Allowing people to bypass our legal immigration process in order to reduce "dangers at the border" including deaths is simply not a viable answer.
Borders exist because they are necessary to preserve law and order. My guess is you live in an apartment, condo, or house. I suspect, you don't allow anyone to simply occupy your home because it is better than where they are presently living. Do you consider yourself not compassionate because you don't want to share your home? I suspect not, but somehow you think there are "homes" somewhere to house the roughly 150 million people that have expressed an interest to move to the US.
You are right immigration is a complex issue.
Imagine the US is the Titanic. We have lifeboats available for 1 million people, but there are 5 million people that want access to those lifeboats. Do you allow all 5 million to swamp the boats and everyone drowns, or do you make hard decisions regarding who gets access to those lifeboats and rescue 1 million people, while accepting that the other 4 million will not gain access to the lifeboats.
People are fleeing to this country because we are not like the country they came from. To preserve that "difference" we need to control the number of people entering this country to a rate that we can economically and culturally assimilate them. Not doing so, creates a chain of poverty and civil unrest.
Doing so, means overtime we will continue to offer between 1-2 million immigrants a place to find refuge rather than destroy the place they seek to go.
Consider that 150 million people have expressed a desire to migrate to the US. That would crush our ability to offer a social safety net for people in this country and strain our social services, housing, jobs, etc. by 50 million or more.
With the social safety net shredded, people would be killing each other in the streets to survive. Pretty soon people would be fleeing our country for a safe country with strict immigration laws and secure borders. Meanwhile citizens in our country would be calling on the government to become a police state where the poor starve, and the rich are protected (like many countries from which these immigrants are fleeing).
I don't think eliminating our social safety net is the answer. We should not put citizens at risk in order to allow immigrants to compete for their "seat" on the US lifeboat. As our nation debates what our immigration policies should be, we need to start with the premise that no immigration will hurt our nation, and uncontrolled immigration will hurt our nation. So, at some point, people attempting to enter this nation will be turned away and some that get through will be deported.
It is not a pretty thought, but it is compassionate. At some level, a rationale immigration policy becomes a form of population management designed to preserve a society capable of caring for its citizens.
