Sneaking across the border is a crime. Overstaying your visa (70-80% of "illegal immigration") is not a crime. It is more analogous to a parking ticket in terms of severity.
The thing is - for a long time immigration was not enforced because the legals paths were blocked off to create a class of cheap labor to drive the American economy. It worked, and it source mostly jobs which citizens did not want to do. (Not entirely, and yes it did depress wages)
The deportation part is the defensible part of the story. It is a lot more than "sending them home". What's going on is excessive. It's worth mentioning - the people being "deported" have something in common, and it's not necessarily their immigration status, it's overwhelmingly their ethnicity.
The Polish and eastern European community by me doesn't seem to be having any deportation issues, despite having a lot of illegal immigrants via visa overstay.
Latinos are - statistically - causing less problems than citizens.
In fact, they are propping up our economy. I had suspected you were posting in bad faith; now I know for sure. Our immigrant population - legal and not - solve more problems than they cause, and the numbers show that.
Thanks for putting the lie - explicitly, in your own words - to the idea this is about the law. You were fine with European illegal immigrants which cause similar amounts of issues (few) to Latinos. The difference is ethnicity. Full stop.
Illegal presence is a civil violation. Civil violations are not crimes (in the sense the law is divided into civil and criminal law):
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
Sneaking across the border is a crime. Overstaying your visa (70-80% of "illegal immigration") is not a crime. It is more analogous to a parking ticket in terms of severity.
The thing is - for a long time immigration was not enforced because the legals paths were blocked off to create a class of cheap labor to drive the American economy. It worked, and it source mostly jobs which citizens did not want to do. (Not entirely, and yes it did depress wages)
It is a complicated issue.