I wonder if this stat includes the economic migrants, if not it could very well be much larger. This news article mentions there have been 2.8 million encounters at the border this year from Sept 30.
Migrant workers usually live in some kind of shared housing with other migrant workers and send money back home each month.
I’m sure some do end up homeless especially if anything goes wrong
There is currently a push by you know who to make “illegal aliens” a naughty word, a word that only the most ignorant would utter. They think it’s a pejorative because it’s associating everyone who enters the country (illegally) with a crime. However they’re ok with calling them all “migrants” or “asylum seekers” even though clearly, the vast majority are not. As you can probably tell, I am against this war on words, and think that you should be able to call a thing what it is.
I believe the actual technical term these days would be "asylum seeker" which is actually a legal status. Perhaps they are taking advantage of that status to seek immigration for economic reasons and so "economic migrant" is also a fair description.
Interestingly, if you work with construction crews in South Texas (I do not, but my parents dabble in the business), you'll find that Spanish is an invaluable language. I don't know what that says about legal status (it seems rather impolite to ask the people who are building your house for you), but it seems like these people may be part of the solution to the housing issues.
Why is the US not tracking all these humans? Count them in the census, let them pay taxes, get them all legal protections under US law. Let them fight to stay in this country with productivity.
I'm pretty sure they'll want to leave once they realize the US government robs people with taxes.
There's a two-tier system going on and we're living in a modern day Rome.
I've come to believe our government is too small to do so. If I was stopped on the street by law enforcement, I wouldn't have any way of proving my citizenship; it's just not something we're typically socialized to in the US. And obviously documents would be pretty easily forged these days (and I believe often are by/on behalf of employers).
I think you would need a pretty strong, centralized database to include various biometrics of all citizens in order to do the thing right, and that's way beyond what I think the average citizen would accept (though I'd actually be willing to participate).
I feel like immigration is like most aspects of the US economy - we leave it up to the market to decide, and labor is a market as well.
You have a good point there. I understand that citizenship is tracked at the federal level and not the state level; although the federal government relies on local county records to prove status. The system requires an overhaul and the states should have a bit more power to police their own territory.
I'm sure we'll get to it one of these decades. Again, I think that a small government ethos will make it quite challenging. It's interesting when you parse the constitution carefully, particularly the 14th amendment, you'll often note that it is all about due process and it does not limit that to citizens only; it seems quite careful in using the words citizen and person.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/30/how-ma...