Doesn't sound very humanistic to me, especially if you think who benefits the most from their unregulated labour.
While having secret police running around and forcing their way without any discretion is quite bad and ill omen for the future, it doesn't eliminate all the problems that are brought with illegal immigration (and even legal one as well). One could argue, that this ICE showdown is a reaction to almost pathological leniency before, when people in need were used as economical benefits for the rich, as it was mostly them that benefited from employing illegally all those workers, while unloading all nasty side effect on the common folk.
I'm not arguing they should be breaking the law. Hence the whole "Make it easier to be documented" line. I'm saying we should change the law to document these people. This would be the first step towards making their labor regulated. I'm absolutely in agreement the current policies just lead to lots of abuse in many ways.
Yeah, we should. The problem is, there are powers, and people behind them, that benefits from undocumentness of immigrants. To make matter even worse, they typically have funds to lobby for no changes, or changes for worse.
Isn't it similar case as in tax refunds and what not? Very purposeful obfuscation to make TurboTax required.
I agree it's probably not a right, but we've made it so obtusely difficult to do. Even people doing the process legally have stints where they'll probably quietly overstay visas because the gaps in processing things messes up their status.
Having such a messed up system only leads to more people being undocumented and our society in a worse place. Make it easier to be documented and obvious that not having documentation means you're probably doing something really bad, and we'll be in a far better place. Add in some carrots to encourage cyclical migration while we're at it.
Make it really illegal (read: executives/owners in prison) for hiring undocumented workers. This will do a lot to prevent undocumented workers.