Reply #72: That seems an untenably narrow view to me. [View All]

Most trivially, another possible remedy is making it so that they are no longer here illegally, i.e., legalizing them.

You will not get your harsh punishment, deterrent or not. First, whatever you think of immigration, it would be morally horrific to imprison or economically ruin or forcibly uproot people who have merely tried to secure the best lives for their families by crossing an imaginary line on a map, depriving in the process no one of their lives, liberty, or property. Harsher punishments may be better deterrents, but we generally recognize that justice and humaneness often mean reining in punishment nonetheless. If we want to stem the flow of immigrants (an arguable aim, but I digress), the just way to do it is preventively with better border security, not retrospectively with deportations and criminalization.

Second, it wouldn't work: we cannot enforce immigration law against eleven million people when we have no reliable means of tracking them all down, and if the punishment is harsh enough that they will not seek a path to legalization when offered, that only will mean the maintenance of the present situation, where they stay here without legal protections, a situation that benefits nobody but the employers who exploit and abuse them.

Neither the moral nor the pragmatic argument here has anything to do with a disregard for the law, merely a recognition that the law should be fair and humane. (There are other arguments that go further, other good arguments, I think, but these are the ones that have the strongest popular hearing, the ones that pro-reform politicians tend to make most often.)