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Notes -
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.
Weird the entire rest of world somehow switched.
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
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:
Canada's a great case study for why English Imperial measurements are better than
French Imperialmetric 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.
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