
This is one of the supreme examples of what a huge effect media bias can have. Without actually lying, the media coverage of immigration (often purposely blurring the lines between illegal and legal immigration, with the birth of the term "undocumented immigrants"), people have become convinced that the US is xenophobic and against immigration. The U.S legally allows a million people a year to immigrate here.

>>swebs+u6
It's number 67 in the world, using immigrants per capita. Still, a pretty high rate of foreign-born population.

>>insula+Ne
Per capita doesn't matter at all in this context though. If you were looking to immigrate to a country, you would have a better chance at getting in to the country that accepts 1 million people per year rather than the one that accepts 1,000 per year. The current population of each country is not a factor.

>>johnce+(OP)
Many people benefit from the way the immigration system has settled:

1. High paying legal immigration is tightly controlled because highly skilled people and high-paying employers don't dare to break the law.

2. Low-paying illegal immigration is poorly controlled because poor people and small employers don't care about immigration law.

Pro-ICE-abolition groups, for the most part, want essentially open borders for poor people and are ambivalent about high skilled legal immigrants. ICE, for its part, has become increasingly brutal in its enforcement of immigration law, and has repeatedly been caught employing white nationalists and doing otherwise gross things. Getting rid of an unpopular enforcement agency is considered easier to accomplish politically than to actually re-write immigration law.