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Skibboleth

It's never 4D Chess

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joined 2022 September 16 06:28:24 UTC
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User ID: 1226

Skibboleth

It's never 4D Chess

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 16 06:28:24 UTC

					

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User ID: 1226

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So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?

The competing interests and preferences of nativists, anti-nativists, employers, consumers, etc... combined with a deadlocked political system that effectively leaves immigration policy up to the caprices of executive discretion.

Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"

What is that supposed to mean? Illegal immigrants can't vote, so the "importing voters" theory doesn't hold up so well, and their mere existence alienates the xenophobe vote, so it's hard to call it a winning electoral strategy. Even if you think they're wrong, you should probably take immigration advocates at their word when they offer humanitarian and economic justifications for supporting immigration.

The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.

This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself. There were anti-police protests in 2014 under Obama as well. You can't attribute these things to a single police murder.

then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.

This is not making a big deal out of enforcement. It is ostentatious cruelty (one might even say the cruelty is the point :v).

You've also got things like ICE going after valid visa holders, calling immigrants "invaders", and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.

Even if we gave everyone citizenship, there would still be downward pressure from wages.

Leaving aside the issues with this argument*, then why bring up the humanitarian concern if it's not a serious priority?

This is in addition to the cultural concerns of having 16% of people in America "foreign born" and the increased difficulty of passing along US values to immigrants as the proportion of native-born Americans goes down.

This is not a novel problem, nor much evidence that it's actually a problem in itself (as opposed to generating backlash from nativists). The US has a history of absorbing staggeringly large waves of immigration, and we've gone through this song and dance before with the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Poles... Somehow none of these

In particular, it's remarkable how anti-Hispanic sentiments echo anti-Irish sentiments: they're lazy and parasitic (but also too willing to work long hours at hard labor for low wages), they're criminals, they're undemocratic, they'll overwhelm us with their numbers and fecundity, they're not assimilating, etc. About the only prominent difference I observe is that there isn't very much overt anti-Catholicism nowadays.

Of course, nowadays, the Irish are at least as American as the English.

It created the prosperity and freedom that Americans enjoy

Do you not think the tens of millions of immigrants who helped build America (somehow without destroying society) had anything to do with it? Xenophobia in the US is generally correlated with the least free and least prosperous parts of the country.

*it's pretty questionable that reducing the labor supply is generally welfare enhancing.