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Ezra Klein in the pages of the NYT on why the Democrats need to Shutdown the government.
TLDR: Trump is an authoritarian.
Back in March, Democrats justified keeping the government open by saying that the courts were restraining Trump, that a shutdown would only accelerate his executive power, and that markets were already punishing his recklessness re tarrifs. But now with Trump firing dissenters, using federal agencies against political enemies, and enriching himself and his allies through foreign investments and unchecked power, Klein says that none of those arguments hold anymore. The Supreme Court is now backing Trump on key issues, DOGE’s chaotic dismantling of the bureaucracy has slowed because Trump loyalists are running it, and the markets have largely adapted to the new normal.
Maybe the markets have normalized, but we shouldn't according to Klein. Democrats are politically and morally failing by continuing to fund a government that has become an instrument of authoritarianism. He outlines how Democrats could frame a compelling message around corruption and abuse of power, citing Senator Jon Ossoff’s July speech as an example of effective messaging that ties everyday struggles (like high medical costs and housing insecurity) to elite corruption. Specific examples the firing of agency heads like those at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Defense Intelligence Agency for political reasons, targeted investigations into critics such as Senator Adam Schiff and Attorney General Tish James, the FBI’s raid on Bolton’s home, masked ICE agents now conducting raids without identification or warrants, and National Guard troops being deployed to cities LA and DC.
Remember when Joe Biden deliberately let in and imported 10 million people for no other reason than he wanted to? Yeah and the republican house just sat there and funded it all over and over.
The house did try to negotiate a "deal" and got somewhere but unfortunately Biden wouldn't budge on the "inport millions of people" part so the deal dieded.
If the democrats shut down the government without even a list of concrete demands that they want, they're going to look like absolute clowns and take all the blame. The only way to win a shutdown or win threatening a shutdown is to makde demands so reasonable and commonsense that the other party will look bad not giving in.
I'm annoyed by the "imported" framing. Biden didn't wake up one day and go out of his way to coax ten million people into coming to the US. These ten million people wanted to come, and Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop them. This is how any pro-immigration Left-winger thinks of the issue, and you are asking the wrong question at a very deep level if you wonder why they "want" to bring in millions of people. It's simply liberalism taken to its furthest extreme. These people want to come, therefore what right have we to infringe on their freedom by stopping them? How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part. I obviously think America can't afford to let in literally everyone who wants in, for the same reason a private person can't afford to let all the homeless people in town crash on their couch. It's just not reasonable. But it is obvious why someone would "want" to do it - would feel a moral impetus to do it - and the "imported for no clear reason" framing obscures this, which is at once uncharitable to the decision-makers, and obscures the underlying issue of naivete which needs to be confronted head-on if anyone's minds are going to be changed.
Maybe this is a nitpick, but isn't this exactly what people generally mean by "imported?" In 2021, the US imported an average of around 2.39 million metric tons of steel a month. All of that steel had international sellers that wanted it sold and all of it had US buyers that wanted to buy it. I wouldn't say that Biden imported it (if your annoyance with the framing is merely the centering of Biden's role in the process, I don't have a firm position on that subject) but he certainly 'elected to not use violence to stop them.' Conversely, he did forbid the importation of Chinese cars, knowing that order would be enforced through violence if necessary. Those manufacturers want to sell us their cars, what right had he to infringe on their freedom by stopping them?
Illegal immigrants, with few exceptions, wish to come to America to sell their labor; sell fractions of their own lives. It seems entirely appropriate to describe that as 'importation.'
In many instances this is uncontroversial. A pardon is paperwork, after all, so everyone executed by the state or killed in an altercation with the police dies for lack of (certain) paperwork. I don't think this is an especially tortured analogy; pardons and visas are both official endorsements granted to specific individuals the authorities deem worthy that stay punishment for otherwise illegal behavior.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that the vast majority of otherwise justified lethal force could be prevented (or at least rendered unjustified) via appropriate paperwork, given that by the numbers almost all of it is military in nature. (Crime, obviously, is not otherwise justified. Self defense is, but self defense kills a negligible number of people per year compared to war. Police actions are a bigger slice of the pie, but still far, far less. And while some force exercised in war is not justified, surely defense against an unjustified war is.) And any military action could have been countermanded and it is for the lack of that paperwork that the lethal force is brought to bear.
People accept this because paperwork actually means something. The paper doesn't matter at all -- doesn't even exist in a lot of cases in the digital age, I'd imagine -- and trying to reduce official judgments to paper is just ignoring their actual significance; the oft-repeated observation that 'money is just paper, man' comes to mind. Somehow this realization never actually leads to us throwing off the chains of capitalist oppression.
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My understanding is that Biden's administration expended significant effort, resources and taxpayer dollars to directly facilitate the entry of foreigners into America in very large quantities. This included far more than passively declining to enforce our numerous laws against illegal entry, and included flying planeloads of such people into the American interior on the Government's dime, and then releasing them into our communities, possibly while directly subsidizing their material needs. It also involved things like expending government resources to remove and to attempt to remove border obstacles, with the goal of directly facilitating illegal border crossings by foreigners.
My understanding is that positive actions like this resulted in millions of foreigners settling in America, in addition to millions more who were able to cross because of Biden's additional, "passive" refusal to enforce immigration laws and the border generally. Am I mistaken?
Okay. What's your view on the proper way to enforce immigration and the border? If we are not letting literally anyone who comes in, who should we let in? What's your understanding of how many people have come in during Biden's administration? Was that number about right, too high, or too low? What should it have been, and what should have changed to prevent immigration past that amount?
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He rather did, and then continued doing it for years.
The Biden administration conducted a number of policy changes upon taking over from the trump administration, changes intended to increase the retention rate of migrants and well communicated to migration-related interolutors. These were changes to a status quo, done deliberately and systemically, with predictable and openly desired results by involved elements of the Biden administration. Biden made multiple domestic legal efforts to broaden the inflow potential, spending non-trivial political capital, to shift the status quo into a more publicly receptive position.
Unless one wants to redefine the term violence, enforcement of migration laws is not violence.
Compassion without consideration of the consequence and harms imposed onto others is not compassion.
Rather than compassion, the Democratic stance on migration is much more accurately characterized as a luxury belief, a performative display undertaken only so long as it does not become onus. This was most notably when the Texas migrant bussing began, and then Democrats began panicking at the fiscal burdens of accepting and housing a fraction of the migrants that they'd been in Texas and elsewhere for years.
Self-righteousness and punting the costs onto the outgroup may be a fundamental impulse, but it is not particularly moral.
Yes, it definitely is. Legitimate violence is still violence. I don’t mean that as an aspersion, and I’m not convinced @WandererintheWilderness did either. I was surprised to see you take it as such. Would you have objected if he said “elected not to use force” instead?
Yes, it is…sometimes. The obvious example would be charitable giving, or other acts where the cost is presumed to fall mostly on the giver. I would extend this to a number of general social courtesies. If I forgive someone for a mistake, it’s not because I amortized the social cost of not deterring another offense.
More to the point, I think pro-immigration advocates have considered the costs to others, and insist they’re small. Since the migrant busses were subsidized by Texas and Florida Republicans, the recipients could assign blame without reconsidering that belief.
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Isn't it still compassion, by definition, even if it is harmful? Not sure if the comparison is altogether valid, but violence used to prevent greater violence is still violence.
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Sure it is. I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens. The authorities acquire a monopoly on legitimate violence, and use that terrible but awe-some power to enforce laws and regulations for the public good. Enforcing migration laws entails preventing people from crossing the border if they're not allowed to do so, and expelling them if you catch them post hoc. This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
I regard runaway pro-immigration sentiment as a case of people getting irrationally squeamish about one particular area of enforcement, even though they are not consistent anarchists.
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
This line of argument has no limiting factor, and can apply as much to any interaction.
This internet interaction has an implicit possiblity of violence if certain boundaries are not obliged, since you could always turn to internet sleuths or hackers and seek to harm me if I annoyed you enough, or vice versa. Anyone weaker than you could infer an implicit threat of physical violence if they disagreed with you. Even people not weaker than you, but less interested in a topic, could take the firmness of your position as an implicit threat.
Fortunately, actual violence does not work that way, and neither do sound moral arguments resort to categorical pejorative redefinitions.
Yes it would. Or, to put it another way, I meant it in the objective sense of "if you don't comply, the government will send men with guns after you". I don't know what to tell you. There is of course a kind of implicit pejorative there, in that hurting people is wrong in a vacuum. But like anyone sensible, I recognize that violence can be justified in many cases, to prevent a greater evil. The state having the theoretical authority to use violence, and wielding it as a threat to prevent more chaos and suffering, is one such case. This is all pretty basic stuff.
The moral argument brought forward by pro-immigration extremists (when they are not outright anarchists who reject the premise that state violence is ever justified) is that the harm caused to immigrants by repression efforts is greater than any harm runaway immigration could cause. This is a dumb position and checked out from reality. But it has nothing to do with "pejorative redefinitions". It's just an extremely biased analysis with regards to the harms and benefits on both sides. A coherent anti-immigration argument still has to acknowledge that at some level you're saying "were an illegal to ignore all warnings and come anyway, there comes a point where we would physically shove, hit, or shoot that guy until he was no longer on our side of the border". Such an argument simply involves saying that the benefits of such a policy outweigh the minor moral cost of that violence.
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No, but the people whose organization Biden also belongs to actively did this.
Why do we enforce laws against and obsess over human trafficking, but not illegal immigration, even though they're literally the same thing?
It's because one of them negatively affects the average left-wing voter (since when we say "human trafficking", we usually mean "for sex purposes", which means the average domestic woman's ability to demand a price for sex is adversely affected), and one is neutral to positive for that voter (since when we say "illegal immigration", we usually mean "for labor purposes", which means the average domestic man's ability to demand a fair price for labor is adversely affected).
No, it's concern trolling laundered through a "moral, compassionate" lens.
The average domestic woman is not competing with literal prostitutes and the average domestic man is offended to imply that about his womanfolk.
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See my analogy elsewhere in the thread to pro-choicers who insist that pro-lifers can't possibly be sincerely concerned about the lives of fetuses, and have to be using it as an excuse to oppress women. No! You can disagree with the principles, or you can say (as I do) that this is an impractical way to implement those principles, but your opponents genuinely, sincerely hold those principles! Honest!
Your gloss on human trafficking vs. illegal immigration misses the mark completely due to this baffling refusal to believe that pro-immigration advocates care about immigrants' welfare as human beings, as an end unto itself. "Immigrants" aren't a means to some other end. Liberals approve of "illegal immigrants" because they think of them as individuals trying to act on their own desires whose freedom US border services are unfairly restricting; and they disapprove of "human trafficking" because they think of victims of human trafficking as slaves and abductees whose freedom is being unfairly restricted by the traffickers. This is entirely consistent, and incredibly obvious. If you do not grasp this, then your theory-of-mind of anyone to your left fails completely.
Those may be their feelings, but closer examination of the actual facts of migration policy reveal this to be, at best, Mrs. Jellyby-ism. So much undocumented immigration is facilitated by truly horrific cartels/people-smugglers that the U.S. government has long balked from designating the cartels as what they are - para-state criminal enterprises fully deserving of the foreign terrorist organization label just like the Haqqani network, Hezbollah, etc. - out of fear that it would open many illegal immigrants to criminal liability for materially-assisting an FTO.
Oh, I agree.
Please don't just post "I agree" posts.
I think "I agree" posts serve an important purpose in situations like this one, where A says something, B replies to A, and then A says "I agree". In that circumstance, specifically A's opinion of what B said is highly relevant, and an upvote wouldn't give B that relevant information because upvotes are anonymous.
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There is much to what you say. It is also true that various leftists have, in unguarded moments, given much much more cynical arguments for immigration. For example, in the Blairite government in the UK:
(Emphasis mine)
The Left support for immigration is a confusing mixture of:
I think it's important to point out as you are doing that people genuinely believe 1-3, but it's also fair to point out that darker motives 4-8 also exist and are not invalidated by 1-3.
I'd add somewhere in your list a feeling of guilt towards historical wrongs and a feeling that sacrificing their own countrymen's welfare in favor of immigrants' is somehow helping make up for it.
True
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I think most of it is just economic, to be honest. The two-party consensus is that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic reasons - more workers enable more economic growth, and it fills out the bottom of the population pyramid, which is declining due to demographic transition. (For non-conspiratorial reasons - no one's scheming to reduce the native birthrate, and in fact the birthrate decline is global.)
When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason, though if pressed they will usually mention it as one among others, but I think it's the core reason and most of the rest is rationalisation.
The Canadian government will just state that business lobbying drove the approvals for temporary foreign workers, and Carney is being admirably clear that it is reason the program cannot simply be stopped despite the widespread belief it was abused after COVID
The debate didn't really get moralized like down south, presumably because the PM had all the tools he needed to achieve his ends without dipping into asylum seekers, who seem especially aggravating.
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Maybe. The numbers show that the economics aren’t working in Europe, and various parties have turned against it. Even the Left wing in the UK is nominally against it though for various of the reasons stated it hasn’t actually done very much.
Whether this is downstream of the economics not working out or other factors is hard to say.
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Protecting one's borders is no more violence than locking the door to your house is violence to your neighbors. The left's position on this topic is, frankly, nonsense. Understanding it does not justify it.
Of course it is. Unless nobody ever contests your borders in the first place, of course you need violence to protect the border. Whether you beat, shoot or tie people up to stop them from crossing illegally, it's still violence. Necessary, advisable, ethical and desirable violence, but violence nontheless.
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Well, it's less locking the door and more that one resident continues to invite guests in, only for them to find another resident trying to throw them out, cycling ad-infinitum.
Not that I support the former here, but a fair characterization would mention it.
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The actions you must take to physically remove someone who's already in the country when they explicitly do not want to leave the country are violent however.
You may argue this violence is justified (I agree, somewhat), but if the ruling people are extremely averse to violence of government agents being televised, there we are.
Putting someone out who is in my house without permission is violence, in that the intruder is the one committing it. This is a basic axiom of English common law. I have already suffered an injury. It doesn't matter if the intruder is a beggar or the King of England, if he doesn't leave then I am justified in defending myself from the harms already committed.
"Violence" is not a term defined at English common law, and the ordinary English meaning of the term has always included legally justified violence as "violence" and excluded non-violent crimes, let alone non-criminal torts like simple trespass. Breaking into premises has always been a marginal case.
There is a reason why the Libertarian Party pledge avoids the word, and instead talks about "initiating force"
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Of course, it's trivial to cheat at that simply by declaring the entire nation in violation of that law, then proceeding to selectively enforce it only against those that improved the place.
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I don't know why I keep getting replies which assume that I agree with this position when I specifically began my second paragraph with "Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part". I am not trying to justify it. I am only trying to get people to understand it. But I don't think OP did understand it, with that baffling talk of "for no other reason than he wanted to".
It’s famously difficult to get someone to understand something when they don’t want to understand it.
Some of it has to do with it being very easy to ignore and talk past someone once you’ve pattern-matched them to “the Enemy”, even if you’re on ‘their side’…
…And some of it has to do with them thinking that they already understand the doubtlessly-malicious real motives of the Enemy, and not particularly being interested in being corrected- after all, how can you be sure that it’s not just Enemy action to try and sow uncertainty about the truth of their sinister motives, and attempt to sway your mind with their propaganda?
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I recognize the steelman, I really do. I just really, really hate this argument. It boils my piss. The leftist framing of what is violence against them and what is violence on their part is always a definitional game that somehow excuses terrorism on their part but prevents speech on my part and thus I have an allergic reaction to the violence-discourse.
Isn't using men with guns to do something part of the standard definition of violence? How do illegal immigrants get removed from the country?
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one, as I don't consider it a "leftist framing." It's certainly compatible with a libertarian analysis as well.
Except for literal pacifists, basically every person on Earth agrees violence is acceptable under at least some circumstances, whether it be self-defense, carrying out a just/honorable war, defending ones property or whatever. The police and federal agents use violence to enforce the rule of law in society. I think the vast majority of ordinary people consider ordinary instances of police force/violence to be completely justified and necessary. Without that, you don't have the rule of law at all, you just have a bunch of suggestions and no means of enforcing them.
I agree that walls are not violence, though. But I don't think physical barriers are the primary way we prevent people from getting into or out of the country, or get rid of them once they get here.
I'm not. In the US, at least, right-wing political violence is usually carried out under the guise of law enforcement. Violence by law enforcement is presumed justified and classified as not-actually-violence because it is (mostly) regular and (usually) socially sanctioned. To point out that law enforcement is, in fact, violence is to give left-wing critiques an exploitable breach in the intellectual firewall.
(One can still defend having laws and law enforcement with all of the above, but the point is to not have to in the first place)
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"Worst argument in the world" people, when someone wants to have borders....
Did you read the rest of my comment? I'm not using "violence" in a pejorative sense here, I'm using it because within the linguistic resources of English it is the most general word available, unless I am very much mistaken.
Do you have a better word for that category of human activity that is more neutral? Because I personally don't think the neutral use of the word "violence" should be considered an attempt to try to sway an argument one way or another, because there are many instances where "violence" is morally acceptable and justified, maybe even necessary for the functioning of society.
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Probably because people suspect you are a liberal, and as a liberal, you don't have to agree with the position of an open borders progressive (or true libertarian) to help ensure that massive amounts of immigration happens. Progressives can just use the moral framework that you believe in to wedge in an argument that you can't reject, and therefore immigration that you can't stop. The only way you can stop it is by abandoning your liberal principles. Stopping peaceful migrants requires force that liberals aren't comfortable with. Even though they don't want that much immigration, they ultimately waste their energy on criticizing the only methods that actually work, which are the ones that involve use of force.
Borders and liberals coexisted for a long time before everyone lost their minds. And conservatives were equally useless at arguing against progressives on this topic, as the US demonstrated.
Yes, but their existence wasn't because of the liberals.
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Not doing this is surprisingly hard. But also, people just want to state their objections for the record, it's not necessarily aimed at you.
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Expectations versus reality moment. Important lesson. This is one of the, if not the, best places on the web for this too.
Back when we were on reddit I'd occasionally get bored and post in some other sub and pretty soon my blood pressure would spike and I'd crawl back here and be grateful for the levels of hostile and incompetent reading comprehension we somehow manage to maintain.
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First of all, thank you for stating clearly the view from within the pro-immigration left’s mindset; it’s one that is based on moral precepts very different from the ones we usually hear about ‘round these here parts, and it’s always good to get a periodic reminder of how the other half lives (and thinks).
Nevertheless, I want to answer the above-quoted passages in good faith, as a not-especially-pro-immigration non-leftist (though I am myself a child of immigrants).
How, indeed, could missing paperwork justify the use of lethal force? In the first place, I would argue that lethal force is seldom necessary to enforce sane immigration policy: simply patrolling the border properly—much easier nowadays with autonomous drones—and enforcing citizenship requirements for any government benefits plus employer compliance with E-Verify or similar, together with harsh penalties for violation and immediate deportation of illegal aliens, would suffice in almost all cases. Still, it is true that deportation is ultimately backed by the threat of force, up to and including lethal force should the prospective deportee resist hard enough. How is this OK? Because the alternative—that is, that we should never enforce immigration law—implicitly grants to every would-be illegal immigrant the unilateral right to nullify American law! Once we let that camel’s nose into the tent, everyone will start asking, quite reasonably, why they should be bound to abide by laws they find immoral, or even merely inconvenient, and what can we say to them? “Actually, the law is subordinate to my particular moral code”? Well, why are your morals better than mine, and by whose authority do your morals supersede the law of the land? And, more darkly, how do you propose to stop people with very different morals from using the same argument, should they ever get their hands on the reins of power? I am reminded of the famous scene from A Man For All Seasons: “Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
In short, respect for the rule of law—even when your morality disagrees with the law—is the ultimately the only way to prevent a Hobbesian war of all against all. In game theory terms, we most punish defectors, lest everyone think it’s a good idea to defect.
I would also argue that “imported for no clear reason” is the wrong framing—there is a reason, namely that Biden (or his handlers, or the Democrat activist class, or whoever else you want to blame for this decision) wanted to do so, and in particular wanted to do so out of the deeply-held moral sentiments that you have just articulated (in addition to base political considerations, of course). But even granting, charitably, that this policy was the result of well-intended moral judgments rather than mere political gamesmanship, I would say that the decision-makers here are very clearly in the wrong, and it is not at all uncharitable to say so.
The President is the chief executive of the federal government. That means his job is to carry out the law as Congress has created it (and as the judiciary has interpreted it): nothing more and nothing less. In particular, the President’s own moral scruples should play no part in how he faithfully carries out the duties of his office. I have no problem with the President using the “bully pulpit” to argue for or against this or that moral view; nor do I see any issue with an ex-President, in his personal capacity, acting according to whatever moral beliefs he may hold (see, e.g., President Carter and Habitat for Humanity); nor is there anything preventing the President from encouraging Congress to pass laws that accord with his morals. But when he is on the job, the President must hold his personal beliefs aside and execute the role that has been entrusted to him.
An analogy: would it be acceptable for the CEO of a public company to unilaterally decide to sell off all the company’s assets to raise money to give to charity? I would say no: the CEO is answerable to the shareholders, who endowed him with stewardship over their capital in the expectation that he would carefully husband the business to maximize their return on investment. The moral worth of the charity is irrelevant: if the shareholders want to, they can decide to donate to that charity with their own money—and if the CEO decides to give his bonus to the charity, or to briefly bring up the benefits of that charity at the next shareholders’ general meeting, then good for him! But in his capacity as CEO, he has but one mandate entrusted to him by the shareholders, which he is bound to carry out faithfully, personal morals notwithstanding.
Sorry, but this just doesn't do what you think it does. Even in the hands of the most scrupulous employers E-verify is hopeless.
I am 100% on the record that the Federal government should provide some accurate method for employers to verify that applicants are entitled to work (and, stretch goal, be continuously notified if that changes). That doesn't even remotely exist.
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I don't believe Biden was unwilling to use force to stop border hoppers- he is, after all, a very moderate democrat with few firm convictions. I suspect that instead he wanted the workers. America, like most other advanced economies, has functionally full employment and a lot of blue collar jobs left unfilled. Japan, Poland, etc are doing the same thing.
"America, like most other advanced economies, has functionally full employment and a lot of blue collar jobs left unfilled. Japan, Poland, etc are doing the same thing."
A blatant lie, easily disproven merely by opening one's eyes. One does not get the millions of fentanyl deaths, the hollowed out Rust Belt, nor the millions upon millions drowning in debt because they literally can't make enough. Nor, for that matter, would you see the H1B shenanigans as employers post tech jobs exclusively in foreign papers, to try and find a loophole around posting requirements.
Good joke putting Japan in there, btw. A nation with employment stats more fraudulent than the US is hard to find, but Japan is up to the challenge, just straight up defining homelessness out of existence. Sorry, but no amount of sophistry is going to get me to pretend that a girl turning tricks to earn enough money to stay at an internet cafe for the night is not, in fact, homeless.
I think a key point here is whether the room's rented on a semi-permanent basis.
I got stuck in motels for a month and a half back in 2022 (after getting summarily ejected from college), and it sucked, because motels tend to have specific dates booked out well in advance forcing you to move motels on a weekly basis or so. It still beats being under a bridge, of course, but it's a hell of a lot worse than having a home.
If the girl can actually hold a specific room for many months, that solves a lot of the problem and is closer to renting than to being homeless. If she has to move regularly, then that brings a lot of the issues with homelessness back into play.
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The fact is that you almost never see homeless in Tokyo. I was asked for money perhaps three times in six years of living there. My understanding is that Japanese homeless are much more tractable than American homeless and the government mostly pays to keep them housed without too much trouble.
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These stories are certainly disturbing but they're largely sensationalized rarities. Family support systems keep the majority off the streets even if they're personally broke. In the cases where you have a girl in the situation you describe it's almost definitely a case of some sort of seriously bad home life (eg molestation, etc) and not simply "times are hard in Japan." While living in one's parents' home well into adulthood may be odd to those from anglo or European countries, it's not such an anomaly here. When you have a girl who has opted out of that it's for a reason.
Homelessness does exist in Japan, of course, but it's miles away from the type of widespread homelessness you see in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. (I am only naming places I've actually been.)
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Why would that mean anything, let alone that the decisions is justify on material / economic grounds? World elites have remarkably narrow worldviews. Do you think gender self-ID was implemented in a good chunk of Europe for material reasons? Do you think there were BLM marches there because of how badly black people were treated?
Iran and Russia also have economic migrants.
Draw an ideological throughline between Japan, the USA, Russia, Poland, France, Japan, Iran, Germany, etc.
Japan has far fewer economic migrants than other developed countries. That has changed a little recently (and immediately prompted a turn to the right politically). Including them on this list seems unreasonable unless you count having any number of economic migrants at all. There is clearly a difference between what Japan has allowed and what Europe or the United States has allowed.
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Just once I'd like to see an example of a country that didn't follow suit and suffered some horrible negative consequences.
Also: sure, I think the leaders of most of these countries are on board for the world depopulation train.
I mean... the communist block arguably qualifies.
Yes, they totally didn't do a whole bunch of other things that are more likely to be responsible for their outcome.
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I think you know at this point that very few people here buy into the moral imperative that liberals and progressives like to invoke when it comes to immigration. It's easy to place myself in the shoes of someone trying to come here from a less economically stable and more dangerous place. Of course I'd want to come here. That's not the point that people care to discuss, because the structural and cultural issues that have come about from Biden's policies take priority over the tiresome moral grandstanding.
Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop mass immigration which aligned with the progressive moral framing and aligned with our economic model that relies on cheap, exploitable labor. When his admin chose not to stop millions of people with force it had massive downstream effects. The "fundamentally moral" intentions behind that decision is no longer a political get out of jail free card, and that has to be demonstrated to the progressive and liberal-minded folk so that it can be made abundantly clear that this type of progressive immigration policy is a total nonstarter.
Certainly. But that does not change the fact that their belief in this moral imperative is the fundamental motivation of liberal policymakers. Ignoring this factor achieves nothing; it's on the same level as pro-choice activists who don't take pro-lifers' outrage about abortions-as-murder seriously and keep trying to second-guess their supposed true reasons for acting as they do.
For some maybe. For Democrats trying to win elections, it's a trend to latch onto to get additional votes.
It's ignoring in the sense that you will not convince the other side by using it as an argument, and that it doesn't carry the political weight that used to not even 2 years ago. It might drive your side to vote more, but it's a double-edged sword that also drives your political opponents to vote. Conservatives will have to contend with it, yes, and it cannot be completely ignored, but leaning into "morality" over practicality will not be a winning strategy for Democrats in the next election cycle now that we have examples of "moral" policy's impact on society.
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