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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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While there are other levels of disagreement, you're missing the one where Trump supporters might be confident that although some citizens may indeed be affected, it wouldn't be people like them but naturalized immigrants, children thereof, or at worst, shit-stirring far-left activists. In this, I fear they'd be correct, though it's an ugly thought.

What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?

What's ugly about it is that Americans who are not sufficiently white don't like the idea that their white coworker or whoever is basically fine with them being seized and deported to El Salvador just because they're a bit too far on his circles of concern.

I can’t speak for Americans but an awful lot of people who are sufficiently white are very fed up with having foreigners and the children of foreigners dumped on them and being told, “these are your people now and so you must care about them”. No, they’re not and they never were. I know damn well who my people are.

Not to mention that the foreigners in question know perfectly well who their ingroup is and have spent the last ten years making it very clear that the ingroup excludes me. If we were having this conversation 15 years ago it might be quite different. But it’s way too late for that now.

All that's being asked is that you not send innocent people to prison in third world countries. I don't think it's reasonable to reject that. In some cases, foreigners are being invited to come to the US, and then being deported to El Salvador, a country they are not even citizens of. No one is asking for you to give up anything of value. You are being asked to not be inhumane.

Granted, and given ideal circumstances I agree with all of that.

What can’t and doesn’t work is having hundreds of thousands of people arrive every year and then having to follow an expensive multi-month process for every single migrant to get rid of them.

In short, how do you propose to square truly mass migration with giving each migrant due process, given real-world legal and financial constraints?

The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.

But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.

There are extremely few of them.

~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.

Taking the number of illegal immigrants as 8 million (no clue if this is accurate, but I've seen it tossed around a lot recently so just using it for ballpark math), assuming a one-hour hearing for each (longer than I think they usually get but let's be generous with "due process"), standard 8 hour work days, to process them in a single year would take 3000-3500 additional immigration judges, making them the largest group of federal judges by a huge margin if I'm reading the other numbers right.

Annual salary averages somewhere north of 150K, but using that for this lazy math would put this Immigration Judge Year at $450M in salaries. Not a crazy amount looking at DOJ's budget and other program expenses.

Obviously lots of other expenses, hiring them for a single year is a bit absurd, etc etc. Just thought it would be interesting to put some numbers to what a useful increase would look like.

You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.

If some country will take them for free. We don't have extra Australias laying around anymore.

Paying other countries to take them without strict imprisonment is also an option that seems to work somewhat for, ha, Australia.

~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.

That seems like an extremely low number to me. Why aren't there ten times that number? That's about one immigration judge for every 500,000 people. As you point out, it's not nearly enough to handle the number of cases in a timely manner.

Canada has more judges than this, and we have 1/8 the population of the US.