There is a legal way for people to migrate to this country. Millions have done it.
I used to say the same thing, Foxy, and then I learned.
The average cost to emigrate here legally is about $10,000 each! So a family of 4, that's $40,000.
The average annual salary in Mexico is $20,112 US:
The average in Guatemala is $16,390:
The average in the US is $94,700, so almost 5 times that of Mexico and almost 6 times that of Guatemala:
That means that it's just as hard for them to come up with $40,000 as it is for us to come up with $200,000.
Now, let's think about that logically. We have a surplus of 7 million jobs right now, and most of them are manual labor, low paying jobs. So we don't need immigrants that can come up with $40,000... they're the rich ones, and definitely not going to do construction or work in a field!
The smarter move for us as a nation would be to make it much, much cheaper (like, free) and easier for them to emigrate here. We need a lot more immigration judges to process cases faster, then we can put them to work and paying taxes instead of costing us money in detention centers. It would also mostly eliminate the ones trying to sneak across just because they don't have the money.
For sure things are bad where they come from but right now they are not fleeing from they are running to. And they are not leaving behind, they are bringing with them the problems
Statistically, that's not true at all. "The incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants."
And that's logical... they sacrificed a lot to get here, you can be sure that they're going to be extremely careful to fly under the radar.
That's not to say that none of them are criminals (I know how some of you like to spin things), it's just that the wide majority of them are good people and hard workers that are just trying to survive. And it's stupid of us to try to get rid of them, when we need them just as much as they need us.