The easiest answer I know is that it's a problem with selective (and unproductive) enforcement.
Lots of people immigrate illegally, and many of them stay at length, work hard, and build lives. The government pretty explicitly turns a blind eye to their presence. Then we change leaders, and suddenly responsible residents of 30 years are kicked out to a country they haven't lived in since childhood. Meanwhile, a great many other people in the same situation aren't.
It's a bit like my reaction to marijuana laws. I think the law isn't very good, but that's just grounds for reform. What I think is immoral is seriously punishing 1% of people violating an unimportant law instead of lightly punishing lots of them. It's about limited or variable enforcement of the law, which encourages people to play a lottery where a handful of players get their lives ruined.
It seems like America doesn't have an appetite for long term, sensible policies. We pass common sense legislation, fail to ever adjust them based on how they work in practice or when new information comes to light. Then as public outcry reaches its peak, a politician will come along to scrap the entire thing in favor of starting anew or propose some poorly conceived, overly broad solution to the problem.
America is great at throwing tons of cash, our vast technical and industrial infrastructure, or military might at the problem. Not so much at utilizing the scientific method to determine a sensible course of action as other nations do.
The easiest example I see is the long list of policies which were assessed via some known value like inflation, but never pegged to it. As a result, they're grounds for new fights every couple of years when it comes time to re-assess them. I'm not even thinking about minimum wage here (which still sees fights over its existence) but inside-baseball funding for various executive branch positions and agencies. Similarly, the alarming number of laws with hard cutoffs (on salary, or employee count, or whatever) that create weird anti-growth, anti-work incentives.
I think it was in a recent discussion of cost explosion (e.g. in healthcare or infrastructure) that someone pointed out that the US isn't over- or under-regulated compared to similar nations; it's just worse regulated. A disturbing amount could be gained by going through the Federal Code and just fixing the bits that every expert agrees are stupid.
Lots of people immigrate illegally, and many of them stay at length, work hard, and build lives. The government pretty explicitly turns a blind eye to their presence. Then we change leaders, and suddenly responsible residents of 30 years are kicked out to a country they haven't lived in since childhood. Meanwhile, a great many other people in the same situation aren't.
It's a bit like my reaction to marijuana laws. I think the law isn't very good, but that's just grounds for reform. What I think is immoral is seriously punishing 1% of people violating an unimportant law instead of lightly punishing lots of them. It's about limited or variable enforcement of the law, which encourages people to play a lottery where a handful of players get their lives ruined.