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Notes -
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
Forget election denial claims. What ought to be disqualifying is his statement that he would not have counted the lawfully cast electoral college votes. Nobody should be Vice President who cannot affirm the simple fact that the Vice President's role is ministerial, a fact Republicans would instantly discover if Kamala Harris acted otherwise.
He’s using it not as a legal term but as a meta description. Arnold Kling outlined in The Three Languages of Politics that most political language is not for convincing opponents but rather for rallying those on the edge of the tribe, reminding them of why they’re in the tribe:
In this case, Vance is describing the meta-category of people who find a way to systematically skirt the usual requirements for citizenship or residency, naming it for the central case while describing an edge case. Anything which looks like a back-channel or backdoor into the US for a steady flow of non-Americans is in this big-tent category. It smells like sabotage, a subversion of the Congressionally-passed immigration and naturalization processes by which people from other nations become legal citizens with full privileges.
For some in this category, it looks like claiming asylum, getting their deportation hearing deferred a year, getting some money from the US taxpayer, and then never showing up.
For others, it’s seeking refuge because their home country is crappy, if not specifically in a state of emergency. For the conspiratorial mindset, this is the time to check intelligence operations in that country and see if the deep state did something like assassinate a head of country to get refugees to flow to America.
That's fine, but if he wants a meta-descriptor he should be probably not use one containing a word which is strictly false in relation to the group he is trying to describe.
I’ll agree to that as soon as advocates for these people return the unadorned word “immigrant” to its rightful place as a synonym of “naturalized citizen”.
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Isn't the distinction Vance was making that the immigrants entered the U.S. illegally and then TPS retroactively changed that status, temporarily, to legal?
But if you read the article, it says that the app's functions have been expanded under Biden to do things like grant parole to illegal immigrants! https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview
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"TPS does not eliminate the effect of [an] unlawful entry.” (Sanchez v. Mayorkas (2021) 593 U.S. 409) It, similarly to DACA/DAPA, just temporarily waves a magic wand over otherwise-unlawfully-present migrants because the executive believes that extenuating circumstances make repatriation a bad idea at the moment. Worse, the Biden Administration is affirmatively facilitating the importation of well north of a million migrants who have no reasonable avenue to U.S. citizenship or even long-term work authorizations through the unprecedented expansion of a "parole" authority from the early 50's.
So technically yes, these people aren't "illegal immigrants" in the classic sense of the term; there are legal fig leaves justifying the government's failure to remove them. However, they certainly are not modal immigrants, i.e. people who intend to and are authorized to permanently remain in the U.S. and who in due course will become citizens. Instead, the law has shifted in order to find ways to putatively bless the importation of a millions-strong second-class-citizen helot class entirely dependent upon the whims of the state and their employers. Heckuva job. sarcastic clapping.
I feel like one obvious difference between DACA/DAPA and TPS is that TPS is Congressionally authorized (by the Immigration Act of 1990) while DACA and DAPA are purely executive action. The TPS program is also not limited to people who initially lacked a lawful status like DACA and DAPA are. The Sanchez decision is limited to unlawful entries. If you were in the United States lawfully when you were granted TPS you can still get permanent resident status like anyone else here lawfully for an extended period of time.
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