What if a law only has consequences for the people it's intended for?
Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?
Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
>Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
To ensure that people go through the checkpoint in the first place? For instance, the point of airport security checkpoints is to make sure that no terrorists get on planes, but if there's no penalty for you jumping the fence, why would people even bother going through the checkpoint?
And all of this is ignoring the other purposes of immigration policy, eg. preserving jobs or whatever.
So the is implication is that we should get rid of airport checkpoints, because our actual goal is to catch terrorists? What about speed enforcement cameras? The law might be that you drive 20 in a school zone, but isn't our goal to actually stop dangerous drivers? Actually, why even bother stopping dangerous drivers? The actual thing we care about is stopping accidents. If you're doing street racing at 4am, who's going to get hit?
So what are you trying to imply then? As we seen with airport checkpoints and speeding cameras, it's clearly okay to punish behaviors that aren't directly harmful, so why is it so baffling for you that Americans want enforcement actions against people who entered the country illegally?
For the sake of argument we can assume the only point of the US immigration regime is to stop baddies from coming in, so yes the goal is "stopping serial killers". However, for the reasons I outlined, that doesn't mean we should disband serial killer checkpoints, or refuse to punish people for skipping serial killer checkpoints.
Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?
Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?