I'm not for wide open borders.

Wide open borders prevent a functional government from protecting itself against neighboring dysfunctional governments.

They can cause massive strain on social systems especially if you're neighboring a failing nation. (Note that Canada has a more closed border with the US, than the US has with its neighbors.)

They can also cause massive strain on a nation's economy, especially one as unbalanced as the US's.

If you're going to have borders that aren't wide open, you do have to have the ability to enforce those borders, and that even means deporting some people.

However.

That doesn't mean that we have to be inhumane about it, or sloppy about it.

Separating families is an incredibly cruel policy, and shouldn't happen, end of story.

Deporting people that have no connection to their home country is often a bad idea.

Deporting citizens is a complete disgrace.

Deporting or turning away asylum seekers is really, really morally questionable (I could see reasons for it in certain situations, but...), and if we caused the situation they're seeking asylum from, we have a responsibility to make things right IMO.

Deporting people who have served our country is really questionable.

Raiding undocumented immigrants' settlements is counterproductive to the safety of our communities.

Also, if we're causing conditions that encourage immigration, maybe we should stop causing those conditions. (For Mexico and Central America, a good start would be ending the war on drugs. For Middle Eastern asylum seekers, work to disentangle ourselves from the clusterfuck that is what we've done to the region.)

Oh, and a couple more things.

If your problem with immigrants is that they look different from you, fuck entirely off. (A lot of US opposition to immigration boils down to this, of course...)

Cultural conflict is an interesting one, though. Forcing people to abandon their culture is abhorrent.

I do, though, feel that migrants are taking on some responsibility to fit into the local culture? (This could be seen as problematic, but let me explain first.)

Note that in this case, the cultural conflict applies even within internal migration within a nation.

But, cultural compatibility is important.

For starters, if you aren't able to fit in, nobody's going to have a good time. (Note that in multicultural settler nations like the US, there's probably *somewhere* to fit in, though.)

But, also, there's the danger of settler cultures (like white Americans) trampling over other cultures...

@bhtooefr so. played a lot of football in high school, then?