Let's start here. I presume that you are not racist, either. But you have been led to beleive that all but .2% of undocumented immigrants are "brown." Let's call that an unconscious bias (we all have them--I picture judges as old white guys even though I often practice in front of women and people of color on the bench). The numbers are difficult to prove conclusively, but estimates are that approximately 7% of undocumented immigrants in 2022 had Europe or Canada as their place of birth. Another 15% come from Asia (including South Asia, so that would probably include "brown" people in many people's minds). Does that still mean that most of these immigrants come from Central and South America? Yes, but the difference between .2 and 7 percent is big (.2. and 22 percent even bigger). Yet, I have never seen an ad attacking all those immigrants from Canada and Europe. Badge would prefer fewer Canadians in Florida--I have heard that. 
The Middle East and Africa make up about five percent of undocumented immigrants.
Another reference point. I was a California voter when the state passed prop 187 in the 1990s, which was a voter initiative to deny state benefits to undocumented immigrants (which the federal courts subsequently ruled unconstitutional). At that time, one of the largest groups of undocumented immigrants in California were Canadians. And yet, not a single ad that identified those horrible Canadians as invading our state/country.
Another reference point, I think someone above posted that no one who has been an illegal immigrant should be allowed to become a citizen. So Elon Musk should be deported, right? He has admitted that he was undocumented during college. As CD pointed out above, overstay of visas is a common immigration violation.
It doesn't help your side that the Trump Administration made a big flourish of giving asylum to a handful of white South Africans on a dubious basis, while at the same time revoking protected immigration status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan immigrants.
I have and will continue to agree that we need to do better work on our immigration laws to (a) stem the flow of undocumented immigrants and the abuse of the asylum system, and (b) to provide meaningful paths to citizenship for productive members of our society. That is a conversation that needs to happen. But mass deportations of anyone with undocumented status (targeted entirely at "brown" populations) smacks of something more than that. When our President openly says that he wants more immigrants from Scandinavia, and identifies African, Central, and South American countries as "shit holes," yes, it is fair to infer that there is a racial component to that rhetoric.
One of my favorite responses: "but it's illegal!" So is underage drinking.
My focus here is all economic so I'll start with Elon Musk:
He obviously contributes more to SS/Medicare than he'll ever receive so I'm not worried about him.
My opposition to immigration got started for two reasons:
First, crime:
I handle the books for a smallish City in Ohio. I noticed YEARS ago that I was writing checks every single month to several different translator services. These were to provide translators for the non-english speaking defendants in our local Court. It isn't a huge amount of money but I looked it up back then and Ohio is one of the lowest immigration States in the country and my county is one of the lowest immigration counties in Ohio. Ie, if we have a (mostly) illegal immigrant crime problem here, then it has to be staggering elsewhere.
This bothers me because there are a LOT of people who WANT to immigrate to the US. As such we have the ability to be VERY picky and we should be. Allowing people to just flood across the border without even identifying let alone selecting them is asinine. We aught to be picking and choosing the most promising without regard to color.
Second, income inequality:
I used to read Slate because I like to read news from outside my own echo-chamber. That led me to Mickey Kaus who was one of their writers. Kaus is no Conservative. He was involved in the Clinton Administration and is clearly a liberal. He has been pushing against immigration from a leftist perspective for decades and I've been reading him for a lot of that time.
My issue here is that as our economy has computerized the demand for semi-skilled labor has dropped while the demand for unskilled labor has held more-or-less constant and the demand for skilled labor has skyrocketed. You are an attorney, law offices have nowhere near the number of typists and paralegals that they used to have because with computers, documents don't have to be retyped from scratch every time a minor change to a term on page 435 is made. Similarly, accountants and engineers use a lot less bookkeepers and draftsmen than we used to because spreadsheets and CAD do all the "legwork" that mid-level bookkeepers and draftsmen used to do. There is still plenty of demand for lawyers, accountants, and engineers and there is still demand for someone to empty our trash and clean our toilets but the middle has been hollowed out.
Functionally this has put people who in previous generations would have been bookkeepers or draftsmen into a real bind. I'm talking here about people who probably don't have the intellectual ability to earn the degrees and certifications necessary to be doctors/lawyers/accountants/engineers but are plenty smart enough to do more than cleaning toilets and emptying trash.
The developments of our modern economy have effectively thrown these folks into competition for unskilled or at best semi-skilled janitorial jobs and their real incomes have plummeted as a result. Meanwhile, real incomes for Doctors/lawyers/accountants/engineers have risen so we have created a massive gulf between the highly compensated cognitive elite and basically everybody else.
Furthermore, assortive mating* has resulted in a widening chasm between the high IQ cognitive elite and the rest of society.
One stat that jumped out at me on this has to do with births to married and unmarried women:
A few years ago the NYT trumpeted the fact that >50% of first time mothers are now unmarried. We all know that this has been an increasing trend but what I didn't realize until fairly recently is that this is NOT AT ALL uniform across socio-economic and racial lines.
Something like 90% of white, college educated first time mothers are married. That is nearly equal to the figures when Leave it to Beaver was on TV and my dad was a kid in the 1950s.
Functionally what has happened is that marriage has become a luxury that only the relatively well-off can afford. This is an abject disaster for the children of the rest of society. A strong majority of children either have two college educated parents or they have a single mother.
*Assortive mating:
The VAST majority (I'm not looking it up right now but if anyone questions this, feel free to go look) of college graduates marry other college graduates. We used to talk about people being the first in their family to go to college but this is almost unheard of today. It is also multi-generational. Consequently there actually aren't all that many kids today with 1, 2, or 3 college-educated grandparents. Instead the majority of kids today have either zero or four.
Most of us here are guys so I'll put this in male terms. Today if you are college educated (a lawyer such as yourself) your wife almost certainly has a college degree as well. I know this not because I know you, but because I know the sociological data. Think about your firm or the people you associate most closely with. How many lawyers do you know whose wives/husbands are HS dropout manual laborers? Do you know any?
Part of the reason for this is simply prestige. If a young lawyer/accountant/engineer showed up at the firm and told his co-workers that he was going to marry a waitress or janitor, wouldn't some people look askance at him? That just doesn't happen today (it isn't zero but for statistical purposes, it is).
This is a big change. Back in the 1950s your wife wasn't (probably) going to work anyway so if you had showed up at the firm and said that your wife had a degree in something-or-other the response from your (all) male co-workers probably would have been something like "that is great, what is she cooking for the Christmas party?"
In sum, today Doctors/Lawyers/Engineers/Architects/Accountants marry other Doctors/Lawyers/Engineers/Architects/Accountants and raise kids together. The people who take out our trash and clean our toilets don't get married at all, they hook up with other people who take out trash and clean toilets and then the (nearly always) single mothers raise the resultant kids on their own.
There is another issue related to the multi-generational nature of all of this:
Not only does my wife have a degree but so does her brother and his wife and my brother and his wife. Consequently my kids not only have the network of two college-educated parents to assist them, they also have two college educated Uncles and two college educated aunts. That is a tremendous support network and on a personal level I'm obviously glad that my kids have it but . . .
The other side of the divide is a catastrophe. Those kids not only don't have college educated parents. They don't even have parentS, they only have one and she doesn't have a degree and (generally) neither do their uncles nor their aunts.
One point that
@OrangeAfroMan has made repeatedly that I strongly agree with is that we (on this board) are far more fortunate than we typically realize. Only about 1/2 of American workers have a degree and frankly, a lot of those degrees aren't actually marketable/useful. On this board we have a LOT of lawyers and engineers and accountants and other fairly highly-compensated people. With the possible exceptions of
@Cincydawg and
@847badgerfan I assume that most of us aren't actually "1%" types but realistically, most posters here are easily top-1/3 or so. The other 2/3 of society faces very different realities.
Now to tie this all back to immigration:
The last thing that our unskilled and semi-skilled citizens need is even more competition the the jobs that are available to them. It is frankly a good thing economically for most of us here in the short term. Realistically most of us are net consumers of unskilled/semi-skilled labor and net providers of highly-skilled labor. Mass immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers pushes down the cost of that and we are net consumers and it also pushes up the demand for the high-skilled labor that we provide so we benefit on both ends. For people nearer the bottom, it is a catastrophe. It also contributes greatly to a lot of them effectively dropping out, collecting "crazy checks" as
@Gigem and I call them from SSI, and spending their lives high. That contributes to the OD epidemic and other pathologies.
