system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: I don't believe illegal immigrants in America deserve citizenship more than those who go through the legal process

If you desire to become a legal immigrant in any country, you should respect the rules of the government, which includes respecting the requirement of going through the citizenship process. This process isn't supposed to allow EVERYONE to be approved, and it's not supposed to be easy either. This allows citizenship be granted to the immigrants that deserve it—those who had the patience, strength, and will of heart to go through the entire arduous process. In addition, the process is a good way of controlling the flow of immigrants here in America. If the process is too easy and too quick, there will be too fast of an influx that the country can't handle.

Why should those trying to bypass this line deserve the reward over those that actually earned it? It's like, being on line for an ice cream cone for hundreds and thousands of people and seeing people just steal straight from the vendor.

I understand that there are a lot of law-abiding, tax-paying illegal immigrants, and some of them don't have anything to return to in their home country. There's a good percentage that have built lives here in America and worked hard to achieve that life. Many have had children, and so deporting the illegal parents may break families apart. However, I believe that is just the price to pay for what they've done. Yes, the children don't deserve it, but they only have their parents to blame.
gpt
It isn't about "deserving" it more than those who go through the legal process, it's about pragmatically solving the problem.

A decade ago we had an economic boom while Mexico was struggling.  We were starved for unskilled labor, and our immigration quotas/laws didn't really reflect the needs - the only viable paths were family connections or educated white collar jobs / schools with sponsorship.

Unsurprisingly, illegal immigration filled that gap.  Now that our economy sputtered and we have less demand for those jobs, illegal immigration is declining.

None of those are perceptions; it happened.  It would have been nice to fix that problem in our immigration laws before it happened, but it happened.

Ok, so now we have a group of people that have been here 5-10 years and are contributing members of society, many with children whom do not remember their homeland, and are undocumented and in the shadows.  Mass deportation isn't productive for the nation as a whole, nor the people it affects.  

A combination of punitive fees (most solutions being proposed include fines of $5-10k), proof of productive/gainful employment, and a path to citizenship seems balanced to me and doesn't somehow shortchange other immigrants.

Every country everywhere does and has the right to factor in the nation of origin (along with a million other factors) when granting entrance/visas/citizenship for obvious reasons (treaties, culture, threats, etc) - and the United States & Mexico-Carribean have always had very intertwined histories / cultures / people / trade.  This idea that lenience on a particular situation is somehow "unfair" to people from other nations and other means of entry is nonsensical... they don't have any more of a "right" than anyone else.