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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.
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.
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.
Same reason we don't use the metric system:
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.
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.
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 å°º instead was swapped decades ago. Weird how the other 96% of the globe somehow managed.
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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.
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