[pfannkuchen]

So there are definitely large negative impacts on people affected by enforcement, and the fact that the enforcement has been so haphazard over the years has created second order problems.

If we model the national policy as a person, the person would be totally insane and basically heartless and possibly schizophrenic. Like you let somebody into your house for years, and they benefit from being in your house and they get used to it, and you may threaten every now and then that you are going to kick them out, but they can tell you aren’t serious. But then one day blam, you kick them out with no warning and you don’t even check if they have somewhere to go.

But if we think about the policy as the output of the desires and actions of a bunch of competing factions in America and not as a person, the faction that wants the people kicked out now has wanted them kicked out since they got here. They never stopped wanting them kicked out. The only thing that changed is that now, for whatever reason, the dominant politician is aligned with that faction. If that faction were in charge the whole time (not this particular politician, mind you, the faction of people who wanted them kicked out the whole time), we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. So to them I think saying things like “it’s terribly bad for the people being kicked out”, they just go: I didn’t want them to be in that situation, I wanted them gone the entire time, and I’m not responsible for them having been here this long.

A framing I heard that doesn’t seem to have gotten traction (yet?) is that these people are “victims of migration”. The faction who wants them to leave isn’t harming them, per se, they are harmed by the totality of the migration policy situation over the last many decades. I think that makes a lot of sense

On your specific point: I think analogies to other law violations and what the consequence should be for those is not applicable, because they aren’t being removed from the country as a punishment. They are being removed because the violation is that they are here, they violated laws about being here. So the real equivalent would be: if you messed up your taxes, is it fair for the government to ask you to fix them?