@Liquidxlax If someone is born in a situation where they are unable to work and are virtually guaranteed to suffer in poverty their entire lives (not to mention refugees or asylum seekers), then yes they are being punished for being born in the wrong place. If the only way they know how to seek opportunity elsewhere is extralegal and they are accosted, then they are also being punished for that. It isn't hard to understand your reasoning that "illegal = bad" because that is how we are taught to think. Just because something is legal does not mean that it is moral and good, just because something may be illegal does not make it immoral or bad.
If we didn't punish illegal migrants then people would just try to flood in to the richer countries.
Let them come
hoarding wealth while hundreds of millions suffer is immoral. Especially when that wealth is built on the destabilization of foreign countries whose people suffer as a result. In a more just world, people wouldn't feel so desperate to risk their lives leaving everything they've ever known.
Crime would become uncontrollable, infrastructure wouldn't be able to keep up and population density would be a breeding ground for another corona.
Interestingly, immigrants commit less crime than US-born citizens: https://thehill.com/latino/324607-reports-find-that-immigrants-commit-less-crime-than-us-born-citizens
The reason why infrastructure isn't able to keep up isn't because of immigration, it's because decades of neoliberal fiscal policy, austerity and massive tax cuts for the wealthy have made it literally impossible to spend enough money on infrastructure or the social programs we need. Not to mention the US's criminally negligent response to COVID in comparison to countries with better public healthcare systems that aren't gutted by years of assault.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/covid-ny-hospital-medicaid/
Imagine how many criminals would look to help people from poor countries to get to ours. Human trafficking is how a lot of migrants get to our countries. Lots of kids women and men get raped, abused, killed and the like on their way over.
If immigration were not made illegal then there would be no reason for people to seek to immigrate extralegally. This is a similar dynamic to how the war on drugs, which included the criminalization of drug use and distribution, actually created the gangs and cartels that white people are so afraid of nowadays (also led to the modern carceral state). On the other hand, Portugal's decriminalization of drug use and focus on healthcare and support has resulted in Portugal having 1/50th the drug-induced death rate of the US.
https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/
I also wonder if you care so much about the kids women and men getting raped because they were born in poor and unstable social conditions, at home and abroad.
The other thing is how fair is it to someone who has spent months or years trying to legally migrate while some just come.
How is it fair that some people are born into poverty while others are born into wealth? Is it fair that some are born into rich countries full of opportunity while others struggle to live in crises often caused directly by those rich countries?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/immigration-latin-america_n_5168356
It ain't like the Latin Americans liked it when the Spanish and Portuguese illegally migrated into their countries. The native americans were okay with Europeans at first until they had a presence big enough to force their way. I doubt the Australlian native enjoyed European countries dumping criminals in their lands.
You are mistaking colonizers and imperialists for immigrants. The difference between a colonizer and an immigrant is that a colonizer acts in accordance with a foreign state to advance that state's colonial interests (all your examples were explicitly authorized endeavors that were funded by their states), whereas an immigrant typically does not have access to that degree of power. So the intent and power dynamic are significantly different.
I always kinda wondered if latin americans would make up 30 some odd % of the states if there was no illegal migration.
According to your beliefs, america should be 1% latin, 0% white and 100% indigenous