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Throwing in a quick post because I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed here (unless I missed it!), Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago sets up "ICE-free zones" in Chicago.
This comes on the heels of Trump sending in the national guard after Chicago PD apparently wouldn't help ICE agents under attack. I haven't read all the stuff about this scenario, but on the surface level it seems pretty bad, I have to say.
There's a video clip where that mayor is saying that Republicans want a "redo of the Civil War," amongst other incredibly inflammatory things. The Governor of Illinois is apparently backing the mayor up.
This refusal to help ICE and even outright claim that you're fighting a war with them I mean... I suppose Democrats have been doing it for a while. This seems... bad. I mean sure you can sugarcoat it and point to legal statues and such, but fundamentally if the local governments of these places are going to agitate so directly against the President, I can't blame Trump for sending in the national guard.
Obviously with the two party system we have a line and such, but man, it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war. Not the social media fear-obsessed "civil war" people have been saying has already started, but real national guard vs. local pd or state military type open warfare. I just don't understand going this far, unless the Mayor of Chicago thinks that he can get away with it and Trump will back down.
Even then, brinksmanship of this type seems totally insane!
I suppose Newsom in CA has been doing it too, now that I mention it. Sigh. I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.
I don't understand why everyone is beating around the bush (actually I do, it's partisanship, or in rationalist speak "in-group bias").
ICE's mission obviously isn't a bad mission, and most people agree with the overall goal.
ICE's conduct is obviously not good, especially in an American context, which is a country that (ideally) has a stronger aversion to government overreach than most.
"Muh masks" seems to have become a meme here, but it's real. You're Americans, why are you okay being cucked by your government. Masked non-uniformed men are stuffing people into vans. Not just that, they're sending them to third world prisons??? That's insane. Obviously it's nowhere near as bad as the NKVD, but why are you okay taking even a step in that direction? What if the Democrats spin up the "super ATF" who start kidnapping people who fuck up their gun paperwork into unmarked vans to be sent to Romania? Government overreach is bad, period.
Judges, prosecutors, and the supermajority of law enforcement agents manage to do their jobs with their faces uncovered. ICE agents could too. Doxxing ICE agents is illegal and prosecuting people who do that is almost a bipartisan slam dunk. It would be especially bipartisan if ICE didn't make themselves such easy targets by acting like NKVD-wannabes. Most Americans don't like the current immigration situation. So make ICE not maximally shit looking, and then let the Democratic leadership alienate themselves protesting something Americans like, instead of currently, where Americans are starting to dislike ICE.
Further, the actions of ICE are WILDLY UNDERMINED by the fact the administration is EXPLICITLY SAYING they won't go after farm or hotel labour (why hotels?????) If they were serious about immigrants, they'd go after them where they were in large concentrations. They'd use their political capital to push e-verify. They'd go after the AMERICAN CITIZENS WHO PAY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AMERICAN DOLLARS. But they aren't, because they don't want to. This massively undermines the legitimacy of ICE.
They made ICE maximally inflammatory, and then you act suprised the Dems are inflamed? This is the sibling equivalent of winding up your little brother then acting suprised when he tries to kick you in the nuts. You'd get a lot more parental (american people) sympathy if you weren't obviously trying to piss him off and were actually doing the thing you said is your goal, because right now it just looks like you're trying to piss him off and don't care about the goal.
They're not US citizens, I don't give a fuck. It's extremely sane, and extremely awesome. FAFO, lawbreakers.
Gun people are meticulous about paperwork, and don't have much sympathy for people who don't do their paperwork. FAFO, lawbreakers.
I have already covered this before.
Perfect is the enemy of good. When the GOP fields a "deport all lawbreakers except hotel and farm worker candidate" versus a "deport all lawbreakers" candidate, I'll vote for the latter. But so far, we've only ever been offered the former.
I'm not surprised, I'm indifferent. They are inflamed because I exist. I don't care that they don't like it. No matter what I do, they will be inflamed and continuously encroach on me and mine. It's war now, war to the knife. The time for talking is over.
I write this not to wage the culture war, but to express what (I think) many who support these ICE actions are feeling and thinking. In the context above, supporting ICE makes sense. Your use of caps lock made me think you were genuinely distressed and looking to understand the other side. Maybe my answer is disappointing because there is nothing there for you to relate to (hopefully I'm wrong!), but I really think that many people feel this way and therefore really do not care what ICE does to illegals.
How do you know they’re not US citizens if, as ICE has been doing, the people being detained are not given a chance to prove their citizenship? In May they took a guy’s REAL ID after wrestling him the ground and cuffing him, and just declared on the spot that it was fake. They then kept him detained for a few hours and eventually let him go after he provided his SSN (wtf???), but that doesn’t change the fact that this is retarded. There would be no story here if they simply had not done that, and just arrested the guys who were undocumented. A traffic cop can scan my license and verify it’s real, why can’t ICE? I don’t carry around my passport and as a US citizen I’m not required to. I don’t know what defense I’d have in the moment if ICE decided to detain me after making the determination that a.) I’m undocumented and b.) the license I gave them is fake. Add to that the fact that some of these guys are masked, not in uniform, and refuse to present a badge. It’s pretty close to just plain kidnapping. It’s idiotic and Americans are right to sour on such an astounding lack of professionalism.
| I don’t know what defense I’d have in the moment if ICE decided to detain me after making the determination that a.) I’m undocumented and b.) the license I gave them is fake.
I guess it would go the same way as the guy from your story, you're detained for a couple hours and released when they discover that you aren't the right person. That's supposed to be kidnapping?
Edit: I just realized that your "...Americans are right to sour..." statement might mean that you aren't American and don't know how ICE fits into the deportation flow, so my comment may have been excessively harsh.
From reporting, it may seem reasonable to think that ICE is rounding people up and choosing who to deport based on what they determine about the person's citizenship status. That could produce a situation where someone goes to the grocery store without their passport, gets caught up in a sweep, and finds themselves on the next flight to CECOT.
This is false. ICE does not make deportation determinations. The deportation decision has already been made by an immigration judge and ICE then needs to positively establish a person's identity to know whether they are the correct Jose Gonzalez who has a removal order. If yes, process them for deportation. If no, they can still detain you and refer you to an immigration court, but they can't deport you and you will have the ability to plead your case to the immigration court. (There are some nuances with immigration officers in some situations in border areas where they have more discretion to order an expedited removal, and if you at all claim US citizenship then expedited removal isn't permissible, this is not what's happening with ICE.) It's basically the same as other agencies enforcing different laws - ICE does not have the independent authority to deport in the same way that the police can arrest you for something but they can't make a determination of your guilt or impose a sentence.
I am American and understand how it works, I’m okay with all of that and mostly think the execution has been very bad. Citizens shouldn’t have to worry about being detained for even a few hours by federal agents just because those agents randomly decide your license is fake, especially in a country like this where limiting government overreach was a core value of our constitution. I haven’t liked when Democratic administrations have done stuff like this and now I also don’t like that the Trump administration is doing it.
Then I notice that I'm confused. In your original post you said: "How do you know they’re not US citizens if, as ICE has been doing, the people being detained are not given a chance to prove their citizenship?". But that means you know that ICE can't deprive you of a chance to prove your citizenship because a claim of citizenship (or legal status generally) can only be legally adjudicated by a court. They cannot deprive you of a chance to prove your citizenship. If you know of any cases where it seems they have been doing that I would be extremely interested to learn more - that would be, to me, an actual scandal.
Yes, but also no. Yes because I agree that citizens shouldn't have to worry about that in the same way I think citizens shouldn't have to worry about being the victim of a crime or (if running for office) citizens shouldn't have to worry about how they're going to put food on the table. Ideals we should strive towards but which are not achievable in our current - maybe any - civilization.
I have no idea about the situation you're describing so I'm not making any judgment about the details. I will admit that there have been enough "ICE Agents Did A Bad" stories that turn out to mean "ICE Agents Enforced Immigration Law" or "Complete Fabrication, ICE Agents Not Involved" that my skepticism level of an ICE related story is at the level of Jussie Smollett reporting a new hate crime. But that's my bias talking and it's absolutely possible that it happened exactly as presented, so let's stipulate that this was a Bad Encounter.
Bad Encounters are bad and we should work to minimize them. Bad Encounters are also inevitable and there are feedback mechanisms to do their best to correct the damage - I truly do hope that if this guy has some sort of case against ICE he gets anything he's entitled to - afterwards.
Maybe, though, this type of Bad Encounter is more widespread than I believe and citizens are being routinely detained in large numbers. I have not seen any evidence from reporting that this is true, I haven't personally seen it or known anyone who has despite having friends who have illegal immigrant family members, and given the number of Hispanic citizens and the intensity of press coverage on the issue I'd expect it to be clearer. If in my bias I have missed it or if this happens in the future (because I think it very improbable) I give you permission to say about me "man, what a maroon". This would also be a large scandal to me.
Skepticism towards authority is pro-American and healthy, but like all virtues it can be taken too far. Don't forget that the same George Washington who freedom fought against British tyranny turned around and personally led troops as President during the Whiskey Rebellion - which was partially a dispute over Federal authority.
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Cops, federal or other, dont decide whether your license is fake. They run it through a system, typically known as LEADS. If you pop on the system and are an American citizen without an arrest warrant issued for you, you are in the minority, maybe 0.1% probably less. And in most of those cases it is because you had your identity stolen at one point.
Everything gets checked. Sometimes frustratingly slowly. But the slowness is because of the things that prevent people from being hanged the morning after arrest, not things working in the other direction in 99.99% of cases.
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I agree. Unfortunately we are in a state of exception, because a large proportion of the people within our borders are not supposed to be here, and until very recently they were coming in at a faster rate than we could kick them out. Once there are almost no illegal aliens in our country, I will gladly join you in support of strengthened civil liberties to prevent ICE overreach (coupled with extremely strict and aggressive border controls, of course!).
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The concern is if you have law enforcement doing wack crazy shit, what if they accidentally pick up a US citizen and because they're operating at a level of "wack and stupid" they get shipped off? We should demand more competency from the government.
Again, what if the government makes you a lawbreaker? This is such myopic thinking. These are terrible precedents. This is literally the definition of the "first they came for" quote but you're just super confident it'll only be the first step.
Sure, but then you can't complain when I call your guy a retard and his policies terrible. If you want to have low standards that's fine, but I get to point at them and call them terrible. Your standards suck.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I am not very pro-immigration myself. I am mildly distressed I guess, but mainly because I feel kind of like I'm screaming into the void as a centrist.
This administration is retarded, and isn't even doing the thing they say they're doing, and it kind of feels like this (normally quite smart) community is content to clap like seals instead of going "wait why aren't they actually doing things that would solve immigration permanently, and instead going for maximum heat and chaos?"
Polling shows trump getting steadily less popular on immigration all year. Down and to the right. So while you're right, that group is shrinking due to his shitty execution.
Cost of doing business. I don't care. As a normal middle class person with a job who isn't tatted up or dressed like a thug, ICE is literally a 0% threat to me or any people I know or care about.
It's not myopic it all, in fact the liberal scales have fallen from my eyes and I see clearly. The Left is going to eventually come for me anyway, and in fact they have already been boiling the frog for decades. No matter how hard the Right contorts itself to please the Left, it will never be enough. A lot of Leftists would already like to declare me a lawbreaker for my gun ownership, political and religious beliefs, and educational choices for my own children. They just haven't gotten the right tyrant in the power yet. They have a religious view of Progress and a Manichaean worldview that divides people into Decent Human Beings and chuds. Chuds deserved to be silenced, disarmed, barred from employment separated from their own children (who will be forcibly converted into Decent Human Beings by state education)..
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here. He's a "retard" because... he's doing what he was elected to do less than perfectly? Does "retard" here just mean "MAGA shitlord" or is there a more specific meaning you intended? To me, a retard (here I mean "foolish or naive person") would be trying to deport people with the best possible optics in attempt to please both sides while failing to accomplish anything of note because he'd be using a bureaucratic state full of hostile partisans. Under this definition, Trump is clearly not a "retard." Optics and decorum have been effectively weaponized by the Left, and only a retard would allow his supporters' agenda to be stymied by accusations of "racism" or "14 heartbreaking photos"-style manipulation.
You know, I am actually sympathetic to distressed centrists. I never wanted to be an angry partisan, and I am in fact weary and a little ashamed of my partisan thoughts and feelings. At heart I am a disappointed liberal. My world was more pleasant when I thought my fellow countrymen and I just had the same fundamental conceptions of goodness and justice, and we merely disagreed over the best ways to realize both. But it seems undeniable that the worldview of a large segment of the Left and the majority of the Right are actually incompatible and irreconcilable, and the Left believes in their political position with religious fervor. And so, in a great irony, the descendants of those religious men who laid down their arms and embraced Liberalism in order to end all holy wars must now arm themselves against a fanatical religious movement which is the fruit of that same Liberalism.
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| The concern is if you have law enforcement doing wack crazy shit, what if they accidentally pick up a US citizen and because they're operating at a level of "wack and stupid" they get shipped off? We should demand more competency from the government.
This is a concern, yes. This (very valid and very real) concern is true of all law enforcement. What if we arrest or even convict someone of a crime that they did not commit?
The answer is that we sometimes do.
Barring an even more intrusive surveillance state and its associated concerns, this is absolutely inevitable. Which is why there's a vast amount of legal guidelines around the operation of law enforcement, a robust series of protections and legal avenues for challenging the actions of law enforcement, and a free and really vocal press that will scream to high heaven over even legal but visually distasteful operations. These are all good things, great things even. Not flawless - some amount of errors will always occur and we should remain vigilant for them - but they operate well enough to know that your concern is essentially unfounded. If there were a real risk of citizens getting randomly yanked off the street and shipped overseas it would be occurring and we would know about it. ICE is being aggressive in enforcement, sure, but I'm unaware of anyone who was deported without an actual order of deportation. Even edge cases like Abrego Garcia had deportation orders. The due process has been duly delivered by immigration courts. "They have made their decision, now let ICE enforce it!" The system - it works if you let it.
And to the point that ICE is being unnecessarily inflammatory through their actions: I submit that being less invasive did not result in better cooperation or lower rhetoric. When people were (and are) legally detained by ICE after showing up to their hearings there was no end of whining that it was terribly unjust and fascist - why, those people thought they were just going in for a check-up, how dare you then arrest them? It truly does not matter how ICE operates if the other side thinks that (effectively) no person should be deported.
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‘Trump isn’t going after the problematic illegals’ is a reasoned criticism. The guys in a Home Depot parking lot are probably not people I want my kids hanging around with once they’re done with work(I mean, they’re roustabouts), but that doesn’t make them the worst people. The worst ones are outside of employment, making their money off of other illegals or crime.
Now farm and slaughterhouse workers are probably the least problematic ones, when native citizens have the choice between doing those jobs and jail they choose jail. Somebody has to pick the crops and slaughter the chickens and thats a very reasonable principled exception.
I will gladly pay twice as much for strawberries or steak in the U.S. if it means Americans get those jobs. I currently live in Japan, and so I'm already essentially doing that. It's really not that bad.
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I heard an NPR show in which they interviewed chicken slaughterhouse workers. White Americans worked those jobs. They were displaced by illegals.
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Without really wanting to weigh in on whether this statement is true or not, it's at least possible to note that Congress in its wisdom created visa categories (H-2A, H-2B) for these sorts of jobs. Is it completely crazy to think "maybe we should actually use (or expand/modify as necessary) the existing visa program, rather than allow 'anything goes' under the table"?
Although there's probably an interesting tangent on using AI and robotics in slaughterhouses.
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???????
That’s not principled at all.
If your “principle” is “no illegals, except for these specific jobs that natives shouldn’t sully themselves with” then that’s just a comedic farce and the left would absolutely have every right to spit in ICE’s face in that case.
I'm reminded of an ironic line someone posted in a comment back on slatestarcodex or perhaps the subreddit, well before TheMotte was a thing:
I'm also reminded of a discussion I had on the SlateStarCodex subreddit with someone probably around 2020, when they were arguing that Twitter was being perfectly principled in selectively censoring Trump, since they were following the principle of "I don't want Trump to speak" (it might have been some different public figure on some different platform - my memory is fuzzy).
If you make principles sufficiently absolute or sufficiently bespoke, then you can make any behavior principled. Which, sort of like "everything is political," is really just word games, since the entire point of words having meaning is to discriminate between things that match that word and things that don't, and this destroys this ability to discriminate between "principled" and "unprincipled."
Either that, or perhaps it forces people to explicitly declare which principles are involved, forcing people to recognize different principles that each other have that were only implicit until then.
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I'm so confused what your view on immigration is. "I'm fine with immigrants if they do shitty jobs"
So then you're fine with the status quo? What % of illegal immigrants are gang bangers?
My view of immigration is that there is no market clearing price for first world citizens doing a variety of shitty jobs- you can reallocate the limited supply by offering more money, but you cannot get them fully staffed.
Ideally we would let Hondurans come, make lots of money(for them) and then go home and enjoy the purchasing power advantage. But at a certain point it’s on us for being lazy and incompetent.
This is, frankly, absurd. It must misunderstand both components, supply and demand. How is this supposed to work? Does demand for such workers not slope downward? (I would think that as the price of such labor increases, the quantity demanded would go down, as the price of the ultimate products would have to go up, reducing the consumer demand, in turn.) Does supply for such workers not slope upward? How would this work? Are you somehow going to entice fewer workers to take those jobs by offering $X+1 instead of $X?
It's not really a lack of a market clearing price, but if the supply curve is very flat, behavior that looks like that can happen. Suppose there are 10000 people willing to do a job from any price from $10/hr to $100/hr. And there are 3 employers willing to hire a 3333 people for any price between $10/hour and $50/hour. Market clearing price is $10/hour and one person is unemployed. Now another employer pops up, also willing to hire 3333 people for between $10 and $50. At first they offer $11, and they fill all their positions while the other 3 employers end up understaffed. Those employers offer $12 to fill their positions. The new employer offers $13, and so on -- the market clearing price eventually reaches $50 and a bunch of positions go unfilled. And if any of those employers decide they can pay more than $50 (but less than $100), all they do is move the people around and end up at a higher equilibrium price.
A very flat supply curve would, by convention, be nearly perfectly elastic, with the value of elasticity very close to infinity. In contrast, what you go on to describe is a perfectly inelastic supply, with the value of elasticity very close to zero.
This is in pretty sharp contrast to actual measurements of the elasticity of labor supply, which are more like 0.7-1.8. Do you have any sort of empirical support for this claim of (I believe) perfectly inelastic supply (as opposed to your description of the supply curve, which would be perfectly elastic)?
Maybe I'll put off dealing with the demand side until we see if we can make some progress on the supply side. TBH, I've got a bad feeling about this one.
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This has been my position since the Regan amnesty.
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