This answers my question very well:

> So ... who is hurt and how badly are they hurt?

Your answer: not many people, not nearly as many as our prisons-for-profit our healthcare-for-profit systems. Plenty of legals rape 13 year olds, hell a legal here in my home town cut open a mom to be and tried to kidnap her fetus.

So yeah your anecdata proves my suspicion. This illegal immigration crackdown is a false flag for racism and xenophobia. As long as people have feet they're going to move, and as long as people have brains, they're going to resent and fear that.

As an American minority who has emigrated to an Asian country known for strict immigration enforcement and ethnocentrism, this is just a bizarre take to me. On HN, where there are regular posts about cybersecurity and vulnerabilities, for some reason people fail to grasp the concept of national-level Physical Access Control. For a country with a trillion-dollar security budget and an all-too-cozy relationship with the jailers of the world's largest open-air prison (Palestine), we should not have millions slipping through the cracks. We should not have repeated offenders committing high-profile violent crimes.

"Our domestic systems are broken and ruin more lives so anyone who opposes foreign criminals preying on our citizens is a racist." No. Some of us minorities appreciate law & order too.

Immigration enforcement is low-hanging fruit from a policy perspective IMO, with real, tangible positive impacts on the quality of life of the citizenry. Going after the monied class that benefits from the prisons-for-profit is a MUCH harder objective (but also absolutely necessary and SHOULD be done in conjunction with the street enforcement). I find nobody hates criminal immigrants quite like law-abiding immigrants; we end up stereotyped due to the actions of the high-profile idiots.

All that said, I find that many actions which would be "government doing its job" in other countries bring out the worst low-IQ racists in the US in support.

Yeah I totally fail to grasp the concept of national-level Physical Access Control. In the richest country in the world, with a population approaching 400,000,000 people and 7,458 of land borders (not even counting our sea borders), the phrase sounds quixotic without a lot of bounds set on it. We consume over a third of the world's resources with just 5% of the world's population. Simple laws of diffusion operate against any kind of long-term enforced border control.

What makes the violent crimes high profile? I don't see anything done by illegal immigrants that isn't done at a higher rate by citizens, be it rape, murder, gang activity, you name it. It's a well documented fact (you can look it up yourself) that illegal immigrants in the U.S. have a lower crime rate than legal immigrants or citizens.

As far as tying cybersecurity to this, sure. The only safe network is one that its unplugged from the rest of the world. Problem is it's also a pretty useless network.

What is a low hanging fruit policy wise is clearly not so low-hanging from an execution perspective.

I oppose anybody preying on our citizens, not just foreigners. While there might be a political need to control immigration it ignores basic human nature, which has been around far longer than any political system.