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There's no reason it couldn't. It really depends on what the anti-immigration people are upset about. Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California. If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.
I mean you still have no border control at the state border. If I live in California it’s not like there’s a border checkpoint at Texas. So whatever the most liberal policy is would end up being tge reality for everyone. One million immigrants in California don’t have to state there.
The distance between California and Texas seems to be at least 500km, and more like perhaps 1500km between the big cities.
An illegal in California can likely not just take a plane from LA to Houston for a weekend of murder, mayhem and pet-eating. (If he can, then the federal government could fix that.) Nor can he likely afford it. Perhaps he can take the bus (which would also be preventable through legislation), or drive there by car. He can certainly hike through Nevada and New Mexico.
The costs of going from CA to Texas are high in terms of time, money and deportation risk. Assuming that Texas is fully cooperating with ICE, the cost of staying any substantial amount of time in Texas are high in terms of deportation risk, likewise.
If I were an illegal, having perhaps paid most of what I own and risked my life to get into the US, and CA was safe and Texas was not, then there would be nothing in Texas which would be worth the risk of deportation. As much as people like to dunk on California, it is likely still a hell of a lot better than whatever country the illegal came from.
If you model illegals as rational actors, then having states which do not enforce immigration law is a great boon to everyone other state, because the net migration will be towards these safe states.
If you model illegals as particles undergoing Brownian motion, then sure, a few will diffuse into Texas. But new illegals will also get in from abroad, so you need to keep up your deportation effort indefinitely either way.
Things would be different if California had the power to let new illegals in, or if immigrants had a generation length of a year, with their population rising exponentially. Or if there was nothing worth stealing in the illegal-friendly zone, but plenty worth stealing in the MAGA-zone 200m over.
I guess an argument can also be made that if the illegals are not deported now, some bleeding heart liberal (like me) will naturalize them in a decade, at which point they can come to Texas and nobody can do anything about it.
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Right, but this leads to a couple of things logically
the states that don't want the illegals will want to cut off any potential indirect federal subsidies to the illegals, because it makes no sense for them to help pay for aliens when they aren't even receiving any e.g. tax benefits. This means fights over things like "public school funding" and "welfare funding."
internal border checkpoints.
Maybe this is compatible with a United States, but I think in many ways it vibes as being less "united" than the European Union.
One of the things that's been proven dramatically twice over the past few weeks is that if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets. It's not really unreasonable for red states in a collateral security agreement with blue states to want to prevent this outcome.
They'll never tell you why.
Who's they and what's why in this context? I don't get it.
It's a reference to a supposed Russian proverb "the Jew will always tell you what happened to him, but he'll never tell you why."
Iran and Russia got hit because they engaged in acts of war against other countries. It doesn't occur to "they" that you can avoid having to worry about such things if you don't pick fights with foreign countries.
It's basically the mindset of the prison gang guy who's big and tough and strong and always thinking about how he will defend himself from attack, who sees of himself as a hard-headed realist, and is 10x more likely to die a violent death than the average schlubby insurance agent who never thinks about self-defense at all. MAGA is an entire political movement based around this mentality, which wants to drag the entire country down with it.
Is your position here is that if we get attacked by a foreign adversary it is because we deserve it? [Edit to add – if Russia could have avoided having to worry about such things if it didn't pick fights with foreign countries, does that mean Ukraine doesn't have to worry about it, in your view?]
I don't think that can be anything but a straw man of your actual position, but – it really doesn't matter whether Iran or Russia were in the right or not, we need to pay close attention to the conflicts going on around the world or risk learning their lessons the hard way.
(JD Vance if you're reading this get Hesgeth to fire a five star every month until we have soft cover around all of our strategic bombers.)
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Ah I see, you've never actually lived in a failed state and have therefore no organic understanding of the necessity of a monopoly on force for what you consider a normal life to even exist.
That's easy to remedy, Hispaniola is really nice at this time of year. You can have a quick trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and convince yourself which society you'd prefer to live in based on their approach to border enforcement.
Be sure to ask any insurance providers what they think of either place, though you might have trouble finding any in Haiti at the moment.
I will say I don't even mind anarchists myself, so long as they can take a hard look at a lawless society and genuinely desire it for themselves. Me I'm more of a Leviathan guy, private property, courts and all that jazz you know.
Nice takedown of that strawman.
I thought your position was specifically that being concerned with the enforcement of borders or your country's strategic security was pathological.
The only sort of people I know that believe this are anarchists of various stripes, some of which I'm good friends with actually. I assure you they're not made of straw.
But given your answer this is surely not your position, so can you explain how come you believe this without having to make yourself the enemy of Leviathan?
Are you maybe one of those people that believe that we should have a global government or something? Or some kind of multilateralist who thinks states can diplomacy their way out of the state of nature?
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During the trade war with Canada the Canadians threatened to turn off its electricity supply to America. Trump and MAGA used that as a reason why America couldn't rely on foreign countries for electricity:
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/3zhsGGkCA11aj2O0t57NaQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTQ5MQ--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_independent_635/80f6a10cc60a71ffc764529da7c7eb2a
They really cannot grasp the correlation between their behavior and outcomes and think that's a good argument.
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I think it’s mostly the former, with the giant flaw if you have a federal government, a sufficient number of illegals living in communities many hundreds of miles away will end up forcing you to accept their own preferences via the ballot box.
Right, this is the other problem. Imagine if Rhode Island unilaterally declared it was giving residency (but not citizenship!) to everyone in India and instantly gained a supermajority in the electoral college.
This is obviously crazy and it doesn't seem like a good idea to say "well no this is fine as long as you fly millions of Indians to Rhode Island."
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