This has nothing to do with people and everything to do with the law
What are the laws on immigration? You enter legally. You have certain paths to citizenship. If you enter illegally you are deported. That's it. That's all there is to it. There's no need for any special clauses because there shouldn't be illegals in the country to make special clauses for.
illegal immigration as a crime is very simple. if you don't go through the legal processes and live here anyways, you've
done something illegal.
legal immigration as an action is not. laws concerning legal immigration procedures are convoluted and burdensome and that's relatively undisputed as far as i can tell. the US discussion of immigration focuses on this, not on the legality of illegal immigration, an act which is obviously, by definition, illegal. nobody is saying that criminals
aren't criminals, but they may be saying that the law should be changed so that they
wouldn't be, or that the law should be changed to be less burdensome to follow. none of this is to say that the actions aren't illegal, they're to offer solutions to fix laws that are broken or unfair. understand that the reason it's frustrating to talk about whether or not illegal immigrants are criminals is because the focus of the discussion is on how best to alter the legal processes, not on how best to punish (or not punish) people who have broken the law.
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