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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24804 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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The scope of the issue at this point is essentially intractable. The 'brutality' of ICE is partly a calculated effort to change the vibe enough to encourage more self-deportation of illegal immigrants.

I live in a SEA country with roughly 20-30% of the population allegedly made of illegal immigrants from neighboring poorer countries. I see immigration checkpoints and forced deportation of illegals fairly frequently, yet nobody external to this country cares too much about it. Obviously the lack of birthright citizenship in this country means there's far less issues with 'wait one of the 20 people we caught with no paperwork, minimal English and in a sketchy workplace situation was actually born here, MASSIVE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION' that abounds in the West. The vast majority of people with the resources to make it to the USA are facing a low-moderate decrease in living standards from being removed, they're not being sent to Mordor or 'disappeared'

The vast majority of people with the resources to make it to the USA are facing a low-moderate decrease in living standards from being removed, they're not being sent to Mordor

This is fair, and worth repeating. But my primary concern is not with the long-term decrease in living standards once they're back home - my concern is with the inordinate amount of suffering involved in grabbing someone from their home without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years, etc. It's the difference between having to move, and having your house burn down. That (and of course the threat of violence during the raids themselves) is what I referred to as "brutal". That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids. Not the end goal of sending the illegals back to their country of origin.

Nothing can convince me that a not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant morally "deserves" that kind of treatment. You can make a pragmatic argument that, in practice, this is the only way to ensure they are deported at all, because they would otherwise vanish into the night the moment the officers' eyes are off them. But that just begs the question of how we got to that situation. It should not be beyond the state's capacity to "tag" an individual once identified by law enforcement, such that if they have not left the borders within [X] days they can instantly be tracked down and arrested. I'm taking ankle monitors, hell, maybe daily check-ins of some sort. Just something so that no human being has to suffer the inordinate stress and grief of being torn from their home literally overnight without the chance to put their affairs in order - an amount of suffering which is totally out of proportion with the very diffuse amount of harm that any given not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant causes by their continued presence in a host country.

without letting them [wind down their life here]

They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?

That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids.

I'd rather them prosecute the traffickers directly, but "daring to remove trafficked humans" might legitimately be the most punishment for the pro-trafficking faction that the anti-trafficking faction can muster.

They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?

Quoting myself from elsewhere in the thread:

I don't think human psychology is such that a mass message of this kind is fungible with a personal "you, yes you, we know who and where you are - you need to scram" notification, for much the same reason that a big sign that says 'don't step on the grass' is not as effective as a guard personally yelling 'hey, you, with the ugly sweater, get off the grass' - even though, in the latter case, many more people will comply with the verbal command than escalate to physical violence. We can wish human behavior were more rational, but you've got to work with what you've got.

Sure, but what actually happened here was half the country going "here's a free plane ticket, come on in, we'll never enforce this law, and you should ignore it- the guard may personally tell you you're in violation but he can't do anything, don't worry".

The guard now has the power to enforce the law, and has proceeded to do that.

without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years

As the reply to you states, a good chunk of these are already in the "this is the time you have to pack your bags and say goodbye" stage. For the ones that have not, they've been on notice since January 2025 when some official got on TV and said the guard's power was coming back, and literally half the nation (and statistically, where the trafficked humans are most likely to live) went into hysterics about "the guard is finally removing people".

Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.

It might not be their fault they were there, but I'm not actually owed special protection from things that are not my fault, and trying to force me to grant it is an injury much like removing trafficked humans is to you. You could have bargained to change that law, and compromised with me, but you didn't do that. So, by Golden Rule Your Rules, Fairly...

Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.

No, but the nice thing about killing enemy soldiers is that it's almost perfectly symmetrical. You are killing them to prevent them from killing you (or your countrymen): the nature of the harm you are inflicting on them is exactly isomorphic to the evil that you are trying to prevent by doing so. In contrast, I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a given deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American. It's basically a torture-vs-dust-specks problem.

I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American.

Good for you. I do not.

Stealing a cent from everyone would make you very rich; when punished, it looks disproportionate- wasn't it only a mere cent from everyone?
Can't you spare an extra cent?

But it's not about the extra cent, it's about removing the people who have it normalized that cents are available to steal; that's why we punish white-collar criminals when they do this.

(And to the extent that it makes the traffickers feel bad- it should, and "making them feel bad as punishment" is a salient thing, because the way they trafficked the humans was also stealing, though of political power rather than directly financial. Now, that theft is being prosecuted, and the thief's final argument, "but you were bad for being able to afford it and refusing to", is just DARVO.)

Would you care to elaborate on that? It seems very hard for me to picture how a given illegal immigrant, individually, is doing any kind of "harm" to anyone at all. Sure, in some distant sense they're contributing the continuing existence of an economy in which it becomes substantially harder for a certain class of American workers to find a job, and, from there, to all sorts of unpleasant second-order effect on the economy - but that guy in particular - one illegal immigrant more or less - is not going to make a measurable difference in anybody's lived experience. Removing 500,000 illegal immigrants, yes, that gets to making a substantial difference to a lot of citizens' lives. But removing any one guy? As far as I can tell, the effect size is indistinguishable from zero. I don't just mean that the effect is very small; it's that the immediate practical consequences are so irrelevant to the broad market forces at work that that guy's disappearance is not going to reshape the economy one iota, and consequently Americans' collective quality of life will not be improved at all.

Or are you coming at this from the other end, and disagreeing about how traumatic and painful being grabbed overnight would be? That seems even stranger to me.

it's that the immediate practical consequences are so irrelevant to the broad market forces at work that that guy's disappearance is not going to reshape the economy one iota, and consequently Americans' collective quality of life will not be improved at all.

Yeah, that was the argument that the traffickers made about how all this would improve the economy.

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