Caitlin Dickerson

You are subject to deportation if you don't have legal status.

And for the vast majority of the undocumented population, there is no pathway to legal status.

This is another thing that people don't realize.

I got an email from a reader after a recent story saying to me,

Caitlin, you're writing about all these people you say have been in the United States for 15 or 16 years.

Why don't they just become citizens instead of trying to leech off the system and refusing to pay taxes?

And I had to write this person back and say, undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars to the American tax base every year.

And trust me, if these folks in my story could have become citizens, they would have eagerly done so to avoid being detained and potentially deported.

after so much time in the country.

Those options do not exist, and Congress controls all of that.

ICE does not control that.

ICE can only do what the law tells it to do.

The law on its face says everybody who doesn't have status is deportable.

You know, so even more so now I could see people saying they would want ICE to be abolished at some point in the future because you're going to have this massive workforce that is disaligned with what I think a lot of people think immigration enforcement should look like in the United States.

So my sense is that the country would not support a world in which there was no immigration enforcement.

I don't see that as a realistic possibility.

But I think that a lot of the

anger behind this abolish ICE message really comes out of people's frustration, and they may not realize this, with what Congress has told ICE to do.

OK, so I'm going to recommend Impossible Subjects by May Nye.

This is kind of a holy grail book for immigration nerds, but it's eminently readable and it tells the story of Americans' relationship to immigrants, really helps people understand how we reached this moment.