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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30619 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.

Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.

At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.

On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.

This is confusing on so many levels.

Everything the district has on file indicates Dr. Robert affirmed that he was a citizen who was eligible to work for the school district

The district claims that he completed his I-9 verification. I can understand why they'd be in none the wiser. But to fake a citizenship ? He must have created a fake passport or a social security card. That's hard mode.

competed in the Olympics

Why was he illegal in the first place ? A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card. Public school districts are also eligible for cap-exempt H1bs. He could've become a citizen legally by now, if he wanted to. I won't be surprised if this is a case of 'dude keeps choosing the contrived illegal option over the straightforward legal option because people can be selectively stupid like that'.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

I-9 only requires proof of identity and proof of eligibility to work in the US. Most people use a driver's license for the former and a Social Security card for the latter, neither of which requires citizenship. And the law only requires that the employer inspect the documents for their authenticity, not conduct an investigation to determine if the person is actually, at this moment, eligible to work in the US. He could have easily gotten a Social Security card when he was here legally on a student visa, and used that for all his I-9s.

The ones you get as a student prominently say something like "valid for work only with DHS authorization" on them, though.

Yep, citizen and green card holder social security cards look very different than that of visa holders.

I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it.

Same reason we don't use the metric system:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Revelation 13:16-17

This is overstating it a bit, but there is some portion of America that opposed the metric system and opposes things like national IDs or implantable payment chips as being "the mark of the beast". The beast being a seven-headed monstrous enemy of God. Or at least symbolically represented as such.

...the metric system? Really? Are you sure? I grew up on a lot of anti-metric-system propaganda but it was all just about it being smug Euro garbage that infringed on American pride and so on. And on the other hand I've heard a lot of interesting (conspiracy) theories on what the mark of the beast might be but none of them remotely resembled the metric system. That's unusually stupid.

There was a minor American evangelical opposition to bar codes and the metric system. Both accused of being the mark of the beast. I'm not clear if these people in particular were able to block it's adoption, but they existed.

Of the era ramblings in this manner.

Much more modern example of similar ramblings.

Accusations that the metric system is somehow linked to the mark of the beast originated in, at the latest, the 1870s. This is an OG conspiracy theory picked up by some Americans in the 1970s.

There are other fringe Christians also long opposed to metric system based on an unrelated understanding of the holy meaning of the inch. So metric system advocates are also working for the devil.

"Let's count units by 10s."

"The devil put you up to this?"

Kind of approximately the last century and a half. At least for some fringe minority.

Same reason we don't use the metric system

We don't use the metric system because it's not in the rational interests of people to switch. The imperial system sucks for kids (because they have to memorize the conversions), and if you have to do the math by hand I guess, but your typical adult already knows the conversions they need and has a calculator to handle the math. So they get no benefit, but would have to put up with learning all the new measurements. There's no upside for them.

What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.

Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.

Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.

Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.

Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon.

As an American, I have never been subject to that either. Europeans love to bust out obscure conversions that nobody knows as evidence for the imperial system being bad, but nobody knows it because nobody needs to ever make that conversion. So who cares? I long ago memorized the very short list of conversions one encounters in everyday life:

  • 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)
  • 16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton
  • 3 tsp to one tbsp
  • 2c to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon

I'm willing to concede that metric conversions are easier than these. But they aren't hard to learn either, and there aren't that many of them. It's not actually onerous in practice. I think that the inadequate equilibrium framing is not wrong, but it risks overstating the extent to which the equilibrium is actually causing problems in anyone's life.

12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)

You can easily derive the 5280 feet from 3 feet to a yard, 440 yards to a quarter mile.

16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton

Except troy pounds which are 12 (slightly larger) ounces. Though if you're dealing with troy pounds you can hire someone to remember that. Also the ton can be the long ton of 2240 lbs.

3 tsp to one tbsp

And 2 tbsp to the fluid ounce.

I never quite understood why Europeans think that somehow there is a huge amount of friction with the every day usage of US customary units. They are customary for a reason.

Like if a carpenter in the US dealing with dimensional lumber the US you deal with a 2x6 on 2 foot centers. That is nominally 2 inches by 6 inches, but of course not actually. If you were building the same wall in Europe you are dealing with a 6x2 on 60 cm centers. That is nominally 6 by 2 cols but actually 148 mm by 48 mm. No one who does not deal with that stuff every day has to care about why the nominal or exact dimensions are not the same in either system. People who deal with it every day are used to it and there would be a cost for them to switch. Clearly 2 and 6 as nominal measurements are easier to deal with than exact measurements of 148 and 48, that's why there is a customary unit that those timbers are still sold in. Marking off in units of 60 is not easier than marking off in units of 2. 60 is used because it is divisible by 3 while the nice round 50 is not. This is not a problem in customary units because the next unit down from feet is already divisible by 3.

Not that SI is perfect, either.

There is also the strange habit of talking up the metric system, but then acting like everything is in SI. This is not the case. For scientific use CGS is still extremely common for practicing professionals.

There are also extremely common metric customary units that are in use that are not SI. You still have to specify the unit, no one who regularly deals with a given application is confused by that unit, and if you have to make a conversion it's trivial to look up. This is exactly the same as if you deal with US customary units.

For example tire pressures are often quoted in the metric customary Bar in Europe. The SI unit of pressure is the Pascal. You also see in the extant literature depending of field: technical atmospheres, standard atmospheres, Torr, and mmHg. That's 6 metricish systems for the same unit. No one who deals with Bar when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard. Just like no one who deals with psi when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard.

The Americans similarly often seem to think that there's a huge amount of friction in the everyday use of the metric, though. "Lol do women in Europe put "no men under 182.88 cm" in their dating ads?" No, though they might put no men under 180 cm.

I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."

Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.

There's also just a massive amount of equipment, material, hardware, and even facilities designed around imperial units, sometimes practically irreplaceable. Switching over to metric, even solely for new projects, isn't just or even mostly a matter of getting people to use new units on drawings.

But again: somehow the rest of the world did. Their precious tooling using only Troy ounces, Whitworth screws and French inches except when needing 尺 instead was swapped decades ago. Weird how the other 96% of the globe somehow managed.

It doesn't really help the "switch to metric" argument that unit conversions are typically done by computer these days anyway. The marginal cost of doing calculations in "harder" units isn't worth it because the calculations aren't really the hard part any more. Consumer products are pretty universally labelled with both, but the imperial units are round numbers: the box in front of me here is "16 oz (1 lb) 454 g".

Raw material stock sizes are probably a more difficult transition at this point: changing to size of the "2x4" (1.5 x 3.5 inches, naturally) would impact pretty much all construction heavily with seemingly little upside.

I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.

Almost all products sold at my grocery store are labelled in both metric and imperial. A quick search suggests this has been federal law since 1992, with a few exceptions.

Weird the entire rest of world somehow switched.

Yeah, weird. Almost as though they had different conditions which led to them taking different actions.

They almost all either switched prior to mass education and industrialization in their countries, or they half-assed it and ended up with a weird Frankenstein system like the UK, Canada, and Australia

Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.

The only thing Australians generally still do in Imperial is human height measurement.

In Canada:

Air temperature (as in the weather) is in C. Pool temperatures are in F. Cooking temperatures are in F. Body temperature in F.

Short distances are in In/Ft/Yd, but laws often are written with metric (for instance, in driving), but travel distances are in km.

People's weight and height are in Lbs and Ft/In.

Volume units in cooking are lol whatever; there's a preference for imperial measures but you'll have to deal with stuff in liters too (milk, soft drinks are sold by the L or 2L).

Note also that:

  • 400m is almost exactly 1/4 mile, which is part of why highway signs are marked like that instead of a round number
  • A full-sized plastic jug of milk is still a "gallon", and cans are all in a weird number of milliliters because they're a round number of ounces (when things are rounded off in metric it's generally done to hide shrinkflation)
  • The measure of land is still an acre until it's a forest fire (nobody knows nor cares about what a hectare is)
  • People who give their weight and height in metric are generally recognized as being obtuse/snooty

Canada's a great case study for why English Imperial measurements are better than French Imperial metric when you're operating on human-sized scales. But then again, that's not what the French were going for when they designed that system, they designed it with the intent on forcing it on everyone else at gunpoint under the banner of rationalism.

But there's a reason nobody copies the French.

That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

Because it will not be so used. We already have sanctuary cities which house most of the illegal immigrants in the nation. Their cops will be mandated to not check that, as they currently are in those jurisdictions.

If you actually look at the US laws, you would observe that it is seemingly a very strong immigration code that should already be easily able to deal with the illegal immigration problem. The reality is tens of millions of illegals in America. How? Sand in the gears. No law can get rid of the sand. You could try to mitigate it by hiring millions more ICE agents and immigration judges. The sand throwers would re-direct enough of their efforts to preventing that hiring to continue to stifle you.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

Moreover, in many other democracies that the US left idolizes, every contact with the government ends up being a check for immigration status, similar to how in the US all police will run you for warrants.

American liberals do not understand that the US has by far the most permissive immigration policy in the developed world.

It depends. Annual immigration as a proportion of the total population is low relative to other Anglo countries and most of Western Europe.

And recently one of the most permissive abortion policies.

I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

I think most don't truly oppose it, but it risks alienating some member of their coalition, the sovereign citizen, anti-government types who think not having a national ID is impeding the federal government.

Well, it seems to kind of work. Can't remember how many times i've read news that so and so has been in the US illegally and occupying a high position almost reaching congress or whatever while being illegal.

A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card.

No, the US is much harsher than that -- you need an Olympic MEDAL to automatically qualify, though I believe even bronze is accepted. Without that, an olympic athlete needs 3 of 10 criteria. Though two should be easy:

  • Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence (anyone who gets on a national olympic team should have this)

  • Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members (the Olympic team itself should qualify)

Given those, he'd need to have one of

  • Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media

  • Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel

  • Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field

  • Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations

  • Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field

Without any of them, no EB-1 for you.

I mean he was in the Olympics, it shouldn't be hard to dig up some "evidence of published material about [him] in ... other major media"?

Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel

This one's basically a free space. Reviewed coworker's code? Check. Gave your teammate feedback on their performance? Check. Etc.

No, you need evidence that you've been asked to do it. Informal stuff that doesn't generate such evidence won't work.

Code review has a paper trail. It's easy to make a paper trail for reviewing your teammate's performance too.

You're not thinking outside the box.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.

Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.

  1. Require it for the purchase of (guns/abortion drugs/hormones). Use the fact that the person purchased them as an excuse to '3 felonies a day' them.
  2. Require it for sign on to the internet, in the name of 'safety'. This would probably start by requiring it for access to online government services, then expand to being required for internet sign on for people caught committing a felony involving the use of a computer network (think like, child pornography, or large scale fraud), then to children to ensure they only access the 'safe' parts of the internet, then to everyone, as a generation has grown up thinking it is normal.
  3. Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).

One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).

To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?

Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).

You don't need a new form of ID to track this. Multi-use transit cards already let you track their movement and if you bought them with a card, are linked with your identity. If bought with cash, you leave enough PII around the Internet even if you click "reject all" on every cookie banner that you can just buy a "people that live in A and commute to B by bus" dataset from them that includes their phone numbers. Another dataset from mobile phone operators later and you can find out which one rode that particular bus.

I'm sure you don't need reminding that the Canadian government weaponized the financial system against domestic dissent during the Freedom Convoy, but it's worth pointing out that's the sort of action that "first-world Western democracies" now consider appropriate (even if the courts eventually disagreed, and even that is still under appeal).

Such governments should not be trusted with the ability to issue national ID cards, and since it's clear that even "liberal democracies" can evolve into this sort of government, they shouldn't be trusted with them either.

@anon_ is correct that the government is a necessary evil, but even before COVID I felt that it should be kept as small as possible. Now I think the argument is even clearer.

This may be true, but the price of accepting that (for us in the US) is that our government will never get a handle around removable aliens.

there wasn't a national ID in 1954 and yet the Eisenhower administration expelled the vast majority of removable aliens they targeted

identifying illegals and removing them isn't difficult to accomplish because of a lack of national id, it's difficult to accomplish because the government and powerful interest groups don't want it to happen

it's not some big mystery where the vast bulk of illegals are in the US and it's relatively easy to identify the overwhelming vast bulk of them once they're encountered (race, language, documents)

the reason the right doesn't want national id is because it just gives even more power to the federal government which, for approx 80 years, may as well be structured specifically to harm the right

whether or not it's possible this increased power would make it marginally easier to id illegals doesn't matter because that's not what it would be used for and we know that because there are already on the books strict laws and requirements which are not followed or used

We should revisit this in a year or two to assess whether Trump's ICE, plus all the funding it got from the OBB, was able to accomplish this easy task.

the point is specifically about national id

if in a year or two, with vast resources or whatever you're implying, and the removable aliens haven't been removed, are you really trying to imply the reason is because there is no national id?

that's silly so I'm going to assume you were trying to make another point

what is it?

No, that’s kind of my point actually. Even employers that want to verify applicants aren’t able to do so accurately.

A government that cannot maintain territorial integrity is a government I consider to be "too small".

Well there ya go -- now we're at the point of tradeoffs with respect to the functions that are absolutely necessary.

It would be kinda silly if we both had government as a necessary evil and it was too disempowered to actually accomplish those ends.

I believe the standard rebuttal is "cannot ≠ will not".

I think the libertarian right is coming around to the fact that government is a necessary evil, and to that end it needs the powers to effect those necessary functions competently.

There has also been questions about his education credentials as well. I see two extreme interpretations of the current situation. Either he is extremely unlucky and has been a victim of ICE and now the internet sleuths have been activated and is now is whole life is being painted in the worse possible light or he is a serial grifter archetype. Laura Powell has a breakdown here: https://x.com/LauraPowellEsq/status/1971811032235753770

The other weird thing is in that twitter thread from Laura Powell it shows he was married and presumably married to an American for a long period of time. It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.

It's also interesting to read his statement about the hunting rifle while imagining he is either this unlucky victim of circumstance or he is the grifter. He even implies that maybe it was not a case of luck but rather that he had been targeted due to race and that the citation was due to him trying to create a safer situation for the law enforcement officer. His statement could definitely be true. There is no doubt that there are law enforcement people out there that might see you place a rifle back into your vehicle temporarily and then write you up instead of letting it slide. (https://www.yourerie.com/news/local-news/millcreek-superintendent-issues-statement-after-receiving-hunting-citation/)

He also has not made everything up because is is an olympic athlete and did compete in the Sydney 2000 Olympics where is ran 1:52.32 in the 800m qualifier. (https://worldathletics.org/results/olympic-games/2000/27th-olympic-games-6951910/men/800-metres/heats/result)

Some people are claiming he is was able to get a pass due to his ethnicity but maybe he was able to get a pass because of his sporting accomplishments. Maybe the school board thought that employing an Olympian would help inspire kids regardless of his actual suitability for the job itself.

It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.

If you’re an illegal immigrant can you easily naturalize by marriage? Presumably you’d have to leave the US (and they would have recorded no exit stamp from his student visa 20 years ago, which means he’d have to pretend he left the country without passing through any controlled emigration point), pretend you’d lived abroad for 20 years, and then apply from abroad for a marriage visa (concocting another fake narrative about how you met).

Depends on how quickly you act. But sure, if he had already way overstayed his student visa before getting married, then it would not have been easy to get a green card.

Tbh last time I left the USA I did find it odd I didn't seem to pass through any specific exit point, so I'm not sure if that's hugely unusual

I had a domestic flight from Vegas to Los Angeles then my Los Angeles to overseas flight was just 2 gates over from my domestic flight at the terminal and the attendants said it'd be fine if I just boarded but as far as I can tell I didn't actually go through a formal border control spot.

Tbh last time I left the USA I did find it odd I didn't seem to pass through any specific exit point

The US doesn't make people leaving the country by air get a stamp, but flight (and ship) manifests are tracked for that sort of thing, I understand.

Needing permission to leave sounds a lot like the Berlin Wall, but I think makes sense for the EU combined area.

Yeah I'm just used to having very explicit entry and exit stations from countries. I don't think I've ever seen anybody actually barred, but atleast a quick look at a passport before ushering people into international limbo.

Honestly vaguely worried I'm in some random DHS checklist as an overstayer even though I very much complied with my suggested itinerary.

Needing permission to leave sounds a lot like the Berlin Wall, but I think makes sense for the EU combined area.

You don't need permission to leave. Just EU airports (and most in the world) are separated in international and domestic flight sections. To get in the international part you need to pass border control. And it is impossible to move between the two sections. I think that usa is unique in that regard.

US airports sometimes mix international and domestic gates. The difference is that on arrival international flights kick all the passengers over to customs and usually make them go back through security before flying onward. But that can just be rearranging a couple doors.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.

We do not have such laws as far as I can tell. So in the absence of such, I see no fundamental issue with deporting him, even if it’s morally mean and probably counterproductive. I also don’t begrudge people mad about it, you know, unjust laws exist and objecting to those is normal political discourse, though this concept is on a sliding scale. Does the lack of a just law “fixing” an unjust situation have equal impact as a literal on the books unjust law? Can we allow characterization of an otherwise just law as unjust by virtue of ‘external’ flaws alone? Those questions aside, in that light some conservatives rub me the wrong way when they insist that it’s a clinical issue with correct and incorrect answers, and ‘why could liberals possibly be so mad’ is a dumb thing to wonder.

I do often wonder about what it must be like to live for decades presumably looking over your shoulder. I once drove with expired plates for nearly a year (insurance was current though) and I was constantly a little bit on edge every time I saw a cop car, and then some. Not fun, a little tiring. To do the same for decades? I guess if enforcement is spotty maybe you just forget - perhaps it was only a year or so of this (since the deportation order).

Possibly unrelated: I have no issue working for even big defense contractors, generally speaking, although a few friends and two siblings might disapprove some. But ICE? Personally I find the idea of working for them right now morally repugnant. That’s not to say ICE shouldn’t exist or anything, but my conscience simply would not allow it.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.

But there is no such system that would allow a guy like this to remain. He's not productive, he's an active participant in the public schools system. Not just at the teacher level, which IMO is bad enough in most scenarios, but at the administrative level. The argument that this isn't a parasite class is incredibly weak. At best he's just following the incentives laid out before someone who wants money and prestige and has a passion for progressivism. 99% of the other scenarios he's cynical and knows he's part of a parasite class.

If you declare "My ideological opponents (including people who work in fields I disapprove of) are not productive citizens" you are not striving to create a just system, just one that rewards your ingroup and punishes your outgroup.

But I actually think most school administrators are not productive in a "positive net value of their labor" sense. There's been a multi-hundred percent increase in school administrators in the past few decades. There's some correct level of administration and then there's the Iron Law of Institutions run wild. I think we are far into the second case regarding public school administration.

I don't really disagree with that, but it's not relevant to the argument. I can think of a lot of jobs I think are net negative.

Fair enough if you're complaining about free enterprise that you don't approve of, but it's rather different if the job in question is paid for by your own money taken at the proverbial gunpoint.

An ancap argument is essentially the same argument.

public school teachers are a parasite class? this seems like it's painting with a broad brush.

Public school administrators as a parasite class. The teachers are far below these people.

I think @anti_dan is reflecting a broader ratsphere view which sees schools as child prisons. Personally, I would agree that the public school system is far from optimal.

On the other hand, I also do not have a solution ready to replace the US public school system at scale. If one simply gets rid of the schools and hopes that kids will learn how to read from their smartphones, that will likely backfire spectacularly for most kids.

If we fired all the teachers tomorrow and spend their salaries on licensing LLM-powered learning apps, that would be unlikely to be an improvement over the status quo.

The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies. The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).

So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.

The purpose of public schools is to spend taxpayer money on themselves. They don't prioritize state funded daycare any more than they prioritize education.

Parents consistently say that they prioritize job prep. Teachers mostly prefer general education. Admins prioritize spending as large a fraction of society's resources as possible and also their ideological crusades. Statefunded daycare and actual education are not priorities.

I think the assumption is that public school administrators are, which seems broadly fair at first blush.

Does it?

I’ve met my fair share of public school administrators. They were 1) very small in number compared to the total school staff and 2) did the necessary ground level admin work mandated by the law and city, required planning (eg. resource allocation depending on student numbers, scheduling classes etc), hiring teachers and so on. They had zero input into any of the ”improved” education styles and similar foolishness (that was all mandated at city / ministry level). Of course this wasn’t in the US, but I’d be surprised if it was all that different.

Now university administration is a whole different game.

Administrators are (obviously?) necessary and useful, so it's not a purely parasitic function. Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

In the world we actually have, they... fall short of that ideal, to say the least. But it seems alienating to call them a parasite class. For people who do want a public school system but one that's better run, it's better to distinguish between good administrators and destructive ones, even if as a class a current supermajority of them can be fairly described as destructive and self interested.

Good administrators can be good, but it's not the sort of specialized position for which no qualified citizen is available, and must be drawn from the pool of foreign Olympians.

This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.

Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

Well...

DENNIS: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--

ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

More seriously, lots of schools like Oxford and Cambridge seem to have been able to run themselves without a specialised professional administrator class until recently.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official

Isn't this just 'complying with the immigration law of the country you're trying to enter'? It's not like the guy entered originally through a Coyote over the Southern border. He had multiple hearings regarding his immigration status and then chose to ignore the final result.

having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded

Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.

Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired.

Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.

So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").

The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.

It is a strange situation. U.S. employers are usually required to confirm US citizenship or legal residency and work authorization before hiring someone, and while some employers are notoriously lax about this, school districts and other state institutions usually are not. If you don't produce a birth certificate and social security card at some point before your first paycheck, you won't be able to keep your job.

U.S. employers are usually required to confirm US citizenship or legal residency and work authorization before hiring someone

Is that true for state/city governments? I'm reaching back a lot here, but I thought a lot of the laws the government uses here required the torturing of the commerce clause that was common between ~1940-2000 and didn't apply to government agencies themselves.

Of course, plenty of government positions do background checks for their own reasons, but I thought there was a big difference in this particular case.

Federal law requires employers to submit an I-9 employment eligibility verification form for all employees. Employees have to provide suitable documentation proving they are eligible to work legally in the US. Technically you can't require someone to be a US citizen, but proof of citizenship would be one way to prove you can legally work here.

There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive.

This seems apples and oranges. There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.

By contrast, if someone has a work visa is something which can be determined on a prima farcie basis. Sure, it is possible that he forged his visa, or stole an identity, or obtained his visa based on false statements, or blackmailed an official into improperly granting his visa, and I would not expect a school district to do the kind of digging to find these. But from what we know so far, it sounds more like they did not even check.

Is employing someone without checking their visa status (or nationality) an offense, criminal or regulatory?

There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.

I don't expect 100% of background checks to be 100% perfect.

The guy in question has held at least 4 different jobs in four different districts (three different states plus DC). All four either didn't do a background or the background failed? Dude's got pretty good luck or the background check system school districts use is a farce.

prima farcie

What a great typo!

My assumption is that he had some sort of bridging status that got formally revoked at the end of 2024, which might answer the question of how he managed to get into the job (since I assume HR's not doing quarterly immigration status checks)

My experience with school districts is that anything Principle-level(and sometimes Assistant-Principle) and above are pure political appointees.

Old-style politics, in the form of whom you know. And if you're lucky, they're somewhat competent at thier job. If not...

So it doesn't really surprise me that he got hired. He knew the right people, and they didn't care about his bona fides.

The head of a school is a principal. A principle is an underlying idea.

I have never claimed to be a clever man.

"Remember, the principal is your pal"

More generally, "principal" means "first". Which I assume is the origin of principal as the head of a school, but IDK for certain.

Same origin as the word "prince" for first son, I would assume.

'Princeps' means 'first citizen' and was used as a euphemism for the institution of a de facto hereditary monarchy(same as 'imperator' which just meant 'person holding authority'). Over time it morphed to refer to a minor king which then became used as a courtesy title for a non-reigning royal.

prīnceps merely means 'first' - the prīnceps senātūs ('first of the senate') originated during the Republic, and later Augustus took the title prīnceps cīvitātis ('first of the citizens') to pretend that he was merely first among equals rather than a king.

One of my favorite bits of historical PR. "No, of course I'm not a king. As a proper Roman, I hate kings just as much as the rest of you do! I'm just the first citizen, with near-absolute power over the government and whose children will reign after him. Totally different!"

If the domain of a prince is a principality, does that make the domain of a principal a principalipality?

As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.

With that in mind, what better target than this guy? To others overstaying their visas: if they can get him, they could get you too. To the voting base: "Look, this guy thought he could get away with blatantly flouting the rules for two decades, and in case you thought he was an upstanding citizen, pillar of the community, Olympian, etc. He had weapons charges and was fleeing the law"

As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.

There are many purposes, but yes, the idea is to encourage self deportation, and discourage illegal crossings, by making the environment not feel overwhelmingly pro-illegal as it has for most of the past 30 years.

This is a good target for that, but it also just seems like an insanely flagrant violation that couldn't be ignored once anyone at ICE got a whiff of it. This is one of the highest paid public employees in a swing state.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

As an aside, it's actually crazy how much school district admins get paid, especially considering that what they mostly do is make things worse.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

You need to excuse the olds.

There job is to make sure the district is eligible for funding and doesn’t get sued. These are much more important functions to the district than educating the children.

Much more important to the district's union, the district is best off when someone comes in and burns everything down.

Making sure you have funding is still an important function. And I'm not sure it's actually better for the district to have a principal who makes a courageous stand against bad policy as opposed to one who secures funding. If nothing else, the district already pays taxes; if the school district is better described as babysitting than an educational organization, at least there's the befit of getting the babysitting you pay for.

In theory yes, in practice nearly every superintendent wants to make their “impact” and so tosses any program affiliated with a predecessor and replaces it with their own shiny new toy that they obligate teachers to drop everything and follow. And yes, it’s horribly inefficient.

Well yes, and as someone not employed by the district I take this as evidence that district bureaucrats should be shot and district functions sold to vendors, pour encourager les-autres.

a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash.

Iowa is a constitutional carry state.

What percentage of men have hunting knives in their car? 100%? I've had some sort of knife on my person at all times where it was legal and practical since I was like 12 years old. A pocket knife is as much a part of my pants as my wallet is.

$3000 cash? Who cares?

If you pulled me over and tried to write this story about me it would be like: "man found with a loaded handgun (normal where I live), multiple tactical knives (a leatherman in my pocket, and the one that fell between the seats and I never found), spotting equipment (binoculars I keep in the glovebox for monitoring the situation), and hundreds of thousands of dollars of untraceable cryptocurrency (my coinbase account viewer on my phone).

I hate that this is highlighted on these stories.

The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?

"Had gun in car" is a pointless non-fact.

I like when then they bust someone and scarily state that he had a few guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his home. Pretending as though that is noteworthy or strange.

I mean, aside from his woke crap (which was likely a grift), this guy sounds like a good Red Triber. Carries a knife and handgun, goes deer hunting, presumably thinks physical activity is important, etc. If it weren't for the woke stuff, I'd have wished he tried to become legal; he probably could have managed it after his Olympic appearance. But he didn't.

It’s a relevant fact. Not to ICE, you’re right that they like police often toss prejudicial technically-facts in press releases all the time. But to the district, because it’s against policy to carry guns onto school properties there, so if those are regularly in his car they are regularly showing up at schools. (Now do I care actually, and is that a good policy? Not actually sure.)

This would only matter if he was arrested on school property or on his way to/from school.

Also, while it might technically violate the policy, it seems like it is also utterly unenforceable at scale. Letting everyone walk through a metal detector is feasible if expensive. Searching every car which enters the school parking lot is just not feasible. From a safety point of view, people keeping their guns in their cars seems closer to them keeping their gun at home than them keeping their gun on their person or in their bag or briefcase.

I would also estimate that people who keep a handgun in their glove compartment are feeding the illegal gun market, which seems bad.

From a CW perspective, this also pretty much destroys his woke credentials, I would say. Being a school official who hunts is one thing. But while hunters carry pistols for defense against boars and the like, my priors for anyone who keeps a gun in their glove compartment is that the gun serves for self-defense against fellow humans. OTOH, if his area is rural and has a severe coyote problem, that would make things look different.

This is Des Moines, it's not gonna be rural enough to have a serious problem with feral hogs or whatever, and carrying a gun to defend against coyotes as a grown, lone human is... unnecessary.

Now technically as a matter of law, you can generally have guns in the car in the parking lot of a facility that bans them. Your car is your personal property.

It depends on if the parking lot is considered to be on the facility's property - I know some federal facilities are like that (the parking lot is "federal property", and then there's another "controlled area" beyond that). For schools, a lot of gun laws are I believe based on the distance from the school, if not based on "yes the parking lot and green fields are school property". If I'm correct about the distance thing, I'm sure there's a case out there where someone couldn't (or was legally found that they could) have a gun or something in their own home due to being within that limit.

You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.

My point is to illustrate how deceptive reporting is on these things. My choice of “coinbase app on my phone” was a deliberate choice for the exact reason you are stating.

I don't see how the reporting is deceptive. They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character. How did he come to get a highly paid job in the administration? How did he pass the background check? Why is there all this cash in his car? Why did he try to flee law enforcement? These questions are probably not unrelated.

It's not a crime to have lots of cash nor should it be. But it is useful in trying to analyse the situation.

Not all people with certain kinds of obnoxious tattoos are criminals. But they do send a message and wisdom involves receiving that message and calibrating appropriately.

They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character

This is profoundly circular

"The media is trying to make them look sketchy, and from media reporting, they seem sketchy, so that makes sense"

"The media is trying to make ISIS look like bad guys and from media reporting, they seem pretty bad..."

They could just be bad! It is very, very likely that an illegal immigrant from Guyana who gets a position of high office is a sketchy character. Even without the cash, guns and so on he'd still be a sketchy character.

Reporting on things is always deceptive. "High School Graduate Gunned Down While on Stroll" was essentially the initial Michael Brown reporting. If you read the OP's news article, they frame all these allegations as allegations made by ICE, which is a far less credulous stance than federal law enforcement would be given by NBC news if this guy was being arrested on lynching charges.

The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?

The earlier weapons charge anyone has been able to find is a penny-ante summary offense about having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car. It's not clear whether that charge had anything to do with his deportation order, nor whether that is the February 5, 2020 weapons charge that ICE is claiming exists. ICE is implying he last entered the US in 1999 on a student visa, but this clearly isn't the case since he competed in the Sydney, Australia Olympics in 2000. It does seem clear that either ICE has screwed up big time, or Des Moines Public Schools has.

having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car.

Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms? IIRC In theory it was at least an ITAR issue for dumb reasons ("export") until the first Trump term when regular ol' guns left that list.

Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms?

Federally speaking, there's a specific statute prohibiting possession (or sale to) to illegal aliens, or to legal aliens on non-immigration visas (with a tiny number of exceptions not relevant here):

It shall be unlawful for any person... who, being an alien... is illegally or unlawfully in the United States... to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.

The ATF has taken an unusually even-handed approach to this matter and does not consider the bare possession charge to apply to nonimmigrant aliens (though they can only purchase lawfully from private sellers), but it defines those who have overstayed their visa as specifically not in nonimmigrant status.

Theoretically speaking, this only applies to firearms or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate/foreign commerce, but I wouldn't be my dog's life on the ATF making a distinction.

In practice, prosecutions are rare.

Constitutionally speaking, there's been some recent cases about how much the illegal immigrant must know that they are illegal, (caveat: I can't find if he was retried; the man was almost certainly guilty under the new standard of proof, but that doesn't always mean much). The prohibition itself hasn't made it to SCOTUS, but it's been pretty universally upheld by appeals courts. Some states prohibit possession by even federal-permitted lawful aliens (or even non-citizen US nationals), and those are on sketchier constitutional ground in my opinion, but they've also been difficult to challenge for procedural reasons.

Thanks!

I wonder what that means for the legality of the "I am visiting the US and want to shoot a gun" folks. I've seen billboard ads for "shoot a machine gun" in at least Vegas and some red-state cities.

I guess that might not be legal "possession", though.

Renting a gun at the range is legal and not considered possession as long as it stays at the range.

One of the nonimmigrant visa tiny exceptions is :

admitted to the United States for lawful hunting or sporting purposes or is in possession of a hunting license or permit lawfully issued in the United States.

It's... much easier to argue for recognized sports or permitted hunting than for machine gun tourism, though I'm not aware of any prosecutions in either case.

"sporting purposes"

"Why yes officer, there is a bullseye downrange somewhere. It's very rare one of our new shooters actually hits it, though."

I think it's complicated -- although in some cases having a hunting license makes it pretty OK. (Assuming he had one?)

Canadians deal with this all the time -- other than a hunting license in some state, if you have something like a letter of invitation to a pistol competition or something, maybe it's OK? I think there's some ITAR form that you might need to fill out for whatever guns you are bringing with you, but that wouldn't apply if he bought his hunting rifle in the US.

its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.

Non-commandeering says otherwise, with respect to public officials.

Laid out in a case against commandeering local police to enforce federal gun laws, no less

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