and to me immoral and sinful. If someone wants to apportion blame, don't look at these children, they are blameless in the matter.

Why shouldn't this be grounds for any law breaking parent to not be jailed? I'm sure that is just as damaging to a child.

a strong justification in jailing a parent even though the child will be hurt. For example, the welfare of the child may be threatened.

For a well-functioning family however, an immigration violation is not such a justification. Furthermore, immigration violations can be dealt with by means other than destroying a family.

If you want to argue against incarceration or deportation due to the effects on children you have to excuse a whole lot of lawbreaking.

Having kids can be a get out of jail card, avoid deportation card, and gain eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps. What a deal!

BTW...lawyers typically argue "effects on children" regarding parental incareration. Where have you been?

WTF are you talking about?

The welfare of the children is a factor to be evaluated against other factors. Can you please describe a specific scenario? On one end: a drug kingpin bust will definately go to jail (and BTW they are probably a threat to the child -- see how this works). On the other end: a first time offender busted for consumption the welfare of the child will weigh heavily.

"It is one thing to dabble in Devil's advocacy, quite another to actually be on retainer."

i think you're running behind.

The "however" near the beginning of paragraph 2 implies that what Obama said--that he'd "focus" on "violent offenders and people convicted of crimes" is false.

Then, later, he says that 55% of those deported were convicted of some offense. Unless "focus" means "only include" then he has no case. Obama did as he said he'd do, the writer's "however" notwithstanding.

The writer then tries to say that "usually"--perhaps that means precisely 73.493% of the time, perhaps 73.494%, perhaps some other number--the convictions were for misdemeanors and not violent crimes. Perhaps Obama's statement confuses him. The writer seems to be interpreting Obama as having said "focus on people convicted of crimes of violence."

Interesting, the most common effects of deporting an illegal immigrant parent and not deporting the children with him/her (always an option, even after the fact) are similar to those experienced by children in prison. They're also true for children of all single parents; the severity of the disruption or consequences (on average) depends on the parent's income. This, of course, is a strong parallel argument to limiting divorce and making sure that unwed fathers man up and fulfil their obligations to society. (Although in some cases mother/father incompabitility leads to worse outcomes for the children, most of the research from the '60s and '70s is flawed. It compared kids with abusive/fighting parents and kids without abusive fighting parents, not kids with abuse/fighting parents and kids in the average resulting single-parent household. The incompability needs to result in obvious abuse and even violence for the harm to the kids to be a valid justification for divorce.)

Nobody would argue this, however. The consequences are acceptable in the latter case. What makes them unacceptable in the former case is that they're justification for achieving something that's already desired--a change in the immigration laws and in societal attitudes towards illegal immigration. In other words, the "strong evidence" isn't evidence at all in other contexts.

People move to the US with their kids, from other countries. The child can always return, as an adult, too. The child is a dual citizen.

After everyone defending Elian Gonzalez father - I would say those people who defended him should not be upset at this - what's wrong with living in one's parents' country? Being a dual citizen is an advantage.