Oh I'm not even saying I agree with his decision or anything but there are people who are here legally who are (if facebook is to be believed anyway) really freaking out right now.
He did say that he would challenge the 14th Amendment, whether he actually has any intention of doing so or doesn't. In other words, he'd also retroactively revoke the status of birthright citizens and deport them to nations most of them have never set foot in. So no...not even citizens are guaranteed "safety" (such as it is). Additionally, even if a person is a legal citizen, it doesn't mean all their friends and family are. And even if all their friends and family are documented non-citizens, this climate of racism and xenophobia further impedes the path to citizenship...which is already costly emotionally, psychologically, physically, and financially. You are already at the whims of bureaucrats who may or may not particularly like you and people like you. It's another to be at the whims of people who most definitely hate you.
I don't know what the process is to become a citizen here, but I guess I just feel they should try that instead because sooner or later it's going to catch up to them.
Definitely easier said than done...especially if you don't know.
A lot of them don't pay taxes so we end up having to pay for them to stay here
I don't know about that. It's more or less impossible to live in the United States without paying some sort of tax. In most cases, even if you do not file a return, you still have taxes deducted from your wage. Then there's millage and the ever-ubiquitous sales and excise. So all told, undocumented immigrants are paying taxes in excess of several billions per annum, regardless of how you want to manipulate the calculations. Regardless, even if all the undocumented paid $0.00 a year, I think it's fair to say it's a form of pretty pointless misdirection championed by rich bigots like, say, Donald Trump, who, along with massive corporations, are serial tax dodgers (for decades) and have a far larger impact on the US government's revenues.
I just don't think it's too useful to lay any kind of blame at the feet of people who are also getting their teeth kicked in by rich Americans while trying to make it. Like...I'd rather see containment of all these Cirque du Soleil-ass loophole jumping hoes before I have to see ICE rounding up and tearing apart families simply because they're poor and desperate.
and there's a lot of people who are homeless who are here legally, and need jobs and just... things like that.
...But these two things are entirely unrelated causally, so it's dangerous to conflate them. Immigrants and refugees (documented or otherwise) are not responsible for the crises/criminalisation of poverty and homelessness in the States or anywhere else. Speaking in purely material terms, there are more than enough empty houses in the States to shelter every single dispossessed person, more than enough capital for everyone to receive a wage, and more than enough food and water for them to live comfortably.
Even if you want to add the artificial restrictions of our economic system, the only reason that the US has such a horrifying population of destitute is because it (collectively) wants to. It would not be difficult to legislate the lion's share of that out of existence. But then you have a (very racialised) mythology of laziness and parasitism surrounding the indigent, and the very same rich politicians and tax dodgers making huge amounts of money through predators like CCA and GeoGroup, who prey on people using garbage policies like the "war on drugs" and the lack of any infrastructure for the treatment of mental illness.
By contrast...migrants/undocumented immigrants, in large part, labour in miserable circumstances for jobs that nobody wants because the pay is absurd/illegal and the conditions intolerable (and often straight up inhumane). Employers (again...like Donald Trump) who hire these people do so because they know they can turn a far greater profit than if they were paying someone with any recourse. What are they going to do? Report them to the authorities? I mean, immigration status makes the undocumented (especially women and children) vulnerable not just to economic violence, but to interpersonal violence as well. Contacting the police in cases of rapes, trafficking, assault, robbery, domestic abuse, and et cetera often end with deportation proceedings, because you can be flagged (documented/citizen or not) for just having an accent and/or requesting an interpreter. So people don't have access to any sort of help even in imminent danger, talk less of facing down contractual renegement.
And that's if you find work under someone who pays you at all (granted, only when and how much they feel like it). Oftentimes, if an independent contract is negotiated, after the job is complete, clients simply use their hiree's status as a way to escape fees (note that you can be living legally in the country but be unauthorised to work). Por ejemplo...the same shit happened to one of my uncles (though given, this was in London) when he was working in home renovation. He spent six months rebuilding half a woman's house, then after he finished and asked for the agreed-upon payment, she called immigration on him and he was deported.
So these are not the kind of work "opportunities" that anyone would find reasonable. And certainly not anyone with any kind of legal protections.
And all this is before even touching the thousands and thousands of people trafficked into the country for sex slavery/the sex industry, and what happens to them if they're fortunate enough to escape.
So again, [Amr Adeeb voice] NAHNU FE KARBIN AZIM.
