I’m in favor of amnesty only because we have allowed employers and households to hire people without immigration status for decades. It’s absurd to punish the supply of labor and not the demand of it. At this point entire key sectors of our economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. Randomly punishing a small percentage of illegal immigrants does nothing to change that reality - and so it’s just performative pain rather than a solution.

We also as a democracy simply cannot allow the status quo of a permanent underclass of non-voting residents to be a large percentage of our population. It’s corrosive to have different classes of people with different labor protection rules, wages, etc. There simply is not a clean path forward that doesn’t involve some kind of amnesty simply because seeking justice would be a humanitarian and economic crisis.

Amnesty might not be justice, but as a nation it’s our penance for decades of destabilizing our neighbors and allowing this situation to continue. Let’s get a reasonable immigration system in place and move forward.