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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.
Trump brought this on himself.
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty. Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics. There are documented cases of people being deported to random nations, a few people have been disappeared (from public tracking, limiting a family's visibility into where a loved one is) and there's a general allergy to due process. Horrible optics.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer.
Literally randos.(I retract my statement, I was wrong here)There is reason that police & military training take time. Using a gun for law enforcement is a heavy responsibility. ICE is picking untrained civilians, giving them guns and asking them to go be bounty hunters.Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else. Given that most illegal immigrants are brown, I can see why democrats would believe that the average ICE agent is a raging racist too.
If Democrats believe what they claim to believe, then their actions are in line with those values. ICE agents look like an angry paramilitary that a dictator would deploy against his populace. People believe what they see. Democrats are cherry picking, but the cherry picked images are still real images.
It may be treason. It may not. An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter. In your characterization, when the state oversteps its powers to oppose the federal govt, it is treason.
Now, both parties have operated in a maximally oppositional manner since Obama was elected. The adversarial nature has only gotten further amplified with every subsequent President. Given the way laws are written, both parties fight it out in the massive grey area between words. States vs Federal tussles are the most common form of inter-party warfare. This is business as usual. The system leaves it to Courts to decide what the bounds of this grey area are.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason. Given that no one have been convicted of Treason since WW2, I think you're being hyperbolic.
I'm confused. Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.
Trump is the President and central figure to America's current polarization. If there is a civil war, it will be because of him. As the one in power, the onus is on Trump to reduce the temperature.
Give me the power of mainstream media, and I can portray a "free school lunch" program as having the optics with the greatest cruelty. Like why, after everything that we discussed here overe the years, should anyone, including left-wingers, take any of these declarations seriously?
But regardless of media spin they are actively choosing to have insane optics. The Hyundai plant. Tiktok videos with the pokemon theme song "gotta catch em all" on what I thought was a very serious topic that required significant government resources.
Also, again, they'd be way more justified if this wasn't so obviouslyfake. They don't actually want to solve this, they just want the base to think they are. It undermines all of it.
Where is e-verify? Why are they not going after illegal immigrants in hotels? Or farms? Why aren't they going after american employers, all of whom are documented, who make up a much smaller # of entities to deal with? American citizens pay illegal immigrants American dollars to work. Go after them! That's so much easier, that's so much more effective. Illegal immigrants will deport themselves if they can't make money to send home, they're not here for fun.
Hotels looks like straight forwards corruption to me, but there isn’t really a replacement for illegal labor on farms. This would be a principled exception literally anyone makes. You can get farm work done by taking advantage of wage differentials(these guys think they’re making n Dakota oil money) or through forced labor. There is no other option.
Correct, they’re not here for fun. But, the average daily wage for the paid in cash underclass in the US is similar to the average weekly wage for the normal working class in Mexico, which is the wealthiest of the countries these people are coming from. I really don’t think you’re going to solve the economic case with a few laws when señora cleaning one house a week for cash makes more than she would with a full time job in the old country. You’d have to make ATM’s illegal.
I find the view "I'm against illegal immigrants except for farm worker ones they're fine" incomprehensible
That's just being fine with illegal immigration with extra steps.
I disagree, it's simply looking at the tradeoffs of enforcement within certain contexts. If the harm of enforcement within a certain context would be greater than the benefits, that doesn't invalidate enforcement everywhere.
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Uh, what do you want done instead of immigrants on farms?
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