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This forum basically presents the cause of protests in Minneapolis as "blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced". If this claim is controversial, I can back it up by linking several comments from last week saying as such, so I hope you don't feel strawmanned if you're broadly anti-protestor.
I want to present the claim that what ICE is doing in Minneapolis is inefficient at its stated goals, broadly unlawful/lawless, and disproportionate. I'm going to steelman the cause of the protestors - why it's good to go around notifying others of ICE's presence, making noise, and generally annoying them. I'm not going to support any form of unlawful action with this post, as I think it's wrong and unwise for one's personal safety to get into fights with law enforcement - but I'm going to explain why 10,000 people took to the streets in Minneapolis on Friday.
I'm using Gemini to get stats for this post, but all of the writing is entirely my own. Many of the examples I take are drawn from a recent twitter thread
In 2025, there were roughly 15,000 violent crimes in the entire state of Minnesota. Let us assume all of them occurred in Minneapolis, all of them were committed by a different illegal immigrant who was immediately released on bail or sentenced to ten minutes by liberal activist judges and then released, and all of those illegals reside in Minneapolis today. 170 murderers, 2159 rapes, 2836 robberies, 9826 aggravated assaults, all of them committed by a different illegal immigrant who is now at large in Minneapolis.
ICE has deployed approximately 3000 federal agents to Minneapolis. Supposing ICE is in fact, after the bad guys, they should probably be done by now, because they only had to arrest five people each in order to get all of the highly criminal illegals out.
The problem is, they keep wasting their time by engaging in completely lawless and unbelievable actions. These have a few flavours:
a) Firstly, as shown in many videos, ICE takes time out of their day to stop and question, photograph, detain, and arrest people for blowing whistles near them, yelling at them, and generally being annoying. I sympathize that these agents have some legitimate fears of the public, there are bad dudes who want to hurt cops. But it seems uncertain that any of these actions are actually intended to promote their safety, rather than intimidate protestors. Take a look at what started the entire Alex Pretti confrontation - they pepper sprayed a woman for what purpose, with what justification?
b) Secondly, the current immigration enforcement protocol seems to act on people who prosecutorial discretion should be utilized for, and has very consistently in the past, and then the government doesn't even bother to defend its acts to judges. Take this case, wherein we have a highly sympathetic detainee - but someone who nonetheless, I acknowledge, ordered removed many years ago, but not yet removed. That said, the government's position to the judge isn't even that they should do this, are allowed to do this, or want to do this - they literally offered no argument as to why she shouldn't be released. No, seriously, they submitted a three sentence response that said "we have no argument to present" - and then didn't just release the person themselves, without being ordered to? Why not? For what purpose does the government take actions that it does not represent to a court that it agrees with? For what purpose does the government require judges and court costs to issue orders to make them take actions that they have no argument to oppose?
Here's another case, this one directly out of Minnesota. Again, ICE should have plenty of evil criminals and pedophiles and whatnot to chase down - how and why do they have the time to go get this guy who appears to be causing no issues, other than being illegal? I understand that in the minds of many, that is sufficient, and that anyone who's illegal should be deported - ok, but what is pursuing that goal worth? Is it worth sending agents of the state to chase people down? The optimal level of any crime isn't zero, there are costs in lives, time, and tax dollars to enforce any law, and sending the government door to door for this guy is an insane waste of resources.
c) Thirdly, many of ICE's immigration enforcement actions are beyond "prosecutorial discretion should be used" - and thus, making the case for protest more important - they are actually lawless and illegal themselves. Take this case out of Minnesota. Let's assume that whatever this minor criminal history described is, it's highly objectionable, and this guy should be deported. You cannot just detain and deport someone with a pending application for lawful permanent residency, who is otherwise following the rules. If you want to deport him, you should file the paperwork to adjust his status, and give him a chance to contest it. This one is even more egregious - forget the tearjerking identity of the person arrested, just focus on the facts. This person applied for refugee status on entry, was vetted, and granted refugee status. The position of the administration, contrary to the law, appears to be that they can just arrest and detain anyone foreign present in the United States, even if they followed the rules. This is utterly lawless. Suppose that the Biden administration made a terrible mistake, and this woman is in fact a Burmese spy or a fugitive war criminal - how likely is it that figuring that out requires physical detention without warning? Has DHS actually raised a national security concern here? No - they're simply sweeping up whomever they can find, arresting people with valid paperwork, who entered lawfully, on the basis that the government has decided it wants to re-think prior decisions. This policy is illegal, cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. This is what ICE is doing in Minnesota - illegally kidnapping lawful migrants. If this alone is not worth taking to the streets to protest, what is?
d) Fourthly, and most importantly IMO, there are much better mechanisms to get to where ICE wants to go. We already have a surveillance state for the IRS that involves essentially all banking institutions and Paypal. Why won't Congress pass any number of measures that would criminalize, fine, and prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants? If the economic opportunity were much more limited, nobody would jump the border if they couldn't feed themselves after! This would have immediate negative consequences for mostly red states, however, it would likely gut their economies in short order.
The whole reason ICE is in Minneapolis has nothing to do with criminal illegal immigrants. The federal government has decided that it wants to send poorly trained, armed, and disguised agents to a city, to intimidate and cause chaos. Those who condemn the protests miss the point - the point is to show that they're not intimidated! And this is why various administration figures spend their time slandering protestors, because the goal isn't to arrest (Criminal/Illegal/Previously Prosecutorially Discretion Tolerated, pick a combo) people, or even to reduce the number of illegal immigrants living in the USA. If that were the goal, there are cheaper, faster, easier methods that don't risk the life of any agents, unless you think Tyson Foods executives are going to shoot at federal agents if their HQ gets raided. The entire operation is political theater, not a sincere attempt at policy enforcement, and utterly illegitimate from conception.
Two other arguments that I see made frequently here are:
a) All of this is necessary because of Sanctuary Policies that the Police Don't Co-Operate with DHS, so ICE Must Go Looking For The Criminals. Why don't they hang out outside the county jail and question people on their immigration status there on their release? Why don't they hang out at the courthouse - recall, a judge was just convicted of obstruction for preventing ICE from arresting someone at a hearing, they can sit in the gallery and question everyone's immigration status at the end of every hearing! You would be much more likely to arrest people guilty of criminal acts if you did this, than going door to door and getting into fights with protestors.
b) If nobody protested or interfered, then there would be much less chaos - aren't you giving Trump what he wants? Largely, no - Trump recognized pretty quickly once he watched the Renee Good video that it was regrettable and would hurt his poll numbers and his statements reflect that. Furthermore, no, I think it's good and justifiable that people protest when the state decides to waste tax dollars and commit illegal acts while acting like an occupying force rather than servants of the public! My least favourite (former) congressional representative makes the point rather well here. The behaviour of the feds, to inefficiently pursue questionable goals of questionable legality with strongarm tactics is to blame. It is the sign of a healthy, engaged citizenry that ten thousand people decided to go out in extremely cold temperatures and make their voices heard, peacefully.
Except for the violence, peaceful.
The protestors are not causing the violence, this time. No looting, no burning cop cars, no trashing local businesses…
https://x.com/Breaking911/status/2015632802838888839
Pathetically whacking the hotel’s sign with a snow shovel is a far cry from, say, the BLM riots, or the anti-ICE riots in Cali a few months back. Vandalism is still bad but it’s not on the same level as what would be implied, to me, by “violence” (it’s not looting, it’s not arson, it’s not even trashing the hotel that’s being picketed). No one, including ICE agents, has been injured or killed by a protestor in Minneapolis.
Edit: immediately after posting I remembered that the agent who shot Renee Good had been bruised by her car. So, correction, one person has been injured by Minneapolis protestors, and none killed.
That they're ineffectively violent does not make them not violent.
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To me this is a Trump-esque kill shot.
Nothing has changed from the BLM days - with sufficient media cover you can do whatever you want and it will be painted as both good and not what it actually was.
Meanwhile our country spirals apart from a preponderance of failures of institutions and people being allowed to and encouraged to believe total absurdities.
OP just wrote a lot of words that are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and we upvote that because that is what we do while Rome burns.
I might disagree in that things have changed for the worse, but otherwise agree with the sentiment.
Unfortunately, Fight Club is down the hall. Here at Learned Gentlemen's
SupperDiscussion Club (food and drinks no longer offered), fiddling and updooting is about all that remains. With something like the OP here, I find it difficult to offer any insightful commentary when I see galaxy-brain mistake theory takes that read like they are an elaborate cover for conflict theory.More options
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Indeed, so one can believe the first statement (or at least for the purposes here, leave it aside), and believe that your (a) explains the game-theoretic place that got us here. Immigration enforcement could largely be carried out by local/state law enforcement, they don't need to do a whole lot beyond sharing fingerprints with DHS (an Obama initiative).
In this game, the next move will be for those jurisdictions not to arrest illegals (already the case in CA) and, when possible, to allow them to attend court via Zoom (already in MN/IL/NY). That's why "how did we get here" is important.
So too did the thousands of people in Birmingham and Montgomery that went out to oppose desegregation. And insofar as they weren't obstructing kids from attending school, that's their prerogative, but it doesn't make them right. Indeed, the whole point of free expression is that they get to express themselves regardless of the correctness of their position.
And to the extent that "voices heard" is an organization intent on obstructing law enforcement or aiding & abetting criminals, then we should do what JFK did in the 60s: send in the 101^st airborne.
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ICE can't arrest anyone efficiently when they're being obstructed and protested. Isn't that what you're asking for?
Because dragnet enforcement is very legally fraught when local officials won't cooperate by providing access to records, defendants, warrants, etc.
Like, I don't get it, you're asking why ICE can't act more moderately while supporting the very protests that are obstructing them from acting moderately! Why is my steak so overcooked, I only asked for it well done.
ICE (et al.) do not currently have any credibility that they would act moderately and reasonably. Have they apologised or even admitted error for sending innocent people to a foreign torture prison? Have they apologised for detaining someone for writing a milquetoast op ed? Have they apologised for calling people their agents have shot assassins and terrorists based on zero evidence?
Until they express that they have not been acting moderately, and express a desire to change, I don't buy that the protesters are doing anything but revealing abuses that were already happening. Yeah, these specific clashes with protesters wouldn't be happening. But I don't believe that they have any desire or intention to prevent equally egregious actions from happening when the cameras aren't on.
"ICE doesn't have any credibility because I believe in fake news"
That's more or less how that parses to me. "Sending innocent people to a foreign torture prison?" El Salvador was the murder capital of the world until Bukele locked up all the gangs, so now ICE can't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele will put some in jail? Ridiculous, realize your own part in escalating this conflict because leftist rioters think we aren't allowed to legally deport people the easy way. ICE could be deporting convicted criminals straight out of jail, it would be the easiest thing in the world, all it takes is local officials cooperating with ICE -- oh, but that hurts leftwing bleeding heart feelings so we can't do that.
That is not what happened. Venezuelans, some of whom had not been accused of any crime and were in the middle of asylum cases, were deported to El Salvador with the understanding that they would be sent to CECOT, with the US paying El Salvador for this service. By all accounts "torture prison" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe CECOT, "concentration camp" is another word one could use and only be exaggerating a little. As far as I can tell, no official has apologized for this or outlined what steps will be taken to prevent something equally horrifying from happening again.
I'm not sure how the other two things I listed could be considered fake news either.
Call me a bleeding heart all you like, but this administration cannot be trusted to treat deportees humanely, and so, well I would generally agree that sanctuary city policies go too far, loosening them right now is a terrible idea.
It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for this position.
Tens of millions of illegal immigrants came into this country over decades, then President Biden enabled millions more. They made an app so anyone could apply for asylum and wait in the US while their claims processed (designed to take years if they ever even happened). Welfare, work authorization, no verification. Crime, gangs, murderers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, the works. People came pouring into this country. The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us. You don’t want to cooperate with ICE, ok, then we are going to have to focus on deporting the illegals who aren’t sitting in jail cells. And some of them, I assume, are good people.
And we’re not going to give them all trials, they’re here illegally, deportation is their due process. Maybe in a gentler time we could have been nicer. That time is over because our immigration process was abused by the same bleeding heart liberals saying we can’t deport criminals. Cry me a river, give me a break. I don’t care if a few hundred Venezuelans with gang tattoos get deported to an El Salvadoran jail. It’s fake news of the media to suggest that we’re just kidnapping random legal immigrants and putting them in death camps.
Can Trump be trusted to deport immigrants humanely? No, because you made that impossible. This is what you wanted, this is what sanctuary cities are. We don’t have law anymore. We let in millions of immigrants and millions of criminals then said we aren’t even allowed to deport the ones who were so bad they still ended up in jail. Ok, what’s your next move? You can protest and riot in the streets and incite more bleeding hearts to pick fights with cops until more people get shot. Humane! As long as the bleeding hearts feel good.
But @Eleocharis wasn't even talking about the gentleness or lack thereof of the deportation process! The point is that the US specifically arranged for them to be shipped to the torture prison, as opposed to neutrally dumping them back in their home country and letting events take their course. "We shouldn't under any circumstances actively pay Bukele to put people in his torture prison" is pretty fucking different from "we shouldn't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele might put some of them in the torture prison".
We couldn't deport them to Venezuela because Venezuela was run by Maduro, who refused to accept them.
Moreover this framing of El Salvador's prisons as a "torture prison" is inherently a little dishonest. Define "torture". In Sweden they would call American prisons torturous because we don't give criminals Xbox and weed. Singapore still uses the cane. El Salvador had a massive gang problem, the highest murder rate in the world, they put all the criminals in jail. That's bad, apparently. Now we're not allowed to deport gang members there because liberal journalists say it's inhumane, we're more enlightened than that. Why do I have to accept this characterization of Bukele's jails as "torture prisons"? It's a prison, it's not supposed to be fun.
"Deliberately inflicting serious physical pain on an individual" seems like a good, no-frills definition that avoids relativistic semantic creep where any less-than-maximally-homely prison can be called a "torture prison". I am not trying to play language games here, I am talking about the thing where CECOT detainees are allegedly beaten to the point of injury on a regular basis - not even as a punitive measure for specific documented misbehavior within the prison, but at the whim of the prison staff, including an hour-long beating meted out to all newcomers. You don't have to be a Scandinavian hyper-altruist to think that this is barbarous conduct that the US should on no account be condoning, let alone subsidizing.
(I'm not a fan of corporal punishment as it exists in Singapore, but that's still a different story. Caning over there is an actual judicial sentence, carried out in an orderly, controlled way with proper healthcare provided to the convict afterwards. This may not be our civilization, but it's recognizably a civilized process with limited scope. And even then, I still think the US paying Singapore to cane people would be a step too far.)
If you want to argue that the reports of the beatings etc. at CECOT are fabricated, well, color me skeptical, but that's a factual disagreement I can live with. If the reports are accurate, however, I don't think there's anything hyperbolic about calling it a "torture prison".
Well, tough. Where was the famous Trump bravado then? The principled thing to do in the face of such an unreasonable demand, IMO, was clearly to call Maduro's bluff and just fly them to Venezuela anyway. If Venezuelan authorities don't want to take them into custody, just set'em loose outside the airport. If my neighbor's aggressive dog hops over the fence and starts causing property damage in my yard, it's not actually up to him whether I toss the dog back over to his side of the fence. That's just… ridiculous. Particularly if I'm a zillion times stronger and wealthier and influential than said neighbor. (It'd certainly take something more than an Official Refusal from him for me to even consider paying out of my own pocket to place the dog into the custody of some third party, never mind whether that third party would abuse the dog or not.)
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I thought their home country refused them, as would be sensible for known criminals
From what I remember from reading on Kilmar - when you apply for asylum, you generally also apply for 2 other forms of protection. One is based on torture, one is based on nonrefoulment (dont return peoole to dangerous counties). But basically when you apply for asylum, you can also say "dont return me to my home country becauase theyll torture me". And sometimes you are able to get orders to not be deported to a certain country, even while being denied asylum. Which basically means (until recently, maybe?) they get to stay. So it might be that as much as home country not taking them.
I think what was happening with both Kilmar and CERCOT was that Trump admin was basically playing hardball. People were getting a bunch of nonrefoulment type protections from being returned to their home country, the bar to get that was lower, and then they could more or less just stay. And trumps response was to say "ok, maybe we cant send you back to Venezuela, but instead we can send you to a third counry, like South Sudan or El Salvador." The chance of being sent to south sudan or rwanda or whereever would nuke incentives to apply for certain protections.
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The problem is that if you want to actually get through the ~8M folks that need to be deported at 500-700K a year, you need a durable political coalition that can actually keep it up for 10-12 years.
That won't happen if you piss off enough of the marginal bleeding hearts that there is no way to do it. A paroxysm of 4 years of Trump's ICE (which he's already pulled back on, less than 9 months out) won't actually accomplish your goal.
People seem to forget that outsmarting your opponents is an allowed move in politics. Try harder not to be outsmarted.
Actually I think the Right could lean in to due process as a meme here -- especially with regards to folks who have had asylum denied, had their chance to appeal to the BIA and already ignored a final order of removal.
And yes, for those folks, deportation is the right next step. For those at other stages, they deserve some notice and a solid (5 days? 10 days?) chance to self-deport.
Sorry, your enemies were never going to just let you do it. "Bleeding hearts have a veto so we have to do what they want!" You'll do things the "moderate" and "humane" way and then they'll say it still isn't good enough and you need to do better. This is how you lose before you even try.
Everything Trump is doing right now is the moderate option. This is all right and just. We are going to deport illegal aliens and criminals no matter how many blue voters say we aren't allowed because it's mean.
Midterm elections are in 9 months. One way to lose is by declining to try, but another way to lose is deciding to try really hard, fucking everything up badly in a highly legible way, and being booted out of your position.
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Politically moderate and factually moderate are different things.
And yes, of course the median voter has a veto, that’s representative government. The point was doing it without losing the median voter and without getting outsmarted by your opponents.
Of course a party or a politician can decide to just go balls out for a few years and get whalloped. But it won’t lead to a long term accomplishments.
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What do you consider would be the non-moderate option?
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It seems to me as an external outlier that quite a few of the 'heartbreaking story of peaceful productive illegal immigrant removed stories' are these people, though. Cases where they entered the USA in 2005 or whatever, have explicitly run through all of their options for appeals over the course of a decade and have then wandered off the reservation till occasionally picked up on the current day. Even the OP mentioned with the Grandma who had explicitly received a final order of removal.
Also hasn't a soft-amnesty and opportunity to self deport also been provided with an additional payment to those who take it up?
I feel like those are the least sympathetic such cases. People that were ordered removed by the Obama administration and just refused, well, even Obama was in favor of deporting them (and his clip of 3M over his 8 years is comparable enough to Trump's run rate of 500K a year).
The most sympathetic cases are something like "immigrant goes to ICE appointment, has existing status yanked and is arrested right on the spot".
Granted some large proportion of those existing legal statuses were Biden-era bullshit, I'm not defending that they were justified, but a lot of those folks did have a valid-on-paper withholding of removal. And while the left doesn't acknowledge it as legitimate, the same law that makes it possible for the Biden AG to grant WoR also justified the Trump AG revoking WoR on the spot. Still, it's bad look as compared to giving them notice that WoR is being revoked, a chance to try the process and appeal through the BIA and ultimate removal if they ignore their legal duty to leave.
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Ah yes, those bleeding heart liberals worrying about things like due process and the rule of law and, uh, preventing torture.
I guess don't be surprised that people actually believe in these things and are willing to put their lives on the line for them. Sure seems like it would be a lot better to, say, propose a bill to change laws around asylum etc., but for some reason those who are currently in power don't seem interested in doing that.
Yeah that's how they get you, first they say it's just about basic due process and preventing torture, then suddenly we're not allowed to deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. The bleeding hearts who let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants are now concerned about the rule of law. We're not acting out this inverse morality play anymore. Let's deport this shadow society of tens of millions of criminals who are outside the rule of law first.
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
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I mean you can decide that your goals are so important that you can just steamroll any objections. I think most people have enough of a view of history to know where that tends to end up (30 thousand dead Iranians in the streets anyone?) but I guess you think this time is different? I'll stick with liberalism and democracy, thanks.
People who think like you have plenty of power within the system right now to make changes in the direction you want. Every time the Vice President of the United States blatantly lies about the motives of someone who the government just killed, you lose some of that power. Seems like everybody would be better off if that power was used to pass a law tightening the asylum process rather than kidnapping random minorities off the streets of Minneapolis.
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I don't think it actually works like this, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him. What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Which, fair, if you want to criticize blue states for that, I think it's totally a valid point of argument. But if your contention is that we should instead be able to eject somebody from the country the moment they're convicted of rape or murder or drug smuggling or what have you, that's a problem with federal law, and one that Congress, not sanctuary cities, is actually capable of tackling. As far as I know, Jose Ibarra, the murderer who killed Laken Riley, is still sitting in a Georgia prison, and will be for the rest of his life. And there aren't any sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia.
It's 8 USC 1231(a)4.
If every one was going to languish in prison eternally, though... well, someone would complain about wasted tax dollars, but it wouldn't get that much of the Red Tribe's dander up. The problem's that a far greater number end up revolving door inmates.
Sometimes. Most sanctuary cities/states will comply with ICE detainers for "serious felons" being released from prison, specifically, though the dividing line there gets messy since many sanctuary cities also have standing policies by their prosecutors to "consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences as a factor in reaching a resolution". They usually won't for those completing a jail or noncustodial sentence, and will almost never do so where they've arrested an illegal immigrant and choose to not bring charges. Many will also refuse to notify the feds on finding undocumented immigrants and some specifically prohibit releasing immigration-related information: this is probably illegal where enforced by law, but it still happens.
I strongly suspect the federal law making this illegal is unconstitutional under general principles of state sovereignty and anti-commandeering.
The Supreme Court acknowledged something similar in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) when they stated that state officials could help enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act "if they choose... unless prohibited by state legislation." By implication, a state may legislate to prohibit officials from helping enforce federal laws; Northern states quickly took them up on that implication. I don't believe any court directly addressed any requirements for notification, but it seems to go with the general principle.
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I'm not speaking on the legality of this because I don't know and don't care what the current legal situation is. But, this seems perfectly reasonable to me. If their asylum cases had not been resolved in their favor, what makes them entitled to be in the United States? The impression I get from comments like this is that our asylum/refugee system has essentially worked like this: get to the border somehow, say magic words that trigger asylum/refugee case (that you are fed by activist organizations that coach you), get let into the United States with some maybe-in-future court date that might resolve your asylum case years down the line. Until then, you basically have free run of the country and can disappear trivially.
Frankly this system seems absolutely ridiculous. I don't know why we accept asylum seekers at all, there's no reason for it. And the faster we can dismantle this absurd system and start deporting the people abusing it the better.
The United States accepts asylum seekers because of laws such as the Refugee Act of 1980, which was passed into law by legitimately elected democratic representatives.
Perhaps you should petition your elected representatives to change the laws to do so. Until then, the United States has offered people a legal process to be allowed to live in a country, and if they are taking part in that process exactly how they are supposed to, it is obviously not legitimate or moral to suddenly deport them to a torture prison because you don't like what the laws say.
Yes but it was contingent on a good faith application and used in a world with far more poverty and random bloodshed. Decades of concept drift, deliberate gaming of the system and the inherent tendency of a judicial system to continuously swing more permissive as cases accumulate have then produced the current metagame.
The vast majority of these asylum applications are simply contigent on the processing timeline being so long (due to the sheer weight of frivolous applications) that you can easily apply without any real expectation of actually getting it then frolic around randomly whilst you wait. This is playing out consistently across essentially all developed Western democracies
This really seems like a case where you should petition your elected representatives to change the laws. If our legislators actually started legislating that would help a lot with the current power struggles between the judicial and executive branches, and maybe having their constituents getting on their case for failing to legislate would help with that.
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As I said in the post you're replying to:
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Democrats seem to get to just ignore immigration laws they don’t like (sanctuary cities), it seems regrettable but reasonable for Republicans to do the same.
Sanctuary cities have been the subject of various legal challenges which have generally determined that cities and states are not compelled to enforce or assist with federal immigration law.
Again, it would be completely reasonable for the Republicans, who control the legislative and executive branches and have a favourable Supreme Court, to change how the asylum system works. They aren't doing that!
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what specific features of CECOT that distinguish it as a torture prison?
That inmates there report things such as:
"Four guards grabbed me. And they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall; that was when they broke one of my teeth." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/men-on-beatings-in-salvadoran-prison-after-deportation-from-us-60-minutes-transcript/
Yeah, but what did he do?
Why are you asking me a question that is both readily answered by reading the linked article and completely irrelevant to whether CECOT can be characterized as a torture prison?
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What specifically did Eleocharis assert do you think is fake news?
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If it's Abrego Garcia he's referring to, ICE actually DID admit error.
To be clear, what happened is that a lawyer, against instructions, admitted that it was an error, and was fired for it. I do not believe that the official position of the administration has ever been to admit that error, although I could be wrong.
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This is merely a function of what gets reported on. The vast majority of arrests and deportations around the country are conducted peacefully, with fewer officers, and without any bright lights or fanfare. ICE are moderate and reasonable in all places except where they face immoderate and unreasonable opposition.
If the media would report on every altercation where ICE officers professionally deescalated a situation, every instance where they peacefully detained a convicted criminal, or reported all the successful operations conducted with the cooperation of local law enforcement, then ICE would have all the credibility.
There is really very little evidence that ICE is actually doing a bad job, but just that they make mistakes when repeatedly put in very difficult and dangerous scenarios, but would the local police, national guard, or any other law enforcement agency do better in the same circumstances? That is really not clear at all, but the media is making it seem so. The BLM riots killed more than 2 people, and yet very many good people kept supporting those. In fact, one might say they've only killed 2 protesters so far! Is that high or low relative to the circumstances they are working with? I don't really know, but I also know the truth doesn't matter to anyone. The question is just whether those deaths can be used to pursue political goals. ICE are just losing the propaganda war, because they're outmanned and outgunned.
That seems like a far more principled defense than actually justifying some of this stuff.
Instead you have Homan and Bovino talking out of their asses.
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If ICE owned up to mistakes, apologized, and indicated that they would try to do better, I would agree with you. But I see them doing exactly the opposite, do you disagree?
I believe that negative press attention is currently the only thing actually restraining them.
Restraining them from what? Were they unrestrained until they decided to go to Minnesota? Are they unrestrained in Mississippi where by most accounts they are going about their business without much incident? Where they have been unimpeded they don't seem to need much restraining. I have seen little convincing evidence that ICE has been operating particularly egregiously. There are many stories, but many are misleading when you look into the details. Some mistakes are inevitable, and the problem they are trying to put a dent in is very very big. If they didn't make some mistakes, then I'd know they weren't trying.
I don't like having federal agents out there asking people for their papers; I don't like the idea of having ICE run massive enforcement operations in American cities. I don't like any of it, and I am suspicious of all federal authority. I really would prefer a world where none of this was necessary. I probably would enjoy the company of the vigilantes more than the ICE agents. This is all a clusterfuck at least 30 years in the making, but we are where we are, and the Great Immigration Enforcement Defection cannot go unanswered, and it sucks. It risks major civil conflict that could, in the worst case scenario, spiral into the destruction of the entire union, but that risk is still better than the alternative.
Frankly, I am not sure ICE or the administration has anything to gain by admitting mistakes much less apologizing, because I don't think that would earn them any good faith or leniency. Both sides immediately stake out maximally extreme interpretations of events to see what they can get away with. When push back occurs, both sides quietly shift their arguments but never acknowledge changing their mind about anything. They're essentially bartering, trying to get the best "deal" that serves their interests and goals. Conceding ground on anything just gives your enemy an advantage. Reality is negotiable and truth is for dorks. The right has been learning from the left.
From, for example, deporting people directly to a foreign torture prison. I fully believe the decision-makers would still be doing things like that if not for negative press attention.
None of the things I initially listed can be characterised as mistakes. Sure, agents can make bad decisions in the heat of the moment, agents can be acting on bad information, whatever. But deporting people to CECOT is a policy, not a mistake. Somebody made the conscious decision to detain Ozturk over an op ed, and to continue to detain her long after it was clear she had done nothing wrong. High-ranking officials made the decision to refer to Good as a terrorist and Pretti as an assassin. Someone decided that 42 days was an appropriate training period for new ICE agents. Somebody made it policy that agents shouldn't wear uniforms, but should wear masks. Somebody decided that they were going to investigate Good's widow.
Those are the things that need to be owned up to to convince me that the administration wants to maintain the rule of law, human rights and so on. As far as I can tell they don't actually think those things are more important than mass deportation, so they will of course never be able to credibly convince me that they do.
This one specifically seems fine to me? It’s possible that she committed solicitation to commit a crime of violence by telling Renee, “drive baby drive,” while an ICE agent was in front of her car. Probably not, but you’d want to at least kick the tires and ask for an interview.
That's fair, probably shouldn't be in that list. It's clearly not being done in good faith though when they are not investigating the ice agents involved.
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I find the pretense of caring about employers a sanewashing exercise, a firmer straw grasped in the sea of bad excuses of why the state is wrong to enforce borders. "Its hypocrisy!" is currently the complaint of choice because "its morally good!" got destroyed as an argument by voting populations repeatedly. The enemy is the evil white man, so every effort must be made to support those the evil white men hate, which is what sets me as a good white man away from the evil white man.
This complaint that ICE is bad is proceduralist wheelgumming. Whats the end objective of this complaint? Better ICE practices? Deporting actual criminals exclusively? Noninterference with peaceful protestors? Every wargame ends with "never deport illegals". Garcia Zarate killed a US citizen and for that he was acquited of his crimes and deported just like his previous deportations and allowed to saunter back in effortlessly. Complaining that ICE is targeting US citizens is just the latest attempt to stymie any attempt at The Bad Guys (white men) getting any win at all.
Employing illegals likely also involves financial crimes. After all, they do not have a social security number, so how are you paying social security for them? Even making sure they pay income taxes would create a paper trail most employers would likely avoid.
I would argue that the median case of illegal employment is not the woke Starbucks owner who employs an illegal out of her kindness of heart and spends as much money on him as on her legal employees.
Rather, it is some farmer or hotel owner who systematically employs illegals at wages which would not attract legal workers.
I am enough of a classical leftist to believe that freedom of contract should not be unlimited. There are cases where both parties agree to a transaction, and it is still exploitative. Sex work, selling your kidney, renting your womb, indentured servitude, or working with dangerous machines or chemicals are all fields where governments restrict the freedom of individuals to make contracts (sometimes beyond what is appropriate) with the aim to protect one party, and possibly also to protect society from the negative externalities of the transaction. (For employing illegals, these externalities certainly exist -- if an illegal working as a farmhand in Texas needs urgent medical care, the costs of that will be paid by the US society, not by him or his employer.)
I have read here the argument that tolerating illegals will create an underclass without rights which can be exploited by others, and I find it sound. Of course, the efforts of the Trump administration have not changed this situation for the better, now people being exploited in certain industries will be exempt from deportation while their exploitation continues, which gives their employers more power.
"Form a farmhand union you say? You're fired. Now watch me as I call the DHS tipline to report an illegal not employed in a Sanctuary Industry."
And Trump's abortive attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship can be best described as looking at the status of servitude and thinking "what is wrong with that is that it's not hereditary". I mean, they have not said that they have nothing against illegals as long as they know their place (working masta's fields), but from their priorities this seems to be their revealed preference. The pearl-clutching of "but the Blue cities will not enforce our immigration laws" would be a lot less pathetic if Texas enforced immigration laws consistently.
If your business can not compete with others without relying on illegal exploitation, I have zero sympathy. Sell your business, do something non-evil with your life. I am sure a lot of hard-working Americans lost their sugar cane or cotton businesses after the civil war due to increased labor costs too, and I have little sympathy for them either.
As a VITA tax prep volunteer, I strongly disagree. I have seen many illegal immigrants come to fill out their income taxes, with all of the proper tax forms, issued under false social security numbers. Their W-2's showed that their employers had withheld all the proper amounts for income tax and social security.
It's certainly possible some of their employers knew those social security numbers were false, which I assume would be against the law, but I'm sure many of their employers didn't. But either way, it wouldn't be a financial crime.
Okay, I stand corrected. It seems that I overestimated how well social security info sent by employers to federal agencies is verified. (Illegals not getting any social security benefits for their payments still sucks for them, but it hardly seems fair to blame the employer for that. I still feel that if sanctuary industries are so important that even Trump does not dare touch their illegal workers, the saner approach would be some sort of legalization (perhaps a new visa category, "can work in agriculture, etc only, visa expires after six months of unemployment", just down call it brown card).)
Under the circumstances you and @hydroacetylene described, I will retract my original statement. There is still a point to be made that employers collectively benefit from a different equilibrium of the supply demand curve, but it would be false to suggest that illegals are more exploited than their legal colleagues.
Yes, it would, and h2b’s already exist(you can basically get as many workers at regulated wages as you want if you provide housing). The reasons it isn’t a replacement for illegals probably have a lot of blame to go around.
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Being far more familiar with the blue collar labour market in areas with lots of illegals than you probably are, I can't really give a source but you'll have to take me at my word- illegals do not get lower wages than legal workers. Part of this is doing more physically demanding hazardous work, sure, but part of it is also that any part of America which attracts illegals(they are, after all, not going to rural Mississippi) has a severe labour shortage anyways. Illegals make a very similar dollar amount to legal workers doing the same jobs, although usually without healthcare, retirement, unemployment insurance, etc. This is cheaper for the employer, but not due to wages. Illegals are preferred partly because of this, but as much because they don't smoke weed every day, ask for overtime, etc. They're there to work and make money, and the employers which hire them are used to paying cash because legal workers prefer it too(can't get child support deducted that way, can spend it on drugs without having to go to a shady gas station and pay 10% to a middle easterner who mutters racial slurs while he cashes it, etc)- but the illegals' preference for cash is far more sympathetic to most people, including the mildly racist who are nonetheless disgusted at the behavior of the lower working class that competes with them for jobs. And blue collar management in the lower midwest speaks Spanish anyways.
Not getting healthcare, retirement, overtime, unemployment insurance mean their compensation package is lower. Those items are generally considered part of pay. Also, getting paid in cash to avoid taxes and wage garnishing are artificial boosts to their pay that are not available to citizens. That makes for two directions that illegal labor undercuts the citizenry, they cost less and keep more of their wages.
Considering healthcare/retirement/unemployment can easily add 40%+ on top of wages and taxes would take a 20%+ bite out of wages, someone working under the table could easily surpass the above-board worker in take-home pay despite much lower paper wages. Above board $15/hr worker + $6/hr benefits costs the employer $21/hr while the employee only takes home $12/hr. Below board $13/hr worker costs the employer $13/hr and the worker takes home $13/hr. They could hire almost twice as many below board employees or simply keep the $8/hr difference. That would be a huge negative pressure on the wages the above board employees could demand. All the while the employer could complain that no one wants to work for the $15/hr wages, so they're forced to hire below board employees even though they have a large conflict of interest in such a declaration.
Secondly, I can guarantee solve any "labor shortage" anywhere with more pay. What they have is a labor shortage at the low pay they want. That might be a sort of tautology, labor is not some worker placement with limited figurines to put in jobs, it is a function of many variables most important of which is the compensation. If burger flipping was paying more than neurosurgery, you can guarantee they would never have an empty shift. How many people are even joining the workforce is also a function of compensation. If the market sucks, they may choose unemployment, underemployment, education, retirement, gig-work, greymarket, blackmarket, welfare, homemaking, or self-employment.
Well yeah, if you were paying offshore oil rig rates you’d fill up every blue collar job- except that most of the businesses employing them would shut down.
Plenty of citizens at these jobs are getting cash, because the class of citizens they employ are ones would be subject to garnishments.
The whole thing stands out to me like an amalgam of two memes that live rent free in my head: Schitt's creek: "I cannot show you everything, David!" "Can you show me one thing?" and Simpson's: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I glance around at stores begging for employees to apply then I see their posted hourly wage to see that they are at most $0.25 above the going rate for the area while offering short hours at unusual times. I'd respect them a lot more if they actually tried raising wages and had to shutter, but instead they just muddle along until the lack of employees cascades into quality and coverage problems and the place closes with a whimper at the next shock or demand drop.
I see similar shotgun, canned openings for skilled positions in the engineering field that aren't really trying to be competitive if you look at their offered compensation, they feel more like dangling a hook hoping to get a bite from a desperate engineer they can snap up for cheap even as the engineering field as a whole supposedly has huge engineer shortages.
It can't be both a labor shortage companies desperately want to solve and also an immovable object that cannot see its budget increase. The fact that it is sold as both, to me, reads as a budget exercise to maximize profits rather than the desperate plight it is advertised as. Consequently, if it is not a desperate plight, then the off-the-book cheats they've been pursuing are in fact not necessary concessions but are instead just cheats.
Isn't this atleast partly to justify having unfillable positions that require H1Bs et all?
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What? How are you expecting 3000 people to investigate 15,000 crimes and arrest 15,000 people in a month? The hard part of making an arrest isn't handcuffing the guy and driving him away, you need to figure out who committed the crime!
Many Republicans want to deport all the illegal immigrants! Even if they haven't committed any crimes. It's a whole thing. They have a lot of arguments for it They may be bad arguments, but if you're going to make this point to said Republicans you need to engage with those arguments.
Many other republicans and centrists only want to deport 'migrant criminals' and are uncomfortable uprooting the lives of people who aren't bothering anyone. Which is why Trump focuses on the people from 'jails and insane asylums' and vacillates about who exactly should be deported. But the people running ICE and the people you're arguing with here mostly just want to deport them all.
I agree with (c), and agree with (d) insofar as Trump and many allies don't want the political backlash it'd create to actually deport them all, but to say their sole goal is 'to intimidate and cause chaos' is reductive. The Trump Administration is not a singular coherent entity, you can't reason out their goals by assuming their actions are well thought through. Some people inside the admin really want to deport them all, and tend to have control over and focus more on ICE or immigration policy. And, yeah, want to intimidate the city libs and use the chaos to signal to potential illegal immigrants it's not worth coming. And often don't understand that their theater isn't the same as the real thing. Some people inside the admin don't want to deport them all, and when combined with business interests are able to push back against e-verify and let the hawks have some theater as a treat. And Trump's an entertainer, and 'sending ICE to Minneapolis' is made for TV in a way 'prevent illegal immigration with electronic forms' isn't.
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The Iranian grandma got her due process in 1999. She applied for asylum, a judge said no, she was given a removal order. But, as you can guess "Petitioner was not removed and was allowed to remain in the United States."
What is the purpose of the asylum claim, the judge, the removal order if the Iranian grandma gets to stay no matter the outcome? The law says "remove the Iranian grandma". The judge says "remove the Iranian grandma". But for some reason the Iranian grandma stays.
26 years later the Iranian grandma who was told to leave is still here. And now the Iranian grandma gets to argue in court about her due process when she finally gets told to leave decades later. Where is my due process? Why do I have to pay for this whole elaborate process to kick people out, but when they get told to leave we just let them stay? Why are laws arbitrarily enforced, I just have to deal with it and also pay for her healthcare? Iranian grandma gets to just totally ignore the laws and the asylum system when it rules against her, but gets all the protections of the system when it suits her. Very cool.
I don't really understand what happened for the last 26 years as to why she was never deported, but she hasn't ignored anything, she was checking in with ICE regularly as asked.
Under existing law, she cannot be detained, there does not appear to be any dispute on this fact. The administration is perfectly capable of proposing changes to the law to change this, or to change whatever system has resulted in her staying for 26 years. But they haven't even tried!
If you are told to do something by a judge, and you don't do it, in what sense have you not ignored that judge? Did she leave the country as asked? As she was ordered? As the asylum process determined? No.
She never should have gotten an ICE check in in the first place, if anything I hold it against her for wasting even more time and money.
Under existing law she should not be here.
That's fair to some extent. Maybe it's kind of pedantic but I do think there is a difference between an order to "leave the country" vs. "if you do not leave the country you can be deported", and I'm not sure which form the removal order would have taken.
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The jails are under guidance, at least in MN to scout for this and inform detainees of ICE presence. They are barred from courtrooms regularly. And to put a point on it, your plan is totally inefficient. Most places wont have who your are looking for unless you already know, which you dont because no one is sharing information with you.
3000 agents is still a tiny force. And apprehending fugitives is extremely time intensive.
By way of example:
20 Years. 90 agencies. Barely over 100k arrests. The way modern law enforcement works is largely by normal warrant processes. A guy does a crime. He either goes to court to address it, or he doesn't and a warrant is issued. Then he, being a criminal, does something stupid like blow a red light. He is then arrested and brought to the judge that he skipped court on. That normal process doesn't work for ICE in Minnesota. As a result they have to do GLRFTF level work for every illegal in the state. The GLRFTF does not deploy resources for normal crimes. Its basically only for murder, attempt murder, armed violence, and sex crimes. Everyone else, your retail thieves, your car thieves, simple robbers, drunk drivers, all you gotta do is not violate a traffic law for the duration of the statute of limitations and you can get away with a felony. Now, you, being a felon are unlikely to possess that skill, but you can try!
Minnesota is basically forcing ICE to treat immigration enforcement like other police agencies treat Criminal Sexual Assault, and then also letting people harass them while they try to execute that mission, which with the GLRFTF would typically involve at least 1 team of 2 officers sitting on a location, often multiple teams of 2-3 sitting on multiple locations for multiple days. Which obviously would be frustrated in purpose by people surrounding the police cars and blowing whistles. Not exactly conducive to finding a guy evading arrest. Imagine if every pedophile had a defense force of people at his home, his mom's house, and his sisters house blowing whistles whenever police were there. He's probably not getting arrested anytime soon.
And that is the current situation in Minnesota. Minnesota also should be viewed as both an outlier, and a pilot program. Many states are sanctuary states, but many of them also have police forces in quiet rebellion that actually do let ICE know, just on the down low. But ICE will have to take on California and New Mexico sometime in the future, and it was likely decided to try to figure out what could possibly work in a very leftist state with a very modest goal before going after the big fish.
as a non American, I unironcally think the best way for ICE is only enforce the immigration law in cooperative states, focus on state with support
this will force illegal immigrant to move to non-cooperative states, basically the "free NYC migrant bus" policy on a larger scale
Then as soon as the Democrats take power again, they return.
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Bad idea for many reasons, including that the children of illegals would still eventually be supported by federal dollars for both school and welfare. But most of all, this just inflates the census numbers for sanctuary states, granting them more votes in the electoral college and more congressmen in congress.
birthright citizenship is certainly something that is uniquely American that I completely forgot about when I write my comment
forgive my ignorance, why is US counting non-citizens for electoral college and house seats after abolition of slavery?
The relevant clause in the constitution reads:
The three fifths clause now being stricken as slavery was abolished.
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The 14th Amendment seems unambiguous at first glance.
Trump did attempt to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base in his first term, but before any illegal-free numbers could be published (which was necessary for adjudication of the legal issue) he left office and Biden returned to the old policy.
From an outside perspective, this seems unambiguous in the way that, illegal should be counted, as the wording distigush between a person and a citizen, which is totally fucked.
This should be changed, I am sure tourists and legal foreign students do not count, right, right??
The Constitution doesn't explicitly address this topic. But an initial draft of the Constitution used the word "inhabitant", and the first Census-related law passed by Congress used "inhabitant", "usual residence", and "usual place of abode". So the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the government is allowed (but not required) to include temporary absentees (federal employees, such as soldiers, who are living abroad for their jobs) in the population of a state. The same logic presumably applies to the exclusion of temporary residents (such as tourists and foreign college students).
The Biden executive order linked above reflects this practice, explicitly using the words "usual place of residence", though Congress has not bothered to put similar language into the currently-applicable law.
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Thanks for taking the effort. You had to know in advance that this would get broadsides, but the effort to steelman the protestor position is important for healthy discussion in this place.
That having been said, I don't buy it. America is in many areas already functionally lawless - in that I mean it is incapable of enforcing laws, and I said as much last week. The rich flaunt the laws openly, the powerful make or bend the laws, and the average American's engagement with and attitude towards the law can be best summarized by an episode of American Dad where trans fats are outlawed and everyone becomes a criminal.
The scarier explanation behind the ICE theater is that this is genuinely the best America can do. They can't pass measures that would criminalize, fine, and prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants, because those underpin significant chunks of the economy and if those collapse, the people in charge get blamed (see: tyrant's problem) - and I would bet even if the D wing of Minnesota wanted to do this, they wouldn't because companies might leave Minnesota. They can't build a wall, because enforcing the wall is impractical (the entire human infrastructure is rife with people who are pathologically empathetic and determined to hashtag-resist), and building the wall expensive (they will build part of a wall and call it a great success). So what's left?
The optics of Deterrence.
America is a land of optics. It doesn't matter what the reality is, and it didn't even before the internet. Rounding up illegal immigrants is not, in fact, designed to round up illegal immigrants. It is meme, marketing, viral. It is a signal to anyone considering coming to America through illegal means that they might, in fact, deport you. And sending poorly-trained, trigger happy masked ICE personnel to attempt enforcement is a signal to the Minnesotan left and protesters that if they attempt to hashtag-resist, they might get shot. I don't know how heavily these people believe in what they say they believe, even if they just genuinely drank the kool-aid or are just playing along with the kayfabe, but a potential gut full of 9mm changes the risk management analysis in a way that being "oppressed for your beliefs" doesn't.
And yes, a lot of it is just FAFO porn. Nobody likes Karens who scream incessantly for their cause, they're the biggest advertisement for the other side. I have no strong feelings about gun ownership aside from guns being just generally cool, but viewing the bodycam footage of Renee Nicole Good made me want to join a militia.
As has been pointed out, having employers do it is pretty much prohibited because of existing antidiscrimination law.
Obvious nonsense given that employers are already supposed to verify work authorization for every hire.
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Just a note: link is broken.
They're likely referencing this post and it's subsequents. If not, feel free to ignore me.
Personally, as someone whom has a dim view of employers that hire illegals and a very strict opinion on what needs to be done to them, I've never considered the discrimination angle before. Food for thought.
I googled it myself and found a similar document to the one I was trying to link to a post about, that was not dated 2015. It may even be exactly identical (I didn't compare the text.)
It does not make auditing employees impossible. It does contains the references that Quantumfreakonomics pointed out and it's reads as though it was written for two reasons that are at cross purposes with each other. If the employer audits everyone and does it at a fixed time interval rather than in response to anything, it looks like he can avoid antidiscrimination laws, but on the other hand, it's far from "well, employers can just check, that's pretty simple and there are no obstacles".
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I did accidentally link to the parent of the post I was trying to link to and didn't notice because it's just one line above. But the link does work for me so I'm not sure what's up.
I was trying to link to this. Not the same post but similar. It references a document from 2015 so I don't know if the rules for employers have changed since then.
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The surge was specifically for the Somali daycare fraud, because “half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.” There are 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota, many of them illegal. This is a punitive expedition and I could not support it more. Minneapolis allowed this crime to go on for years because Somalis are a D voting block and provide political donations to D. This is punishment against both the Somali community and the corrupt political establishment of the state. The news is complaining about “innocent” Somalis being detained for days, which likely means that the targeting of the community is working. The more Trump punishes, the most investment leaves the state. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/surge-in-federal-officers-in-minnesota-focuses-on-alleged-fraud-at-day-care-centers Noem says 10k have been arrested in the Minneapolis area, so the surge is working, to some degree. It’s not like this is some conservative conspiracy theory. Per NYT: https://archive.is/NNG45
Returning to your post,
What do you expect us to do with this? Errors happen all the time, in everything. There were five train derailments in Spain last week, do you think there was a conniving transportation officer trying to fertilize the land with innocent Iberian blood? You need an argument rooted in statistics if you’re alleging that ICE is (1) concerningly incompetent or (2) evil. There is literally nothing we can do with these isolated cases.
Okay? They are human too. If someone harasses their local bus driver they are liable to be punched in the face. We aren’t Sparta, we don’t have endless pithy and stoical military elites to fulfill every social need.
It seems to me that ICE is the least effective way to punish Minneapolis if you consider that a worthy goal. Mass prosecutions, withholding federal money and so on surely would be vastly superior to following a policy that seems to be cratering your own popularity, is not serving to make you more credible on your top issues and will fade into mist at best when you leave office.
Both of those things are being done. I think what Trump has to do instead is go all-in on videographic propaganda. His opponents are cherrypicking the most emotionally-potent videos of death they can find and then exaggerating the details. So he needs to find the most emotionally-potent video of death he can find and then exaggerate the details. I’m sure his team can find a high fidelity video of an innocent American crying in a pitiable way while gruesomely slain by an illegal alien. He just needs to martyr-maxx these videos constantly, as no human has infinite mental bandwidth for tragedy. It’s literally been more than a decade of Democrats leaning into martyr-maxxing, Trayvon and Floyd etc. The best they could find was a
busgrainy video of aRussianUkrainian woman being killed, which isn’t really effective. They need to study how martyrs function in social ecosystems and then have their own, because it’s like a zero-day vulnerability on the public’s psyche at this point, just easy mode for Democrat persuasion.I'm pretty sure this happened during Biden's run. Part of the reason it worked is that there was no counter-narrative of dead American citizens.
The other thing is: the border is no longer as relevant now that Biden isn't actively paroling people. Stories of recent migrants showing up and wrecking things are naturally going to drop in number and salience.
My impression is, for better or worse, Americans don't have coherent ideas about immigration enforcement. Or not enough of them do to form a coherent policy. His approval on his strongest issue has been dropping, it just seems like people didn't like chaos at the border but once that was resolved the urgency just dropped off.
Trump using ICE to go after what are almost certainly populations of citizens (take it up with past Presidents!) in a hostile city because of topical scandals is a high-risk, low-reward strategy if you assume that a lot of people simultaneously don't like border chaos but also don't want to be mean or deal with random ICE raids and attendant counter protests.
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If you mean Iryna Zarutska, she was a Ukrainian refugee of the Russian invasion, and it was a light rail line, not a bus.
Right. The issues: not a memorable name like “Good”; you don’t hear her agony; you don’t get a close up of her; you don’t see her dying out; the aggressor is inadvertently sympathetic (as she is insane); and most importantly, we don’t experience the event through the vicarious social learning of mourner. The reason you had wealthy professional mourners in ancient Babylonia, and paid wailers mentioned in the Old Testament, is the same reason a weeping Mary is often depicted in crucifixion scenes — it introduces the targetted social response to the subject, for you to imitate through peer pressure or social learning, like a director playing weepy music in a movie.
It’s all very sociopathic to think like this, but I feel that someone in the DNC is plotting this out behind a bunch of excel sheets. The strategy is just way too predictable, they do it every cycle. It honestly feels like like wallhacking at this point. Wailhacking, if you will.
To don a tinfoil hat, they also de-martyred Charlie Kirk. They created the most viral meme of the month called “Kirkification” where the youth would blend Charlie Kirk’s face with a bunch of random faces, so that the memory of his face made you laugh, and millions of young people did this. Massive trend. Then they launched the “we are Charlie Kirk” trend, where the emotional memory of name was blotted out as well; and at the same time the idea of mourning him became the focus of derision and laughter. This sound was used in maybe 500,000 discrete videos across social media. Possibly people just organically stumbled on the best way to blot out the memory strength of Charlie Kirk, but I find it more probable that there are dark forces doing this sort of thing behind the scenes. Look at what they can do against ICE for free with activists, now imagine the tools at their disposal among the people they actually pay.
Wasn't "We are Charlie Kirk" just a piece of AI slop music cynically created to make money from uncritical audiences that then got made fun of due to how incredibly schlocky it was? I think it is far more likely that the song was the result of the market trying to extract money from conservatives than a deliberate conspiracy to destroy his memory.
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So what happens when it turns out that the Somalis are overwhelmingly citizens and/or legal immigrants, thanks in large part to George H.W. Bush and the Republicans who held Congress throughout the 90s, and then a bunch of churches juiced up with money thanks to George W. Bush? For the record if there's going to be punishment I think that it needs to start there.
Perhap I would support giving Trump the brief tyrannical power to punish everyone responsible for America’s demographic changes, including churches, but this is well outside the Overton Window and presents other problems. But the artful deployment of ICE is no more offensive than the artful deployment of other agencies, which have always been deployed with punition, whether against innocent Christian bakers or against innocent conservative nonprofits (the IRS targeting campaign).
This isn't artful. It's impotent thuggery. ICE isn't in the business of prosecuting fraud and no Somalis or white liberals will be punished by their presence. Their bakers remain and will remain thriving, and that is what offends me.
Fact is, Trump is a tough talking liar who lacks conviction and echoes the last person to give him advice. Most of his coterie are corrupt and/or incompetent. He would've been a respectable mayor of NYC but is out of his element as President and the rest of the GOP are mostly worse. Voting is cheap and Hillary/Kamala losing was fun but giving these people an iota of support or emotional energy is a waste of time.
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Their legality should have been conditional on good behavior. Punish the Somalis first then go after the moralizing Pat Buchanan types that let them in under the name of jesus but didn't actually follow through with any active support. Though thats not the fault of the evangelicals that the somalia just lied about embracing jesus and found it bafflingly easy to just continue lying with the active aid of other whites that found it useful to hold an entire population of system defectors up as a cudgel against their proximate enemy.
I think you're mixing up Pat Buchanan with someone else - Buchanan was a paleoconservative exiled from the GOPe in large part because of his views on race and immigration. Here he is in 1993 talking about 'Brazilification', black-on-white crime stats, immigrant abuses of welfare, and demanding closed borders.
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Jailing the Somali's who participated in the fraud seems relatively straightforward under existing laws. About 90% of the Somali population of the Twin cities are American citizens, if they cannot be legally proven to have participated in the fraud how should they be punished?
Widespread social censure and denial of services without vetting. It is clear the somalis are exploiting lawfare with the help of activists, the solution then is to punish the facilitative ecosystem. This ridiculous attitude of dropping a case just because of a minor procedural hiccup on race grounds is a ridiculous self inflicted wound and it is the festering pustule that will destroy the USAs ability to coordinate against internal system wide defectors let alone external stressors.
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Interestingly, this post has received 3 AAQC nominations. (I'm frankly surprised there have been no "boo outgroup" or "antagonistic" reports-not that I think it was boo outgroup or antagonistic, just that a post going against the popular grain here usually gets those with the speed of a hammer tapping the femoral nerve.) However, because it is in the mod queue, it's also in the volunteer mod queue (which does not reveal to the volunteer jannies whether it's in the queue for AAQCs or negative reports or both).
It's currently sitting at a "Bad" rating--meaning most of the volunteers going through the queue marked it as "Deserves a warning or ban."
Fascinating.
Pleasantly surprised by the upvote count. I suspect that the people going into the volunteer mod queue are selected for some quality that might not merit the volunteer mod queue.
Well, the volunteer mod score has now tipped upwards into not-bad, and it's sitting at 8 AAQCs and @Jiro's "antagonistic."
How much of that is people going to look for it there now that you've mentioned it, though?
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It's always been a problem here that things get voted up if they are long and grammatically correct. Not enough people notice the subtle signs of problems to vote those posts down. It's even better if you include buzzwords like "steelman" (unless you're a completely new poster, in which case mottizens will notice that you're using terms you shouldn't be familiar with). Of course, posters respond to this incentive and create better trolls.
It's possible to look at the post and say "wait a minute, people have made arguments here that he's shown no sign that he's even read, despite claiming that he knows what 'the forum's' case is." Or to notice claims being made without evidence (really, you can just assume that agents are poorly trained?) And if you wait a little while it's also possible to notice that he made the post, but he doesn't seem to be interested in engaging with the people responding to it. (That is a dead giveaway.) But not enough voters will do that.
I engaged with one particularly important reply, and plan for more engagement tonight and tomorrow.
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Actually, Jiro, you are a perfect example of terrible voting and reporting patterns. There are few long-timers on the Motte with a worse history of bad faith posting, bad faith reporting, and generally taking a reflexive conflict theory approach to any post. "If it supports my tribe, it is good. If it advocates for any member of my outgroup, it is bad and should not exist."
You are of course allowed to upvote or downvote a post for any reason you like. We would prefer people actually vote according to the quality of the argument and whether it contributes anything interesting or new to the discussion (even if you disagree with the post!), rather than using it as an Agree/Disagree button, but most people do the latter. We would really prefer people not use the Report button to call the mods' attention to posts, presumably with the intent that we should warn or ban someone, because you don't like their opinion.
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A silly mod score doesn't memory hole an X times reported AAQC post or hide it from the editorial review process, I hope. Every time I've participated it hasn't been very difficult to tell what's in there for AAQC review. I've downgraded "High Quality" posts to "Good" in the janitor queue because of that. There are more than a few posts I'd like to see more of that are not at AAQC threshold, because it is its own special gold sticker.
Now that I know the volunteer janny institution has been captured via a Long March, I'll have to escalate my
Affirmative Actioncharity upvotes to more subversive acts.It does not. The janny score gives us some community feedback, but mods make the final decision.
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Is it alternatively possible that the vast majority rated it "bad" directly and few rated it above? Not sure how the algorith works because the banner says it has some swcret sauce
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Always and everywhere democracy fails the same way. Even mottizens cannot resist the sweet sweet nectar of power over their enemies. You have seen it. You know it to be true.
PalpatineUnlimitedPowaaaaah.jpeg
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Absurd, frankly, and highlights why I've generally backed away. I really like many posters here, I agree with many of them on core issues, I disagree with the OP here, but it's a good post. I think it's wrong! A lot! But it's an honest effort to engage and flagging it for warning or ban is absurd.
I have to assume a few members are simply looking at who posted it and reacting off of that.
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My most commonly chosen option for posts is “neutral”; I really only bust out the “bad” option when something didn’t technically break rules but is really shitty for whatever reason. Usually poor writing and poor logic combined, and also exceptionally annoying.
I think I'm more generous with 'Bad' than I would otherwise be because the 'Deserves a Warning' and 'Deserves a Ban' options are there. I use 'Bad' for any post that I think is technically within the rules, but is, in a vague, hard-to-rigorously-define sort of way, the sort of thing that I would like to see less of around here.
I believe the instructions for the queue are to not overthink it and give your immediate response, so I try not to feel too bad about giving a vibes-based response.
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In the ACX Mark Russel posted this comment:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205404360
My only reaction to this is a very demonstrative lol, whut.
Is this dude seriously trying to weave together:
With:
IFeelLikeI'mTakingCrazyPills.gif
This person isn't a serious person. I don't know if they're a real person. I do know that they don't actually like Cambodian bronze art and Middle Eastern food (if they did, they would've dropped that they knew about the specific time period of the Cambodian art and would've narrowed "Middle Eastern" food down to, you know, an actual country. Maybe he means Somali!)
But he really want you to know he likes these things - and Thin Lizzy - and that he is also so dedicated to the protestors cause but can also, like, you know, take a step back and see the bigger picture.
I don't trust this guy at all. I don't think he'd have anyone's back in a real fight. I feel like if his wife got into it with ICE, he might cause somewhat of a scene but then find some interesting way to get tackled by ICE preventing him, don't you know, from doing the heroic thing he was totally about to do.
Mostly, this is a shake my head moment. Whatever, Bro is the gut reaction.
Were it not for:
Fuck you, dude. (Mods: I am talking to the guy in the quoted article, not any other poster here). I'm a normal (enough) guy in a pick-up. I am driving through Minneapolis because I have to go to work, or get groceries, or pick up my kid. You're literally saying "Ha! Sucks to be you, boy, should've stayed home where you belong, boy, might not make it back if you stay out after dark, boy!"
It feels to me more similar to the alleged sniper safaris in Bosnia (the motivation that is, not the situation)--a well-off tourist wanting in on the "excitement". Not so much demonstrative as treating the situation as a form of personal entertainment.
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This is the mindset that I don't understand, but which clearly contributed to Good and Pretti turning up for a disaster.
This is going on about authoritarianism and so forth, but treating the Resistance Protests like, well, a holiday. "Did some light picketing in the morning, went for a pleasant meal and some skating in the afternoon". "Boycotted the Federal building from 9 to 12, then after lunch checked out original vinyl record stores".
God between us and all harm, but if this person gets hurt in any way, they and their spouse will be the first to be all shocked Pikachu face about "they used tear gas? real bullets???" Don't the baddies know they're not supposed to, in fact, do anything because this is our comfortable display of civic virtue and getting shot would really make it tough to grab that Middle Eastern buffet!
But that's exactly what it is.
When I was a teenager, my friends would often catch a train out to the nearest major city to go to protests. What were they protesting against? Fascism!
This is just Antifa doing Antifa things. Antifa isn't an organization? Sure! It's a mind-virus! A ridiculous meme! Made in Germany, please enjoy responsibly.
Teenagers are dumb and take stupid risks. This is normal. This, by the other hand, are grown-ass adults (their college friends are old enough to have an adult daughter).
Is "protest tourism" becoming a thing, like poverty tourism?
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Schrodinger’s ICE agents.
ICE is composed of chubby manlet tacticool LARPers when you want to snicker and make fun of them to your team.
ICE is a deathsquad of roided out meatheads shooting to kill on behalf of a racist, fascist torture regime when you want to gas yourself and your team up as Stunning and Brave rebels, or when someone from your team finds out from fucking around.
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I am also very confused by this. I don't know how to characterize this mindset without resorting to the word "unserious".
The starting premise for the protestors, as stated, seems to be that a swarm of evil, poorly trained stormtroopers are invading the city and snatching up and killing anyone they please. So why aren't they acting like it? Their behavior doesn't seem to follow from the premise. If they were getting into shootouts with the cops I would not be confused, because it would indicate to me they were taking the premise seriously.
Pretti got into a tangle with federal agents while armed. I don't think I can construct a coherent reason to carry while protesting that takes the premises seriously that doesn't involve an active intent to use it aggressively. Good seemed to be acting out of a misplaced sense of white liberal plot armor which is sort of understandable but still didn't take the "evil stormtroopers killing with impunity" premise seriously. Mark Russell and his wife went on vacation to a city they seem to think is under siege, and then proceed to treat the protest like a social function to kill time until the bowling alley opens.
Do they think this is for real or not? Did the constant crying wolf about Nazis for the last 10 years cause the reference to become so unmoored from the referent that they can't actually bring themselves to really mean it even while they're getting shot?
For some definition of "protesting", the Bundy standoffs might qualify as examples here (not endorsing, just observing): as far as I'm aware, the guns were never fired (although perhaps pointed aggressively), and it was quite plausibly IMO part of the fed's decisions to stand down there, rather than repeat Waco or Ruby Ridge.
You're right, of course. I think the difference relevant to this situation is that the Bundys were banking on the feds playing by the rules, but the protestors in MN appear to have it as a starting premise that they aren't.
Just the opposite. "I can carry a gun and get in their way, and they wouldn't dare shoot me!" is banking on ICE playing by rules that they weren't playing by. Debate over whether they "should have been" aside, they demonstrably did not.
In contrast, Bundys brought a lot of men with rifles and willingness to use them. That's what you do when you're serious about enforcing rules that the other side wouldn't ordinarily abide by.
+1, I think your interpretation is a more accurate one in terms of true beliefs. The protestors in MN definitely didn't think that they were going to get shot, but the disconnect between thinking that these are evil nazi thugs killing anyone they want but that they won't shoot you is the confusing thing for me. Saying one thing, acting on another.
It's because "they shouldn't be shooting me, dammit!". They're modeling ICE as if they'll do what they should, then getting angry when they don't. They're trying to use their righteous anger to force ICE to do the right thing, so that they don't have to update their expectations.
If instead they'd update on the fact that ICE isn't gonna do what they think ICE should do, they wouldn't be able to feel outrage anymore, because it'd just be "What do you expect? They're fascists". And then they'd have to sit soberly with the question of whether this is a hill they're willing to die on. And if so, whether they want to die a martyr for their beliefs or try to martyr the fascists for theirs.
Showing up with a holstered pistol and getting in physical confrontations where you don't use it shows that he hadn't thought things through and made a serious decision. It's like coming up to a fork in the road, and unsure whether to drive left or right, splitting the difference and driving straight.
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All this effort on behalf of some stranger is something I will never understand.
Neither Renee Good nor Alex Pretti were part of my monkeysphere, so my reaction, had I been in Minneapolis at the time (colored by my utter hatred for the modern left in general) would have been "They should have damned well known better than to mess with law enforcement; they got what they deserved".
Obviously this Russell is a leftist of some stripe or other.
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This is such a strange and off-putting read. It's like he's trying to paint a picture of a nation under siege, while constantly undermining his own narrative by sprinkling in bits about ordinary vacation activities. There's a dark authoritarian fog settling in Minneapolis, our country is in deep danger and I'm right in the middle of it...Oh the museums in Minneapolis are fantastic by the way, Jill and I go every time we visit! It's clear he doesn't actually know what's going on and doesn't actually feel any danger, but it feels right to join the protest and yell random slogans. Jill even got the herd to chant SHAME and it got on TV, +1 cool story to share back home! Is this guy just a mop and since his wife feels strongly about it he's obliged to at least pretend it's a big deal to him too? Is it a need to belong to something and an anti government protest in whatever form is good ol' proven reliable option for it?
Sounds like "I'm semi-retired and since we have a lot of spare time, we winter in Minneapolis because we have friends there. Last time we visited, there was protesting going on so we decided to change things up a bit and do some activism alongside our usual vacation routines". It really is treating it like tourism. For some reason this makes me think of Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys.
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I’m not sure about your response, for a much more extreme example everything I’ve read about how people behave in wartime always surprises me about how people go on about their normal lives even while bombs fall around them. I remember reading some stories during the Syrian civil war which were like, yeah, we had to avoid those blocks because the rebels have control and the government forces are also over here, but we could take X street though and so after school we went to the theater. Or I also remember following the account of a pair of teenagers in Gaza who would make videos where they make talk about memes and jokes and then say by the way guys we arrived safe at the refugee camp and today we’re trying to find a little extra bread for our mother.
This obviously isn’t wartime in the US, just a clash that feels rather authoritarian to many. I’d give the guy his pass to talk about the museums and think the feds are getting a bit authoritarian at the same time, though.
That's people living there and having no option but to cope with what is going on. It's not the same as "so we flew in, stayed with friends on our usual annual visit, then there were these protests so we decided to tag along and do our Resisting Fascism in the morning, while we had the afternoon free for skiing, museum visits, foodie dining, and vinyl shopping".
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Him mixing in normal life activities in his narration is not what's making it off putting on it's own, it's the fact that he's trying to present his experience as exactly the examples you just brought up. It's an attempt at the slice of life narration about a person in (what he thinks are) adverse conditions, but in reality he's a middle aged/boomer good boy that is inconvenienced by self involvement into operation of completely lawful agents of the state.
This is exactly what he thought this would come off as when he was writing. Except he's not an unlucky Syrian or a Gazan who is thrown in the middle of a war that turns his life (and fate) upside down. Every struggle is entirely self imposed, there's no stray bullets or bombs flying around. He, at any time, can make it all end for himself by walking a block over. I'm not discrediting his opinion (although I'm not entirely sold on if he actually has one, or if he has to consult Jill before he can take a stance) about what's happening as a whole, I'm merely put off by his dramatic narration.
Yeah, the fact that he and Jill can drop the protests by travelling to a different part of the city and doing their 'here's our fun visitor schedule' means that this is not wartime Syria/Gaza/Belfast during the Troubles. That's the tourism part of it: "a few blocks from where we stayed X happened" but then across the city we went to the museum, had our dinner, went shopping, etc. They're not embroiled in anything and are going to where the "creeping authoritarianism" is by choice, and making it sound like "aw shucks, tweren't nothing, we wuz just doing what decent folx do!"
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Yeah, he has these melodramatic writing tics that undermine the gravity and solemnity he's trying to project:
Like, what? Playing tennis is your "life" and "happiness"? I don't even know what you're trying to convey here.
It’s that NPR/New Yorker slice of life tone. It’s part of the blue tribe sensemaking apparatus. If they were forced to describe things as the red tribe do, all action and import, they feel they’re betraying a vital part of themselves.
Next week, on This American Life, we take a look at the quiet life of Cell Block D in Rikers Island. Enjoy this early preview:
_Tuesday is canteen day. Always a bustle of activity then. My cellie (for the week I am visiting) is named Bullwhip. He's a white supremacist who murdered a latino woman and her child. He's got a rugged complexion and a strong gaze that reminds me of my grandfather. I'd spend summers on grandpa's farm as a child, working on spiceracks in his woodshop that never turned out quite level.
Bullwhip leads me out of our cell with a friendly, "get your shit, faggot" to urge me on to the day. "Lead on", I think. Maybe this will be like one of my childhood summer adventures. When we get in line for canteen, a member of the Piru Crips steps on Bullwhips foot. I can't quite make out if its accidental, intentional as to make a point, or the kind of juvenile horseplay that is common in locker rooms. As I puzzle over this, Bullwhip gouges out the man's eyes. His shrieks of pain bounce of the concrete walls as the Correctional Officers - "screws" my fellow inmates call them - charge the scene. Bullwhip, covered in the other man's blood, keeps shouting "That's what you get, frog! That's what you fucking get!" while I lie prone and try to keep from tearing up due to the pepperspray that's been deployed.
Or ... am I misty eyed because maybe, just maybe, I can hear the bullfrogs from Grandpa's farm once again."_
slow clap
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He doesn't talk about the why. Perhaps he truly believes it is self evident. 'I was just on holiday and then the nazis came, so I became the resistance.'
Something that stuck out for me was the 'only arresting the worst of the worst 5-year-olds'. The father abandoned the 5 year old to abscond from ICE. The author pretends that ICE is killing people randomly, arresting the innocent (including children) and otherwise being horrible people.
People really believe this? Its truly 2 movies, 1 screen.
Peace will eventually come. Reality always wins.
Sounds like the pilot episode of Star Trek: Starfleet High (I mean Academy) where Principal Captain Chancellor Girlboss (I mean Nahla Ake) threw a strop and resigned from Starfleet after doing the big, bad thing of separating a lickle boy from his mommykins. (Said lickle boy later turns up as Moody Teen Male Lead at the Academy).
Of course, this was because Mommy was working with a pirate, then grassed on him and thought she had cut a deal with the authorities for a lesser sentence. Oopsie! Turns out that in the commission of their crime, they killed a guy. That makes Mommy an accomplice to murder, which means the deal is out the window and she has to - gasp! the inhumanity! the horror! - serve time in a rehabilitation camp. Lickle kiddo will be taken in as a ward of the Federation.
This is so horrible and traumatising to all involved that Captain Girlboss quits, as I said. Because what were the options, here? Send lickle boy to space Club Fed with Mommy? Yeah, I don't think so. Then Mommy should have been set free because, uh, she has a kid? That seems to be the attitude here.
It is cruel and heartless to separate parent and child, and equally cruel and heartless to send innocent little kiddies to jail, so it's a get-out-of-jail-free card if you commit a crime and have a kid. And that's how it should be. Hence the snideness about arresting five year olds.
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ICE (and CBP - Minneapolis is a joint operation) is arresting every illegal immigrant who comes to its attention, including schoolchildren. They have said they are doing this, the media say they are doing this, and supporters of the operation (including on this forum) say they should be doing this.
The argument about whether it is possible to be out of legal immigration status innocently has been done to death, but if you think the answer is "Yes" then ICE are absolutely rounding up innocents, and this is what the core MAGA vote want. The claim that Trump-era immigration enforcement is focussed on "the worst of the worst" is a lie for the benefit of low-information normies. MAGA think ICE are deporting them all and this is good, Minnesota Nice thinks ICE are deporting them all and this is bad. So mocking the "worst of the worst" lie is an entirely normal thing to do.
Think of the five year olds! It is a nice emotional appeal, but what does it actually mean?
My take on children who are not legally present is that they will either have a illegally present parent or their parents are in another country. It is a pretty weird edge case for one to have a legally present parent but somehow be illegally present themselves. If that is the case, then I 100% would prefer they become naturalized themselves over deportation.
If their parents are in another country, they were effectively kidnapped. They should be recovered and sent back to their parents.
If their parents are not legally present and have a final order of removal, then the child should also be deported with their parent. The fate of staying in the US and going into the foster system is not superior to keeping the child with their parents.
If the child was sent to stay with legally present relatives by their parents in another country, I still think it's better to send them back to their parents. How do we know that both parents consented to this? Otherwise we have to investigate a lot of domestic situations in other countries, which each might have their own custody laws, it's simpler and more ethical to send them back to their parents.
Ideally we would have a lot more family detention centers that look more like kindergartens than Alcatraz. We need a place to put kids and their guardians in a monitored and controlled way while we determine if they are even related to the people bringing them over the border. That would be my ideal. But deporting fewer five year olds seems like an odd goal when actually thought through.
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Certainly ICE is not rounding up innocents. They've mistakenly detained at least a few innocents who (following the activist playbook) refused to identify themselves, but those innocents were released when identified. The illegal immigrants they've arrested, detained and/or deported may not have committed any crimes, but they were not innocent -- they were unlawfully present in the United States, and had orders of removal against them. Arresting them is ICE's job.
And, quite a few of these detained immigrants are also, in fact, serious criminals.
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I mean, isn't the answer, eventually, up to the people going out and harassing police? If I, a person with no criminal history, went to the house of a known murderer, and armed myself, and had compatriots in my pro-murder cause, then saw a fellow murderist being arrested and I tried to pull officers off my murderist friend, what would be the result?
We can hope the police are good enough to merely send me to prison for a few years. But, reality is that force in resistance of lawful authority endangers everyone in the vicinity, including officers and yourself. ANd if an officer kills a bystander, I am the one who should be charged with murder.
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Revolutions are intoxicating, I can see how you'd be swept up into the love bombing for being on the right side of history. But it seems to me that the blue leaders in Minnesota/Minneapolis are trying to engineer a siege mentality in their base.
Some bits that caught my attention
I'm sure in his (Jill's?) version of history the local activists only started impeding ICE activities after being exposed to their rude driving, since as Minnesotans they're just too nice to just let belligerence like that go.
You can feel the energy, the belonging, like being bombed with love.
If you didn't catch the cognitive dissonance in the main text above, no worries, his reply further down (quoted by @phailyoor) should make you do a double take
So it sounds like if you're a legal resident not looking for trouble you're perfectly safe?
Yeah, it might ruin your appetite for the tapas dinner to hang around there.
https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1qn6dfp/ice_agents_and_what_looks_like_police_stand_at/ https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1qn81j3/protestors_have_taken_over_the_hotel_ice_is/
Living in what? Some light protesting before the apres-ski? If you truly believe this is authoritarianism, why not beg Jill to lend you your balls back so you can go spit some ICE officers in the face. Make sure to take some weaponry, you're fighting Nazis after all.
“ Revolutions are intoxicating, I can see how you'd be swept up into the love bombing for being on the right side of history.”
Isn’t the central American Revolutionary mythology basically false? No taxation without representation is basically bullshit? Everything I have seen indicates total attempted taxation was like 1-2% of colonial income which to modern me basically feels like zero. My gut says having the British Navy to protect trade lanes was probably worth that contribution. British subjects in Britain were paying something like 20%.
I think that would be something like being a US allied country today and equivalent to the 3% of gdp to the military within NATO.
I guess you can make an argument that it still needed to happen for the country to grow and achieve manifest destiny. I have forgotten a lot of history so perhaps there were pressing concerns but that’s a lot of blood to be spilled to not paying a small tax where you also got some military protection. It doesn’t feel like a war that could have passed any just war theory.
Those import taxes were more like a combination of tariff policy and bailouts, propping up British tea and coffee growers using the American colonies. They were part of a broader pattern of extractive rule. Whether or not it was a good deal, British policy had a way of trampling the colonial ego.
I’m curious about those 1-2% numbers. Are they something like percent of household income? I think the impact was concentrated on shipping interests, which played a much larger part in the pre-industrial economy.
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Maybe, but I think taxes were in general lower back then. Income tax for example didn't exist, and neither did sales tax (some goods were excise taxed), leaving land, poll, and other assorted local taxes. One may grumble at their taxes going to the local corrupt politician, but you can shame them or vote them out.
So I think that it was mostly a matter of principle for them. The Americans didn't view themselves as a British colony/territory, but citizens. When they were scorned by the king they probably saw themselves as fighting for a say in their own future.
Incidentally, if the Puerto Ricans made a similar argument with similar fervor, it might behoove the United States to give them a senator or let them go.
Puerto Ricans do not have to pay federal income tax. And they consistently vote against independence in referenda (though a fair number of those are tainted in some way). For statehood, it's not only their interests but the interests of the rest of the country which should be considered.
TIL about no federal income tax for Puerto Ricans. Maybe I should move there...
If everyone's happy with the status quo, sounds like a great outcome
PR has a territorial income tax that makes up for it. And the territorial government is corrupt and incompetent so you can be sure very few of your tax dollars go for anything you'd want them to go to.
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And in the replies a very telling piece of information by the same poster:
There's no invasion. Ice isn't terrorizing the streets. Normal people wouldn't even notice. It's only because of fulltime agitators who have nothing to do but to stalk and harrass agents 24/7 that all of this is happening.
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Are they ringing bells?
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This is a very interesting post as an insight into the protest attending mindset. It is very strange to me, he seems continually befuddled by the extremes of hostility ("To me the yelling and taunting at police was misplaced aggression, and counter productive but it was their town, not mine"/"Somehow capitalism and the general economy have been implicated, although I cannot figure how") but nonetheless attends the protests regardless despite it being not his town. He seems to regard the protesting as mostly a harmless social activity that he groups together with going to record stores and restaurants. I get the sense his wife is basically dragging him to this ("I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting") and he is playing the role of an agreeable husband that regards this like his wife dragging him to a museum or board game night, so he is happy to go there and shout obscenities for a few hours in between other tourist activities. I know it sounds cliche, but there is just such beta energy radiating off the entire post.
I had to do a double take. Wait, you're at the protests? As if that follows immediately and naturally from being in Minneapolis?
Look I participated in Occupy Wall Streets Zucotti Park protest because I wanted tacos and there was a hot chick smoking a tea cigarette there. If you've got nothing better to do and you know the fuzz aren't going to crack your skulls a protest can be hella fun. Getting a critical population mass so it isn't just single issue weirdos CAN be an intoxicating environment to be around, like a rave with less open drug consumption and better music.
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This doesn't make sense to me. Why is 2025 a relevant time period? If someone commits crimes in 2016 and is still in the country with a valid final order of deportation, they should be allowed to stay? It's important to remember that deportation is not a punishment. Deporting people with final orders and criminal records is about prioritizing removal of people who have demonstrated that even beyond immigration law, they are not willing to comply with our rules. The rest also have no just cause or right to stay, but their removal is less urgent if they are avoiding victimizing other Americans.
This also seems to be insanely broken logic. It's not like an agent can just stroll outside by himself and grab an illegal off the street. It takes an entire team of agents, plus supporting staff, in order to grab a single illegal. And with the constant interference it takes even more.
Thats right guys, supercop dredd can solo arrest 30 bodies a shift, not like we have endless bodycam vid of an arrest requiring 2 to 3 vehicles and 2 to 3 agents each.
Immigrants Georg is an outlier who should not be counted.
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The major issue here isn't even about immigration.
The de jure legal situation is that federal law is supreme and the federal government has the right to enforce it. If they states are interfering then the feds have some extreme powers to make them comply, eg Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy deploying the National Guard to enforce school desegregation.
The de facto legal situation is that left wing mayors and governors are allowed to rule with a form of Bigmanism and nullify federal laws as they please.
Courts have been toeing the legal line by blocking mild enforcement when insisting they haven't invalidating federal supremacy because the feds can still do some form of extreme enforcement.
People in the Trump admin view the current situation as untenable. They want to get a legal court record covering as much of it as possible. The legal record does matter even if Minnesota courts find ways to block any convictions. Without a legal record higher courts will simply pretend it didn't happen. With it they'll be stuck trying to create some kind of legal principle that can be reviewed.
This. It's all about the ability of the DC to enforce its will on the states. The fact that it's technically about illegal immigration and not something else is because it's a federal issue that has sufficient popular support. This means Trump can say it has a mandate from the population to do what he's doing.
This means both sides are constantly escalating until something like Frey ordering MPD to arrest some icemen or some icemen snapping and going Kent State on the protesters happens.
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Interesting post.
The simple reason why it’s so hard to reverse large scale migration to the West is that it’s easy for people to arrive, and hard to make people leave.
We can describe this slightly more technically.
Other groups have no real power. Salvadoran day laborers are not in power in America. This is important because it makes clear that ICE just raiding Texan farms is not enough. Yes, they should be doing more of it, and yes, they aren’t doing as much of it as they should because the Ag lobby is big and Republican.
But to win, maybe you have to bring the fight to middle class and upper middle class liberals in blue states. Maybe white progressive Democrats in Minnesota have to fear ICE. Maybe that’s what it takes.
But to win, maybe you have to bring the fight to middle class and upper middle class liberals in blue states. Maybe white progressive Democrats in Minnesota have to fear ICE. Maybe that’s what it takes.
I'm sympathetic to that take, but until Republicans so much as sniff toward taking on the business lobby I will assume that they are not serious about immigration restriction and remain the anarcho-capitalist liberals that were Reagan through Romney concerning immigration.
Remember: Business owners are the original open-borders lobby, always have been and always will be. Fealty to capital is not governance but failure to govern and an invitation to be defeated by anyone who values things other than money. One would think that the GOP would've learned from the last century but they did not and will not.
One reason to be charitable to republicans is that they do not actually wish for the foreign labour to have any rights at the expense of locals at all. The illegal worker is a resource to be exploited and discarded, not a soul deserving care and nurturing and resources. Any illegal on a chicken farm must be well behaved because his own peers will enforce the law to keep the gravy train going. For blues illegals breaking the law is the incentive to give even more resources as restitution.
That’s not better. “Yeah, we’re going to import a permanent underclass to keep your wages low, and it’ll push up housing prices while degrading your local culture too, but don’t worry, we won’t treat them like human beings.” It’s not much of a sales pitch.
I mean it's a norm to varying degrees in large parts of the world. Gulf states, Singapore, Malaysia etcetera all run on the basis of temporary workforce migration that doesn't get birthright citizenship for their children or any sort of automatic citizenship acquisition process.
They're all still popular programs since the expatriate workers from the developing world are getting large multiples of the prevailing wages in their home countries.
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But, if we accept the premise that most migrants are not being personally sheltered by white progressive Democrats in Minnesota, why would white progressive Democrats in Minnesota fearing ICE solve the problem of large-scale migration? There is no clear mechanism by which the Democrats being afraid would translate into fewer immigrants, unless it's actually fear on the level of "ICE will find me in my house and kill me if they determine that I did not support ICE enough", and I doubt I need to argue that turning the US into an ICE-glorifying North Korea would be throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
If indeed the mechanism by which white progressive Democrats implement and safeguard the immigration pipeline is saying "ew" at people who want to do something about it (and, perhaps, by extension voting and turning up to the odd protest), then inducing any fear that falls short of fear to do the aforementioned things seems highly counterproductive, because people generally hate being afraid and want to get rid of sources of fear, and contrary to what a red-blooded conservative might think most white progressive Democrats do not in fact already commit 100% of what they could theoretically give to migrant-maxxing.
This gets at something that's been on my mind lately, which is that I think people need to go back to the drawing board if their defense of the recent ICE shooting would also work as a defense of going down the list of registered Democratic voters and sending hit squads to their houses to kill everyone present.
…what?
Take the statement "I think ICE was in the right during the recent shooting, because <reason>".
Take X, and plug it into the statement "I think we should go down the list of registered Democratic voters and send hit squads to their houses to kill everyone present, because <reason>".
Does the sentence still make sense?
Example A: <reason>="because declining to enforce laws if bystander-activists actively make the situation more dangerous sets up terrible incentives". "Kill the dems" statement makes no sense if you put this reason in, thus it is not an example of the sort of thing DiscourseMagnus was talking about.
Example B: <reason>="because the dems had it coming for ruining our country". "Kill the dems" statement does make sense if you put this reason in, thus it is an example of the sort of thing DiscourseMagnus was talking about.
TBH on here I don't see much of example B. On xitter I do, but the discourse here on the motte has been refreshingly free of that for the most part. I do agree with DiscourseMagnus that example B is bad and the sort of thing I want to see less of, but I don't agree with his implication that it's the sort of thing I see a lot of here.
I totally agree with what you wrote. It was very boo outgroup and seemed untethered from our discussion.
I do not consider Republicans or the right wing to be my outgroup.
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In talking to blue people IRL, my sampling so far is:
Quite frankly, if we were all on the same page about doing deportations quickly, we wouldn't even have much of an argument.
I'm seeing more framing like you're presenting here. Transparently, I don't believe it. People don't show up to these protests to prove they aren't intimidated. None of the people protesting are going to be stopped by ICE's detention or deportation. The most charitable way I can frame it is that they view illegal immigrants as the people working at their favorite mexican place or mowing their yard and think it makes their cause righteous.
In reality, it's just garden-variety TDS. The anti-ICE riots are happening exclusively in blue cities where a critical mass of people and opinions are relishing the opportunity to get in a fight with agents of the state they view as extensions of Trump himself. But of course, they'd riot if he offered free ice cream.
I mean, look at this framing from NPR: "A Third of people arrested by ICE have no Criminal record". Are we for real here? ICE's track record so far is such that even wildly dishonest, leftist institutions admit that 66% of them are criminals, and now we're talking about why we need to stop that activity?
The new argument ("We just want smart deportations") is because moderates do grok how insane it is to be using cars as weapons, to wrestle with cops while carrying a gun, and then to pretend like you're a victim. I've only heard it in the past 3 days. And I say this while believing that Saturday's shoot was not a good one - it's a huge bummer that he got killed, and it looks like a mistake more than anything else.
The admin shouldn't worry about the hardcore Democrats who weren't going to vote red anyway. The admin also shouldn't be worrying about trying to appeal to the hardcore GOP base who is going to vote regardless.
The people who matter are the moderates and centrists who make up an increasing number of independent identified voters. Elections are very close, look at the swing states and just how few percentages of voters needed to have shifted for a dem win instead in 2024. Pennsylvania needed only .85% of voters who voted for Trump to instead go for Harris for instance.
That's right, if you piss off less than a percentage of voters then you could lose the state instead of win. And as Nate Silver points out Trump is losing the normies on immigration. The normies and independents don't want violent criminals in the country and you win them on the topic if you handle that. But they don't have much of an issue with Maria the house cleaner, Jose the roofer, and the nice abuela across the street. And if you go after Maria, Jose and the abuela, they'll sour on you as we're seeing now. And they might not like disruptive protests too much, but they also don't like the feds beating up and shooting people either.
This site is filled with overly online internet addicts fetishizing over some sort of race war roleplay, while the average normie voter is way more moderate. They want low prices, they want good jobs, and they don't want to see a bunch of scary violence. There's a reason why Trump with his better political instincts is pivoting away after this fiasco, because he knows seeing a bunch of masked agents shooting people is scary and a bad look.
You and @crushedoranges -
One of my least favorite things is looking at a thread where two people are going at it over some slapfight from weeks or months (sometimes years!) ago. I don't like it when someone comes after me because he wants to renew an argument we had so long ago I barely remember it, and I don't like seeing a bunch of reports because two guys are at it again over some petty shit that they should both just let drop.
What happened was this:
@crushedoranges said "It's understandable that someone who keeps getting called a Nazi will eventually say 'Okay fine, I'm a Nazi.'" You said: "So you're a Nazi then?"
And you've both been going at each other unnecessarily ever since, crushedoranges angry that you called him a Nazi (which you didn't, really, you were just being snarky and trying to score a zinger), you indignant that he said it's okay to be a Nazi (which he didn't, really, he was talking about a natural human reaction to someone constantly accusing you of being something you're not).
IMO, you are both being deliberately obtuse in refusing to see what the other one is really saying, but it doesn't matter. Let it go.
I feel like I'm back in high school where both parties are punished, irrespective of actual fault. Obviously he was being deliberately obtuse, back then. Several commentors (yourself included) spoke out about it!
If there is a different read for 'So are you saying you're a Nazi then?', magickittycat hasn't explained themselves. They flounced. And now they come back, calling the Motte full of overtly online people. What ground does he have to stand on? The pot calling the kettle black? Isn't he making a generalized statement about a group that is an insult to everyone here? That really gets my goat. It violates multiple site rules on good faith, generalizations, and just manners in general. It's sour grapes from people who lose arguments.
I'll drop it, but it really annoys me that I can get dinged for personal attacks but anyone - even moderators! - can go 'yeah, this site is full of terminally onlines/partisan hacks/trolls' etc. It's sneering. If I called magickittycat terminally online, that would be a personal attack. But if they call everyone talking here terminally online, they can get away with it. Because they didn't single out anyone specific. He can be lazy and slur my entire partisan side as Nazis and I have to sit here and take it. Because ha ha, zinger. Just a joke. Why can't you take a joke?
No. Either Nazis are a serious subject out of the Overton Window, or I can break out the Nazi jokes, and believe me: my arsenal is great and terrible. I know you just want to end the argument and get it out the moderation queue, but that is specifically what set me off.
I'm not "punishing" either of you, I'm just telling you to give it a rest. I am not trying to judge who was "more" at fault here, because no one is getting banned.
Yes, of course. I won't bring it up again. Just wanted to get it off my chest.
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If your point is that the median voter is a spinless fool devoid of coherent political philosophy, who simultaneously wants more gibmes and lower taxes, who reads headlines and tweets to form every opinion.... then yeah, I agree with you.
I even think that, as a pragmatic measure, Trump backing down on this gives him enough time to save face before the next election, maybe even midterms!
It should be more normal to be averse to violence than it is today. But it's sick that a 30-second clip of gunfire is what's being force-fed down the gullets of the ducks being fattened for slaughter, not the endless hours of shitty rioters blanketing Minnesota.
I think that's because a lot of voters understand the difference between private individuals (even if they're shitty) and state actors who work for the government. We don't and can't expect every random person in the country to be kept under control at all times, we aren't a police state. We wait for individuals to do crime, arrest those individuals and punish those individuals.
We do expect our government to be controlled however. The feds are a formal organization with the active ability to control who is a part of it and what their guidelines are. When the public sees the government not just committing violations of the constitution but doing so as a matter of policy, they're going to be upset at the formal organization and want a shakeup.
Also here's the Woke RINO Ted Cruz saying a similar thing with prices. A lot of people voted Trump wanting a better economy. Trump did really really well with politically inattentive voters who were upset about inflation. Failing on the economy in favor of the culture war does not make them happy.
My Libertarian bones ache to agree with you. I even think that ICE doing these manual, piecemeal raids is less effective than blanket enforcement at Farms, meat processors, and landscaping companies.
But once again reality rears its head: You cannot simultaneously prioritize criminals for deportation (which the Admin is clearly doing, given 2/3 of the targets are criminals) and the, frankly, decent people working in industry. This demand from the left makes me want to fucking scream it's so dissonant.
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This explanation doesn’t real.
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I wasn't going to say anything, but you're the one who called me a Nazi, and I want to get ahead of your pedantry and say that you pretending to be a moderate is a pretense no one believes. Your condescending argument is an insincere tactic. You would never make an appeal to moderation for any of the left's sacred cows.
And then you insult the users of the Motte. You really saying that the people around here are worse than Reddit? Than Facebook? Than X, than 4chan? Where is this mythical bar of virtue that we fall short of? Aren't you in this picture, Mr. Calls Other People Nazis? Aren't you equally shitting up discourse?
Get off your high horse, man.
Lol nice try dude, it was you who essentially called yourself a Nazi with the quote
And I was asking you if you were serious about calling yourself a Nazi
Because obviously I don't expect random sane people to be doing that.
It doesn't even matter if I was or not, you're not gonna change what the polls are showing. The normies are turning on Trump's agenda.
Not only did I never say the people here are "worse" than any other site, but this comparison wouldn't make sense to begin with. Those sites are large with millions of users, overarching statements about them don't make much sense.
Basically everyone uses Facebook in some capacity, from the retarded 80 IQ criminals to stuff like 140 IQ doctors, rocket scientists, and programmers. How could I rank them much at all then? Your experience on X, Facebook, Instagram, etc depends almost entirely on what communities you hang out in and talk with.
I will quote Amadan:
And you still don't seem to understand that. Nothing has changed. I know you're coping and seething and still calling everyone that disagrees with you a Nazi. I bring it up just in case anyone accidentally takes you seriously.
Most normal non Nazi people do not say that being a Nazi is a reasonable thing to them because most normal non Nazis do not think the Nazis were reasonable.
Regardless, I clearly did not say that you were a Nazi, I was asking if you were because [refer back to the first sentence].
"Source: I made it up" Considering you can't actually even point to a time I called you a Nazi, it's exceptionally weird to make this unproven claim that you "know" it.
I will quote you directly. The passive voice does not exonerate you. Your continued shamelessness in the face of your own words only proves my point.
You do understand how much this is proving the point of being overly online if you are incapable of understanding "being a Nazi is reasonable" is beyond the pale of what the average American considers sane right?
Most people would not make such an absurd claim, because most people do not find Nazism as a reasonable idealogy or the Nazis as a reasonable group.
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It’s not that egregious IMO, not like you would see Nazi accusations on Reddit. It was just sort of a glib or snarky response to your comment. It didn’t seem overly serious
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Is he? I haven't seen any sign of this, it seems like he's doubling down. He certainly has good political instincts, but he doesn't have to worry about politics anymore. I seriously doubt he cares about what happens to the republican party after he's retired.
Greg Bovino is reportedly out. I hate to let the agitators get away with a win, but Bovino really botched the messaging after the Pretti shooting.
I'm not sure that's a climbdown. Historically, Trump has reshuffled personnel during major actions as people fail/prove themselves (that's how Bessent got to his position of power within the admin), and he's simultaneously sending in Tom Homan. We'll see.
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This is also dishonest. Of that 66%, half of them are accused but have not yet gone to trial. Some number of them might end up being criminals, but you are not a criminal until you're convicted, ergo that was not admitted.
Second, this might be what NPR is referring to by saying "the majority of those criminal convictions tend to be traffic violations or lower-level offenses." This breaks it down into traffic violations, DUI, drug possession, and marijuana. Let me put it this way - as someone centrist but closer to the bleeding-heart type than the average mottizen, I'm far less sympathetic to an illegal immigrant who committed DUI or drug offenses, but I don't think marijuana or a single traffic violation really moves the needle on how sympathetic or unsympathetic I am towards a person (repeated traffic violations might though).
takes notes for possible future career as not-criminal So if I do criminal stuff but I'm not yet arrested/tried/convicted, I can sue the ass for slander off anyone who dares call me a criminal? Sweet!
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For every single caveat you could line up to frame this as "dishonest," you have lined up there's an equal and opposite modifier the other way. These are people who aren't citizens, many without IDs or stable places to live, and they still were somehow indicted in our crappy criminal justice system?
Most reasonable people would agree that traffic and weed are a totally different deal. 66% is fucking enormous - it's higher than black males.
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It’s more complicated than that. First, it’s common to plea down form more serious charges to lesser charges, especially for first offenses. Second some jdx have a policy of going easy on illegals for this precise purpose.
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Maybe ICE should take the beam out of their own eye first, before they worry about the motes in immigrants' eyes.
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Okay let's be honest - having a mild case of TDS now is totally justified without the D. Trump is giving an already shambling world order a serious push. I enjoy it and like it. But for people that think of "to live in interesting times" as a curse - it is stressful moment. And we know where they are located.
I am looking at reddit now - the only thing saving Trump now is how cringe /r/pics is in trying to martyr the guy.
/r/bicycling has something like 55k upvotes where the last actual bicycling-related post topped out at 13k. I know Trump is great, but this is just a shallow copy of George Floyd virtue-jerking frenzy (although TBF a superior martyr).
Bots, bots, bots galore!! I wish there was a way to kill all bots on Reddit.
It's just posts becoming popular and then getting on /r/all or /r/popular which makes even more redditors upvote it.
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This is called a ratchet. Apparently it's as easy as pie and not illegal to fly millions of foreigners deep into the country with the plan of solidifying your demographic base, but it's totally illegal and impossible to remove those same people.
No. They can be let in, and they can be removed. What did you expect?
It is the sign of an impending civil war that so many are willing to engage in insurgency against the federal government. This isn't Fort Sumter, but it's starting to look like Bleeding Kansas.
Please, the blues have zero appetite for civil war. They want to cosplay as revolutionaries but won't ever pull the icky trigger themselves. By observed action the blues want to lawfare and shame the wielders of force, especially the Minnesota National Guard, to be the embodiment of Tim Walz Good Guy With Gun that will stand against masked fascist. Trump gives the blues animating purpose in finally fighting the saturday morning evil white man villain cartoon of the 2010s, a categorical evil with his army of jackbooted thugs all with ontologically evil motivations. Its the moral high of getting upvotes on instagram for #Resistance, and they feel especially virtuous because this time they put on boots to go outside. WOW SUCH SACRIFICE.
The absolute zero attention blues paid to Iranian protests and in fact continued support for Hamas just shows what the priority is: cosplaying Good Guy against the evil empire. Europeans screamed that fully legal deportation flights of convicted rapists were already illegal, so what difference does it make to forego restraint.
That's because Team Blue perceives American society as an extension of a high school classroom, where tattling to a teacher and expecting them to solve things for you is just the way the world works. The thought process is step 1: riot, step 2: ???, step 3: good things somehow. Resisting and being seen resisting is the point, not effective resistance; deontologists, not consequentialists. Good people protested a thing that was bad, therefore bad thing go away because we are good.
They might actually be directionally correct on much of this as it's likely an evolutionarily-selected tactic for modern-day terminally-online America, which is why they freak out when the teacher/moderator isn't on their side.
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They know there's no risk, because they can escalate arbitrarily and the reds will give up -- the courts, even red ones, won't support their actions and the bureaucracy and military won't act. At which point the blues have demonstrated that they run the country regardless of what the outcome of elections is; they win without the war.
Agreed. The blues do maintain narrative and legal escalation dominance and population level coordination, while kinetic red advantages are restricted by appetite for really going full ayatollah.
You know what reds CAN do? Abbott 2.0.
The blues communicate their love for their precious migrants so much, just keep bussing them over. Unlimited bus tickets to the lands of milk and honey and love that the blues specifically say they want to encourage. If the migrants are such a massive economic advantage shouldnt the blues be racing to get every single body coming over. The reds can totally just bus them over!
"Bus them over" was based on a particular population of obviously-net-negative but sympathetic-to-Blues migrants (namely newly-arrived "refugees") which no longer exists because of better border enforcement under Trump. In addition, it was a group of people who couldn't legally be deported, so centrist Democrats couldn't call the bluff and say "If you want them deported, why are you bussing them over instead of deporting them."
The red tribe are no more going to bus their own illegal employees to Massachusetts than deport them, for the same reasons. And even if they did, established illegal residents with jobs, homes, families and friends in Texas wouldn't go to Massachusetts voluntarily, and shipping them involuntarily to Massachusetts would look as bad (and be almost as bad, or worse if you care about the law) as shipping them involuntarily to Mexico.
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Yes. Imagine your neighbor's yard was overrun with cats and kittens, and his first impulse was to send in a bunch of men to go and kick the kittens, and pull on the tails of the cats, and to get into fights with the shrill animal rights activists who filmed his "enforcement and removal operations".
"You know, there is an easier way to fix this," you offer. "You could just pick up all the open cans of tuna that have been placed all over your yard. Then the problem would basically take care of itself."
"I couldn't possibly," your neighbor, Donald, replies. "There are so many cans!"
"About that," you continue. "Donald, you know your roommates are the ones leaving the cans all over your yard? Maybe ask them to stop. Or take away their can openers."
"And if they keep doing it?"
"I guess you might have to kick them out."
"Right," Donald says as he nods his head. "Yeah. And then I wouldn't need to hire the men to torture the kittens and cats, cause they would all just go away. And the obnoxious PETA people wouldn't even be able to say I was doing anything wrong. And it would be way cheaper and work way better."
"Exactly," you reply.
Donald feels a growing sense of relief as he think about his new cat free future. But then his mind catches on an unforeseen complication, and he sighs with the sudden grim realization that it couldn't possibly work: "But what about content for my "interrupting cats eating" social media accounts?" If my men can't kick kittens and pull on the tails of cats, the ICE X account will be dead in weeks."
"You're kidding me," you say. "That's your problem?"
"Yeah, Kristi would be crushed—she's the one overseeing this for me. She told me she hasn't had this much fun since she had to shoot that puppy of hers, uhm... Cricket." Donald shakes his head. "Oh well. It was a good thought anyway."
Here's a better analogy:
See this thread from the previous motte thread: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405679?context=8#context
Specifically, in 2023, anti-immigration republicans tried to pass HR2 which got rid of the tasty tuna cans (mandatory e-verify). The hypothetical "you" (dems + a few CATO republicans) prevented it from passing. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4529/text
This line about going after employers is a leftist misdirection. I agree Trump should try to get laws changed to make e-verify mandatory, but also he should enforce existing immigration law and try to get illegals out. Enforcing existing immigration law works, today, to reduce the # of illegals. The # goes down regardless of whether Trump's successor feels like enforcing E-Verify laws or not.
Incidentally, Trump is trying to kick out immigrants by doing things like giving them less free money taken from hardworking taxpayers. Leftists oppose this too.
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I will open sixty million backyard cans of tuna if it keeps the cat torturers in work, because I know someone who's a cat hoarder and at this stage of dealing with them I would cheerfully gut with a rusty knife all the goddamn cats.
Okay, I know your little bedtime story was meant to be about people, but I'm serious. Too many bloody cats and kittens = misery and squalor. If it takes torturing them to death to stop people cat hoarding, go right ahead!
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This story is very cute, but... well, in this metaphor, cleaning up all the cans means making American society just as shitty or as bad as it is in countries the immigrants are coming from.
I mean, that's what you're implying, right?
I think it means mandatory e-Verify combined with confiscatory fines for any business owner (or farmer) who knowingly employs an illegal.
Exactly
But that's not why the cats are there. The roommates are not just any business owners, they are Americans. And all it takes is one dude leaving out a can of tuna for the whole mess to start all over again.
America has tried nation-building i.e. leaving cans of tuna in other places, to hilariously mixed results.
None of it gets around the fact that people want in. E-verify or no, job or no, they want in. There are thousands of immigrants who want in and are willing to attempt both legal and illegal methods of immigration. They want in for many reasons, chief among them is the desire to seek a better life. Insert statue of liberty poem, etc.
You can remove all the tuna, sure, but to torture the metaphor even more, what if one of those cats is actually yours?
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I'm fine with sending in a bunch of men to remove the cats and kittens. Especially since the people now claiming "Oh, go after the cans of tuna" favor providing free tuna by the palletload.
This sudden received indisputable wisdom that going after the employers is the best and only reasonable way to do anything about illegal immigration and, as a result, going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten is not credible.
Granting somewhere on the Internet someone has probably said this, this looks like a straw man to me.
Multiple honest posters here have claimed that the lack of E-Verify mandate means that everything else is unserious and that failure to do so is why "many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump".
For the specific combination that employer mandates are the only reasonable approach and that going after illegal immigrants is cruel :
...
...
Do you think any nuance exists in these objections? Perhaps something less absolute than "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten"? Is it possible the presence or absence of certain qualifying adverbs might impact the meaning of such statements?
I think nuance could exist in objections similar to the ones provided: a post that considered things like how sanctuary city policies have actually interacted with enforcement of deportation orders rather than The One Time Someone Got Caught, or whether immigration lawyers might lie in pleadings or asylum filings. I don't think it was shown, here, or that it'd be consistent with PmMeClassicMemes' other recent public positions.
There's nothing wrong with holding those positions. There's nothing illegitimate with arguing them! But they exist, in their strongest form; they are not strawmen.
I do not think @The_Nybbler was referring to "their strongest form." I am aware there are people who genuinely believe immigration laws should not be enforced and everything ICE does is illegitimate. @PmMeClassicMemes does not seem to be saying "immigration laws should not be enforced" (in fact he says the opposite), and I don't know of anyone other than the most radical leftists who'd agree that literally no one, not even a convicted felon, should be deported ever. @The_Nybbler seems to be merely taking a shit, as he usually does, on people who have moderate-to-strong opposition to the maximal position.
The other posts you quoted seem to be generally agreeing with my own personal position, which is that immigration laws should be enforced, but the administration is unserious about really doing that because they are more interested in setting up confrontations on the streets than applying any pressure at all on the businesses who continue to incentivize illegal immigration.
... are you using "strongest" here to describe most extreme, or most defensible? Because I'm talking about the former.
That's nice, and all, but it's a formulation literally only you have ever said, here, and it completely swallows the difference between Nybbler and PmMeClassicMemes' position since both eVerify and direct deportation are immigration laws (hell, even Biden-esque operations are technically 'enforcing' the law, just not in any serious way). If we go back to Nybbler's actual claim, that people believe "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten", we see that PmMeClassicMemes clearly does not want immigration law used against actual illegal immigrants, even illegal immigrants with previous criminal histories. Nor is that specific to PmMeClassicMemes, as we can see by the regular refusal by sanctuary jurisdictions to refuse to honor immigration detainers at jails, or the unending panics over Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Yes, you can imagine the actual enforcement that might be accepted or acceptable to you. But you're the one that had to bring up convicted felons. PmMeClassicMemes hasn't even used the term "convicted" or "felon" in the last month; no example brought here acts as a case where Go 100% Deportation. Maybe he agrees with you, maybe he sets the line a little higher (I don't particularly care if someone sold bootleg cassettes, for example) or a little lower, whatever.
But Nybbler's statement wasn't "literally no deportation against anyone, ever, in any situation, no matter the case". He said "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten". That's not the same thing.
Perhaps, but coincidentally he's also pointing out that people claim that eVerify policies would be just, that deporting immigrants is not, and they happen to come from immigration maximalists, and they're not very credible about that first point.
We happen to have an immigration maximalist in this thread making these specific arguments.
You're calling it a strawman.
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But this is the claim you were responding to:
Which is perfectly consistent with what you're saying now. Notice that you changed "going directly after illegal immigrants" to "immigration laws should be enforced".
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The last time the government attempted to measure the proportion of illegals working W-2 with forged / stolen documents versus those working under the table was around 2013. Back then it was about half: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32004
If you ratchet up the pressure on the under the table arrangements, you'll certainly get more W-2 fraud. And the most popular form of this fraud is to use some citizen's real identity, potentially causing them all kinds of trouble, not the least of which involves the IRS.
What I think is the actual quote, so that people don't have to dig:
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Enforcing any law is going to have an element of cruelty. I'm prepared to tolerate it when the objective is important and the cruelty is minimized to the greatest extent that is feasible. In this case, I don't actually think we are being particularly cruel (with a few exceptions). My main objection is that we are being stupid. We are saying we are hard and cruel (loudly and repeatedly), dressing up ICE mall-cops like they are Delta Force operators, and then putting them in situations where they end up fighting with US citizens.
This is partially fair. I don't think it's really the people like myself putting out the tuna (I genuinely don't want marginal and negative value immigrants here), but the shrieking activists, or really, the people organizing them? Yeah, they are providing material support to illegals that makes it more likely they will stay.
To which I say, fine. If they like the illegal immigrants so much, let them provide free housing for every single one of them, since they will no longer be able to pay rent. Let them provide breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day. Let them organize healthcare and childcare and recreational activities. They can take the whole of the burden of supporting millions of people. You might counter that the more extreme immigration activists would be totally prepared to do this, and they'll use our tax dollars (at the state level) to do it. Maybe so. But these extremists only exist in a few deep blue states and cities, and now they are going to get an entire nation's worth of illegals looking for handouts. My political instincts tell me this will not be popular with the masses, even in Minnesota and California (even people who like cats mostly don't want to have fifty cats). In the long term, the extremists start to look more unmistakably like the zealots we already know they are, and the regular population grows increasingly resentful until they decide to boot the extremists out of office, or else the extremists moderate for the sake of self-preservation.
Will this be a slower, more drawn out process? No, I think it could actually go faster. To move things along, take the money we are now saving from not running the stupid cosplay immigration raids and pay a self-deportation bounty with it. Claude tells me we are about to fund DHS with 191 billion dollars. Take half of it and give it to out to the first 5 million illegal immigrants who self deport. That would be $19,000 per person. A family of four could collect $76,000 and buy a house in whatever country they came from. Or perhaps better still, run the self deportation lottery: "Deport yourself and you get a ticket that enters you to win 1 million dollars! And because the United States is so generous, there will be one winner for every 100 people who self deport! You heard that right, one winner for every hundred people!" Now your cost is down to $10,000 a person, and you have enough money to incentivize nearly 10 million people to self deport. And the best part is, either approach still leaves DHS with its full normal funding, so it will have plenty of resources to ensure nobody is coming in while this offer stands.
At the end of the day, the problem is either stupidity, or more likely, a desire not to actually succeed at scale.
We saw what happened there in Martha's Vineyard, didn't we? Suddenly the cold and rook-delighting heavens - sorry, got distracted by stray verses of poetry popping up. Suddenly all the posters of "no human is illegal" signs in their windows found that heavens to Murgatroyd, it was impossible to handle such a flood of 50 Venezuelans to this tiny, poor little island (median sale price of a house $1.8 million) so they needed the National Guard to assist in the voluntary relocation:
I agree that dumping people out of season on an island where the natives make a living by providing services to the wealthy part-time residents and the jobs are in farming and fishing isn't feasible, but part of catering to the rich liberals was plastering the island with such window signs.
So, you gets what you pays for.
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Sure but how do I make sure I don’t pay for them? How do I ensure my tax dollars don’t pay for them (money is famously fungible)? How do I ensure that when another party comes to power they don’t just make them all citizens that can vote who will now swear everlasting fealty to the party that has been giving them tuna nonstop!
How do I ensure when blue states go bankrupt I don’t have to bail them out?
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I understand and empathize with your desire to use more apparently humane methods to get illegals to leave, but I think your proposed solutions have serious issues.
The extremists would likely pledge to take care of and pay for illegals and then say, oops! The illegals ran away and we can't find them! Meanwhile, blue states will continue to quietly provide free social services to these "misplaced" illegals and make no effort to find them. We'll end up back where we started. Feigning incompetence and cluelessness is a powerful weapon.
As for paid deportations, it seems extremely obvious to me that those people will just come straight back. Worst case they might have to wait for a Democrat president to take office. The cans of tuna will still be calling.
I agree with your claim in your OP that we should focus on removing the tuna cans. Although I am strongly anti illegal immigration (and most legal immigration) I have a hard time getting mad about the free tuna in blue states when the red states refuse to punish employers hiring illegals. It's a pretty big blackpill. One party is captured by rabid open borders activists, and the other party is subverted by "conservatives" who prioritize economic growth and personal gain above the preservation and flourishing of their nation.
Neither side really cares about the national project anymore. To the blues the land they inhabit is filled with evil white men who should be destroyed so that peaceful browns can be nurtured by the Good White Women, while the reds think the land is filled with traitors that would happily keep destroying anything that made the land viable so long as college guilt complexes can be resolved. There is no national unity proposed by either side, no common cause. There will be no civil war but at the same time there will be no civility, just islands of globohomo blues talking to each other among a sea of disgruntled reds.
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I suggested that employers are required to check working rights a few threads ago. It's what Australia does. Australia has approx double the "born overseas" population of Germany, the UK or the US. But we also have pretty unforgiving policy towards illegal immigration or even asylum-seekers (until proven that they are somewhat legit). Overall, I really believe these two policies (ruthlessly preventing illegal immigrants entereing + making sure everybody one meets in polite company has had an accountant or government bureaucrat check their papers) are why immigration is mostly a non issue in Australia.
Aside from this costing businesses more in wages, nobody really had an objection.
As above, when implemented properly I think you need both. Australia sends asylum seekers to off shore detention facilities and don't let them set a foot on the mainland until they have been verified (this has been moderated a bit: we have onshore detention for low risk persons, e.g mums with 2 kids who aren't going to disappear the day after the hand cuffs come off).
But I do think this is a really good policy. It means that:
So what's your objection?
Hasn't One Nation gotten to a mid twenties polling average now due to immigration being a huge dividing political issue that's essentially killed the Liberal party?
Like illegal immigration hasn't been the issue since yaddayadda stop the boats but acting like there currently isn't a super divisive immigration debate in Australia is confusing.
As of yesterday it has, yes. Before 2020 it was between 1-5%. By 2022 it was 5%.
Bondi was definitely a driver of the latest spike, so the message should be to reduce illegal immigration and violence perpetrated by immigrants.
Stop the boats worked as a policy and increased overall satisfaction for most voters. Aggressively dealing with illegal immigrants does work.
Does criticism of common bridging tactics like applying for asylum amongst random expired student visa holders count as issue with illegal or legal immigration to you?
Spurious claims of asylum are technically legal, but I'd group it into illegal for mental model purposes. Why?
They've entered the Australian political sphere as well in recent years. One Nation is polling above the Liberal party some places. I'm confused how you don't think migration is a major Australian political cause.
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Didn’t you guys import like 20% of your population from China in the last 30 years and both your transport infrastructure and housing market are collapsing under the strain?
Is it not that immigration is objectively worse in terms of population-replacement in Australia, it’s just not a political issue because… Australians don’t have the self-preservation instincts that Americans do?
No most of our immigrants are british and kiwis over that time. In recent years, e.g. since 2019, india/china immigration has increased. But importantly these aren't illegals which is what the whole discourse.
Most foreign born australians are:
British, Kiwi, Chinese, Indian, Filipino.
My point was that it's not political and you can have both high immigration and high satisfaction with it. Re: infrastructure, no this isn't collapsing. Re: housing, yes but this seems to be a problem across the board with all alglosphere countries, including ones with half as much immigration as Australia.
In 2025 we had about 75,000 immigrants from the UK and NZ, and about 75,000 immigrants from India for context. Most of the chinese immigrants are on e.g. student visas or temporary visas, compared to most e.g. brits who move here permanently. So the self preservation thing here might be overstated.
Well… no it isn’t. Illegal immigrants are only slightly worse than legal immigrants (their real crime being their undeserving capture of the fruits of my patrimony that my ancestors toiled to build for me), and I think that this is at least a large minority opinion amongst the pro-Wall set.
The problem is the Great Replacement; whether it is being perpetrated legally or illegally is just ACKSHUALLY-nitpicking.
Yeah man I'm fine with a Kiwi coming over to Australia to install my HVAC, but that's just me.
Aren't whites going to be a minority in the states in like 20 years? How's that gel with the above comment?
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I'm going to call out on this as strawman-ing. Hypocrisy is so delightful to call out but it's also very cynical and essentially provoke the other side to dig in and become defensive.
As for this, I personally think that Americans want enforcement of both, preferably kindly but firm. If your complaints is that undocumented illegal immigration is treated with kids gloves then the way employers are treated is a parent yelling from the living room "remember to eat your vegetables!" while the kid is in the kitchen sticking his hand in the cookie jar for seconds and thirds. Calls for harder enforcement of the existing laws on employers or updates to the incentives of employers with regards to the illegal immigration debate are plenty based on this brief search I have:
I'm going to go back even further, let's go to the 1997 final report by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (Jordan Commission) under President Clinton where there is a section on "Immigration-Related Employment Standards (DOL)" and I'll quote it here and bolding some parts:
I would recommend reading the full report, there would be plenty of proposals in there that I think you like.
Illegal immigration sucks but if we are going to get anywhere, let's not just selectively pick the parts that makes you feel good but actually carry out a comprehensive strategy that would fix the problem.
edit1: Let me update my analogy, the state of immigration in the US so far up until Trump 2 is the employer being the bio kid going in for seconds and thirds with the cookie jar in the kitchen while the parent is yelling "eat your vegetables" in the living room, while the immigrant is the unwanted foster kid supposedly grounded but is climbing out of the window to get some cookies for the bio kids in exchange for favors.
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It's about as honest as this week's newfound enthusiasm for the Second Amendment. But it can be fun to debate here as an intellectual exercise.
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I think this is fair, and not a strawman. So,
let me ask, is this actually your point of view? Ok, you've written your reasoned defense of this claim. But is that in alignment with your goals? Do you simply want ICE to become more efficient and lawful in exercising it's deportation goals? Do you think the real disagreement is how to maximize efficient deportations? Or are we right that the blue tribe doesn't want it? If the latter, what's the real value of the rest of the post?
I am not trying to be flippant. But otherwise this reads a lot like that one meme, where the atheist is basically saying: “I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way."
Can’t speak for the OP, but this is more or less my position.
I would like government policy to align with its stated goals. I also prefer the stated goal, enforcing America’s borders, to most of the plausible alternatives. And I would most definitely like our law enforcement agencies to be “more lawful” in exercising their goals. Laws are what separate us from animals and dictators.
We ask the government to do all sorts of nasty things in service of a more perfect Union. Then we soften the blow by adding constraints. This turns imprisonment, conscription, taxation into routine and predictable processes. Border control ought to be routine and predictable, too.
Trump doesn’t play that game. Routines and constraints are means to an end. It makes him less effective, and it gives his enemies more ammunition. I wish he wouldn’t.
The only reason these things are routine and predictable is that the overwhelming majority of people go along with them. The moment people starting defecting in numbers, it's over. The numbers don't even need to be large, I remember from my Ancap days people calculating that with as little as 5% of people engaging in a tax protest, the government would be overwhelmed and would have no hope getting the situation under cntrol.
I wish all the Trump / ICE critics would take this into account, and make a few suggestions on how a clearly ideology-based defection should be handled. Right they seem to be assuming the protests would magically disappear, or that they would somehow, equally magically, be self-discrediting.
5% isn’t little. It’s 10x the prison population. It’s an entire state’s worth of taxpayers. Yeah, the IRS would lose its shit.
But that’s kind of beside the point. I really do believe there would be fewer and smaller protests if this wasn’t treated as a referendum on Donald Trump. People turn out to signal their tribal loyalty in a way they don’t do for abstract, bureaucratic causes. Every incident gets him a nice headline for his base and half a dozen headlines claiming he’s a fascist. That’s good for his personal brand, but it does nothing for effective governance.
That's kind of my point. It's not about the specific way immigration is handled it's about progressives' rival being in power. You can't turn immigration enforcement into something routine, if there's a dedicated group of activists reserving the right to freak out when something is a referendum on Donald Trump.
I also doubt it's really about Trump in particular. Every Republican I recall was painted as Hitler. Bush, Romney... I remember "Pence is worse than Trump articles" when he was VP, and there are similar ones about Vance now , we also had some about DeSantis during the primaries. This is just thr heckler's veto.
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It is my point of view.
The NYT poll suggested deportation approval was 50% vs 47% and ICE approval was 63% vs 37%. Furthermore there was a question about ICE tactics which got 61%/26%/11% for gone-too-far/just-right/not-far-enough.
Put together it means that deportations are still popular but ICE tactics are not. There's about 11-13% of the electorate who holds these two opinions simultaneously. It's not everyone, but it is certainly sizable enough to swing elections. This poll was conducted prior to the most recent shooting, so if anything I'd expect even less support for ICE tactics now.
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Does that meme actually reduce the validity of what the atheist says though? Someone from outside your group may not share your basic goals but might still have a point.
Yes.
And that point can be by balanced by other points that they would not raise because they do not share your basic goals. Such as how they do not share your basic goals, and are merely using arguments as soldiers to get their goals instead of yours... and that their goal is to obstruct yours.
You're welcome to use that as your personal heuristic – ignore arguments from people in different camps to you and stick to your own ideological kind, to avoid being outwitted by an enemy 'soldier'. But this is a nominally rationalist forum.
A rationalist might also be expected to recognize that 'reduce the validity' is not the same as 'ignore arguments from people in different camps to you,' and would not strawman accordingly. Fortunately, as you say, this is only nominally a rationalist forum.
Validity incorporates many factors, such as logical soundness, factual soundness, or so on. These are aspects that must be judged externally, either taken on faith or evaluated at more extensive effort. One of the aspects of people who use arguments as soldiers is that they are not prioritizing logical soundness, or factual soundness, but merely effect. Effect-prioritizing approaches will happily skip steps of logic, or ignore inconvenient facts, in order to achieve their desired effects.
Arguers who adopt styles of debate that routinely smuggle in unsound logic, or ignoring inconvenient facts, do not merit as much faith that their arguments are being cultivated for sound logic or sound facts. Thus, their validity is reduced, even if the more onerous evaluation supports them in a particular circumstance, because the specific instance is independent from the meta-context of who they are and why they are adopting a particular style of argument.
Or, in other words- validity results from a combination of both formal support or faith in their good faith. Few people provide or can evaluate because of how hard it is to work from first principles each time. Good faith is reduced when someone is knowingly presenting arguments from a position of bad faith.
This, in turn, is part of why rationalists have put a great deal of attention to the matter of credibility in conflict-bargaining and conflict analyst. The same message- be it promise or threat or something else- has different credibility/validity when offered by different actors, even if those actors use the exact same words.
To pull from a classic word-manipulator fable, since that is what arguments as soldiers is a style of: the boy who cries wolf and the boy who doesn't cry wolf may both say the same thing when there is a wolf, but the validity for disregarding the warning of the boy who cries wolf is much stronger. After all, he has used his false warnings as arguments as soldiers repeatedly to gain his desired effect of riling the villagers to his amusement. Logical and factual soundness were never his priority, and would have been known sooner had he been known as the boy who cried wolf from the start. Once these became known, he no longer maintained the faith needed to be a valid messenger of warning.
None of which means / implies that his warnings should be ignored entirely- the wolf still exists and does harm the town- but the moral of the fable is not 'he should have been seen as valid no matter what he said or why.' Why you say what you say absolutely matters for the faith people take your word at, which is a foundation of the validity of your arguments.
But why suppose an atheist who says "I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way" is more likely to be someone who uses 'arguments as soldiers' (any more than e.g. a co-religionist)? They could be prioritising logical validity, you don't know until you listen to them.
The atheist who says, "I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way," is usually cherry picking from one or two single aspects of the religion while ignoring all other concerns. A religion is a whole worldview, with many different factors held in tension. Justice AND Mercy, Freedom AND Obedience, Prudence AND Compassion.
Same with conservatism. There are many different principles that make up a conservative worldview, and trying to mount a logical argument while only considering one of them will not come across as intelligent. Arguing from a position someone actually holds will create a more convincing argument.
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I'll start by noting I was probably editing in additional paragraphs of how validity interacts with trust in the time you replied. I will let that stand as a general point.
You are arguing against a(nother) claim that was not made. There is no argument or claim that the atheist is 'more likely' to be someone who engages in arguments as soldiers than a co-religionist. There is not even a claim that it is worse when they do.
The athiest, however, is engaging in arguments as soldiers when they make an argument from a basis they do not believe valid, and attempting to have the other people act to their preference as if it were.
Arguments as soldiers, in turn, is a strategy with a spectrum of applications. There are egregious abuses of it, and there are unremarkable utilizations of it.
Where a particular instance of arguments as soldiers resides matters in some ways, but in other ways does not for the point of whether it decreases validity. The introduction of the variable itself changes the warranted level of faith in good faith to be taken as default, and compounding context- such as reason to believe the person is engaging in the argument in bad faith- magnifies the impact.
If they were prioritizing logical validity, they wouldn't be making the argument from (religious) faith that the meme pre-supposes they find illogical.
This, in turn, doesn't require to know what the specific argument is, merely the nature of the argument and the arguer. If parts of this are known in advance- such as knowing the atheist is an atheist- all the better.
I will also turn back to the earlier post I provided, which itself ties the Boy Who Cried Wolf part of the previous post about why personal credibility / intent matters for validity.
In a context-less vacuum, the meme Atheist and the Christian do not necessarily have oppositional goals. This is why the meme works as a meme- it's unspecific and vague enough to allow the viewer to assume their own interpretation that is more innocuous to their preferences.
For example, their desires could be orthogonal or even overlapping, like Christian wants to spend charity in way A, like supporting widows, and Atheist wants way B, say orphans. Atheist using an appeal to religion in shaping the shared priority might still be a case of arguments as soldiers, but it doesn't challenge the basis of faith in good faith in the way a more hostile demand might. As a result, the Christian comes off as more unreasonable for such a tepid contradiction.
But there are Atheists who might not be interested in orthogonal co-existence, but active obstruction or even harm. If this were the case, and this was known, then the recognition of arguments as soldiers does considerable harm to the validity of that Atheist's arguments. They would- appropriately, rationally- not be warranted the sort of external faith that they are engaging in good faith, since good faith is at odds with a pre-commitment/desire to negate other good-faith actors.
And this leads back to the meme being raised in the context of anti-ICE actors. There are anti-ICE actors who are orthogonal actors who just want more effective immigration enforcement. There are also anti-ICE actors who are directly oppositional to immigration enforcement categorically, even if they try to deny such because it would discredit their public validity. An orthogonal actor may propose a change on the belief that it will actually make for more effective, and be willing to not only implement said compromise but also change it if that change does not actually meet their claimed priority of improving effectiveness. A directly oppositional actor may advance the same change with the expectation/intention of deliberately foiling the implementation and resulting in a decrease in immigration enforcement.
One is a possibly valid way to improve immigration enforcement, and one is an invalid way. How does one evaluate the validity of whether the anti-ICE proposer is proposing a valid improvement to enforcing immigration?
Well, it helps if the previously identify themselves as categorically opposed to the validity of immigration enforcement, and thus warrants low social faith-based validity, much as it helps the meme Christian to know that the aetheist categorically does not believe in the religion, and does not merit social faith-based validity. In the meme, the atheist is clear. In the United States, the disband ICE types are unclear... not least because only a few years ago the same general coalition had the defund the police movement, with similar dynamics.
The "I don't believe this but you do" is a form of "If you believe premise A and premise B then behavior C doesn't fit." This forum often engages in this towards the left. And while often the person using this logic is bad at modeling the thoughts of the group they're applying it to, that's not inherently a problem with the form of argument.
"Arguments as soldiers" is a way to make attempts at persuasion sound nefarious. Of course they are attempting to persuade you! It isn't a secret. It's a nihilistic world view that frames the world as two sides, and one is pre-committed to always defect you no matter what you will do, but wants to see if you are a sucker who will cooperate. You can never earn their respect, never reach some sort of compromise, therefore the correct response is maximum fuck you. I won't say such a person would never possibly exist, but it treats the extreme as the norm. It's also self-fulfilling, because viewed from the opposite side you literally are playing defect bot.
The existence of people who have contradicting goals is not some new phenomenon, it's the norm of society. Regardless of what other people do, you should hold to your own values. This is the right's version of the left's "bad faith" exemption. The left loves this similar game - "We stand for tolerance but by having a limitless definition of harm we can shun you and still be tolerant!" Now it's "If the enemy tries to use our values against us that gives us license to never consider whether the accusation is correct!" The atheist vs Christian context of the meme is rather ironic - at the risk of being the atheist in the meme, I'm still fairly confident that Jesus' big thing was being so committed to his own values that he'd let the opponent "win" thereby convincing the opposition of his righteousness.
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How? Using arguments as soldiers doesn't reduce their validity.
I elaborated my thoughts on how more in the other fork here.
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I think that a policy that effectively and relatively bloodlessly (such as payments surveillance/targeting corporations that hire illegals/etc.) removed all illegal immigrants from the united states would have disastrous economic consequences, and would be horrendous policy. However, I wouldn't favour protesting such a policy, would not call it fascist, just label it as "something I don't support", the same way I am passionate about YIMBYism but don't think NIMBYs are evil.
I am broadly in favour of immigration, but I think allowing a bunch of illegal immigration instead of legal immigration is very silly and inefficient and leads to all sorts of ridiculous problems.
The fundamental reality is that the demand for labour in the united states is higher than the supply of labour, because the government has capped the amount of labour that can be provided, so employers and labourers enter into illegal arrangements to provide labour. I would rather they be able to have legal arrangements, but a policy that cracked down on illegal ones without focusing on heavy handed tactics would have my acceptance and I think broad political legitimacy, although not my support.
I think that if I were a democratic congressperson, I would be willing to actually vote for a bill that implemented the policy even though I think it would have disastrous consequences, without requiring a legislative trade (ex: amnesty for some, increased immigration levels), because I think that in short order (1y-2y), immigration policy I prefer would be demanded by the public on its own.
I also think that it is in everyone's interest to argue for efficient and well-ordered, predictable governance, even when they don't agree with the policy goals. For example, if Mamdani spun up a police unit to specifically to arrest landlords who committed crimes, and directed that all such arrests occur in midnight no-knock raids, I would take criticism of that implementation in good faith from people who oppose rent control!
The demand for labor at $0 is infinite. No matter what you set your immigration target at, companies will still kick and scream about having a "labor shortage" by which they mean a shortage of labor at the price they want to pay. Taking their claims at face value is ridiculous. They are optimizing for their company's own individual benefit, ignoring externalities that impact the public. Low-wage workers have a massive burden on social services like medical care, schools, welfare programs, etc. For some farmer to get a $7/hour agricultural worker, everyone else is paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to subsidize their ongoing existence in the US.
I think most people here would take issue with previous governments intentionally turning a blind eye to illegal migration, rather than the current administration's effort to actually enforce federal law as intended by Congress.
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Thanks for the response; I appreciate the thoughtful earnesty
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I would be sympathetic to this (because I find it quite plausible that ICE are behaving in an undisciplined manner) if "blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced" wasn't literally true. Every single claim they make, every video they post, every action they take, is tainted with the confounder that they also don't want immigration policy enforced. The world where ICE is completely professional and competent would have near identical protests and complaints to what we're seeing now, although probably with fewer deaths. I don't think most people are actually protesting ICE misbehavior, I think they're protesting "enforcing lawful immigration policy" and the ICE misbehavior is just a cherry on top for them to retroactively justify their protest. For many of them, the point of being annoying and obstructive is not to actually hinder the functioning of ICE but to trigger them into retaliating and thus create more viral videos to complain about. I strongly suspect that if the protests were not happening then all the issues would vanish and ICE could just arrest and deport illegal aliens like they're supposed to.
Maybe they actually are overstepping their bounds and arresting legal migrants they don't have a legal right to arrest, but I would take such accusations more seriously if they weren't mixed in with complaints about any immigration policy enforcement. If the claims were "we should deport every single illegal immigrant, but make sure to minimize collateral damage along the way" (which is what I believe), and then claims that ICE has too high collateral damage mixed in with their legitimate duties, then I would take that seriously. But if the claim is "All ICE behavior is illegitimate" then I'm just going to treat it like wolf crying. Come back when you have a better plan which contains deporting all the illegals as an axiom, and less collateral damage. It's probably possible. But if the choices are (deportation + limited misbehavior) or (total non enforcement) I'd prefer the former.
Yes, and that would be a massive political win for Trump. If ICE were absolutely impeccable and locked in, the protestors would look like fanatical lunatics, moderates/swing voters/independents would all look at them, go, "I'm not voting for the party that panders to these retards" and help Trump not get whacked in the midterms.
Instead, they still look kind of like fanatical lunatics, but they also look somewhat like people standing up against big government, which is based (in general) and more importantly, a profoundly American tradition. Plus, the ICE violence and dead American citizens are scaring the hoes (swing voters).
That would be a massive political win for the right. Not sure about Trump specifically. I have no idea what his actual utility function looks like, but I suspect he did it this way on purpose in order to "own the libs" and bolster the flames of the culture war. I still voted for him, because he was the better of two bad options: at least he's doing something, but he is definitely not the ideal candidate to be getting things done in an effective manner.
The far left and the far right seem to have this sick sort of codependency where they need the other to exist and seem powerful as a boogeyman in order to create enough viral content to fuel their own flames. While Trump is not exactly far right, not on every issue, he copied this particular technique to great effect.
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Is that how things were before Pretti? Before Good?
No, it wasn't.
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I think OP offered that up. Go after companies hiring illegals was the plan.
Requires a law being passed. Is impossible unless Democrats AND RINOs both face a wipeout.
I would have thought that about the current enforcement actions. Trump's MO on this seems to be just pass an executive order, and if it gets struck down oh well, the courts move slow.
ICE actually has wide enforcement powers granted by statute law. It's just that previous administrations didn't use them so much -- some of this being that local law enforcement co-operated with ICE, making direct enforcement less necessary. Immigration enforcement is where Trump is on some of his strongest legal ground.
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iprayiam3 is right that, in the rhetorical context, it's a distraction, but the real point is that it's a poison pill. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that restrictionists have truly won until we see Big Ag CEOs getting perp walked, but you can't do that in six months. The opponents of immigration enforcement have picked it up from the radical populists because it's appealing but unrealistic. Too much of the economy relies on cheap (often fraudulently taxpayer-subsidized) illegal labor to do this overnight without causing a crash. These things will take time to unwind, and are inherently very thorny problems - for instance, if we do need migrant labor in some areas, how to have a legal and regulated guest-worker program that the next Democratic administration won't instantly transmogrify into a vote bank - but I think Trump's actions are concordant with the administration understanding that. Go after the criminals now, make it clear that illegal immigration will not be tolerated forever, and give the economy time to adjust.
Typical government, restrict supply, subsidize demand.
This seems like a more honest assessment of why true immigration reform hasn't happened. But it's also the most damning. If our economy is semi reliant on it then not addressing that point is a total cop out.
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I definitely think that would help reduce the flow inwards, because if they can't get easy jobs then they won't expect a better life here. I definitely approve of that as a low-hanging fruit that we should be doing in addition to everything else. But it doesn't actually deport anyone who's already here. If anything it would turn them even more underclass and thus strain any welfare systems they might have snuck themselves into, or turn them to crime or homelessness. Which I suppose might make them easier to detect and thus deport, so isn't a fatal flaw in a system that was actually deporting them, but is not going to give good outcomes if we just keep playing catch and release.
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Yeah this is always my frustration. It’s so extremely fucking annoying that we got an anti immigration president in power twice, and both times he refuses to press the “easily fix illegal immigration” button.
It's almost like the red vs blue thing is a big distraction from the fact that our civilization is run by a small group of rich people who do not care what you think
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Is there anyone on the left actually pushing that, not as a piece of rhetoric? If Trump pivoted to that, would a sustantial portion of the left get on board with deportations and remigrations? If not, it's not a better plan; it's a distraction.
Was there anyone on the left pushing the current ICE enforcement actions? No, but it still happened.
I don't understand your model of the world here. Trump can't do a thing cuz the left disapproves, unless it's something he is already doing?
Many of his current immigration enforcement actions might end up getting considered illegal. That didn't stop him.
You’re misunderstanding my point. Trump should go after employers. Im responding to the idea that PMme is steelmanning the protesting side. If his suggested solutions aren’t things the protesting side would support then it’s not really an alternative to placating the protests and undermines the argument that the R model of the protestors simply refusing deportations is insufficient
Alright let's chart this out.
Action A: hurts blue state, restricts immigration.
Action B: hurts red state, restricts immigration.
I think OPs point is that the protestors are against "hurts blue state" not against "restrict immigration", because they would protest action A but not action B.
It's hard to call them on this though because Trump is only taking action A. Which makes his claim of 'this is only about restricting immigration' seem dubious. If that was true why wouldn't he take action A and B? People here in favor of immigration restrictions, like yourself, seem happy to have both actions.
My personal take is that this is standard politics for most people (including Trump): benefit your allies and hurt your enemies. And try to prevent your enemies from doing things that benefit themselves or hurt you.
For a smaller minority of people it's actually about the policy. You are probably in that minority. Some protestors are also plausibly in that minority.
Since neither side is a monolith, claims of "their side is just playing politics" are likely mostly accurate. And probably 99% of politicians, including Trump are also just playing politics and don't give a shit about the policy.
And protesting some big entity playing politics with your tiny local entity seems justified. Even if you have zero principled stance on the policy in question.
This is a fair take. Still don’t agree completely but thanks for laying it out
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Perhaps one fewer death. The "ICE is untrained and incompetent" claim is just a backstop to the "ICE is an invading army" claim. I have watched all sorts of videos showing arrests which were claimed to be some sort of horrible, and in nearly every one, it shows an arrest more professional and with less drama than I'd expect from one on the news with local cops. To have Ross not shoot Good wouldn't be a matter of Ross being more competent and professional, it'd be a matter of Ross being omniscient.
I don't even thing protesting "enforcing lawful immigration policy" is the center of the onion here; it's "resistance to Trump". If someone with a (D) after their name wanted to enforce lawful immigration policy, we wouldn't see anything like this.
Bring back Cops. That was effectively early bodycam footage days but with a cool voiceover and better editing. Most people being arrested are shitty people, this blue belief that every criminal is just jean valjean stealing a loaf of bread to get by will be regularly battered by continual evidence of pantless gangsters being assholes.
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This is too heavily entangled for this claim to be meaningful. They like the Democrats largely because the Democrats are obsessed with optics and placating the extreme left and being on "the right side of history". If someone with a (D) after their name wanted to enforce lawful immigration policy we would see complaints and pushback and then the Democrats would back down and not do it. Or do a much lesser version of it. They would surgically come in and get the pedophiles and stuff and deport them and the left would allow it as long as they credibly promised not to deport anyone sympathetic.
But they would not have ramped up ICE activity the way Trump has in the first place, so of course the protests wouldn't have escalated like this, but it's hard to disentangle that from the protestors being nicer to the Democrats, or the Democrats being nicer to the protestors and giving them what they want sooner.
We had the little kid from Cuba.
Democrats are allowed to deport even children that are likely to become Republicans.
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I will add that the whole "ICE is going after criminals" argument for their big operations in Blue cities is absurd.
Legally, states and municipalities have a lot of levers to affect crime rates. Most violent crime is judged under state laws, after all. Some have the death penalty, some don't. Some have strict gun laws, some don't. Some have legalized pot. Some make enforcement of laws against sex work a priority, some don't. Some have three strike laws. Some let well-connected people prostitute minors. Some criminalize abortion.
The basic idea (supported traditionally very much by the Republicans, e.g. in regard to Dobbs) seems to be that state governments are much better at creating a criminal justice system accommodating the preferences of their local population, be they Utah Mormons or California hippies, than a far-away federal government in DC would. Of course there are Federal guard rails (you can't legalize slavery, or raping kids, or hanging Blacks), but for the most part it is the locals who decide if an offender gets probation or a lifelong prison sentence.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the bleeding heart liberals in Minneapolis do not deport any violent criminals, thereby endangering their local population.
Why should the tax dollars of women living in Amarillo, Texas be spent to keep women in in Minneapolis safe just because their local state and municipal government has (hypothetically) decided not to invest in keeping them safe? How often do illegals get on a greyhound bus and go on a rape trip in the next state, really? If California abolishes all police tomorrow, will Trump send in federal agents to direct the traffic in LA?
There is certainly an argument to be made that immigration is federal policy, and illegals living in one state may affect the union in the long run (due to birthright citizenship, if nothing else).
There is also an argument to be made that getting rid of all of the illegals will also reduce crime rates (no HBD needed, illegals are generally poor, and poor people are more likely to commit violent crimes). (It would also wreck the sectors which are based on illegal's labor, which is why Trump is not doing it.)
But the framing that ICE is busy catching rapists and murderers in MN is bullshit. They are there to fill their quotas. Number go up. Rapists make the number go up. Sick 70yo women make the number go up. 6yo's make the number go up. Trump needs to tell his base that he has deported more people than the Democrats, and the job of the DHS is to make the number he will claim less of an obvious lie.
Of course, whenever the WH issues a press release about an incident, their ERO men were hot on the heels of a violent criminal. But this is about as believable as their claims that anyone their goons shoot is a domestic terrorist.
This answer is obvious. This failure dilutes the voting power and saps the taxpayer resources from everyone else in the nation.
There is strong evidence, illegals aside, the last census was highly fraudulent and sent lots of extra political power to Democrats. There is also lots of evidence illegals compounded that.
I do not understand your point. Are you saying that some illegal committing violent crimes in MN will harm the union by making MN less well run, which in turn will lead to them paying less federal taxes? This seems like an extremely indirect effect, and could be used to have the feds crack down on whatever crime they dislike.
I also do not think that the median violent crime changes the voting power of MN relevantly. If there is census fraud happening, that is likely not related to violent crime.
NB: the obvious fix for census fraud is
to bring back the 3/5th ruleto elect the president by popular vote, and assign the number of Representatives based on the people who voted in the last election.No, I'm saying illegal aliens are counted in the census, and thus they give non-compliant states more votes in congress and the electoral college. PLUS the illegals get federal welfare in many cases, and in all cases their American-born children do + get federal education dollars.
National popular vote incentivizes voting fraud even more than the current system, because blue cities in blue states would rack up even more fake ballots as it would actually matter.
Instead, now, the only places where fraud is worthwhile is swing states where there is at least the potential for bipartisan oversight (even though we know this can be frustrated fairly commonly, such as in Fulton County).
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Its because this is an immigration argument that got squashed into a crime argument.
That is the entire counterargument, it answers your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs points. Immigration (deportation) is a federal policy, it is set at the national level, a system of each state / city setting its own immigration policy could not possibly work.
I don't think its total bullshit, they probably are picking up more rapists and murderers than just the general population. A quarter of them have charges and another quarter have convictions (see below).
But I think this demonstrates well that this is an immigration argument squashed into a crime argument. Filling quotas, numbers going up, 70 yo and rapists both count as a deportation - these are all immigration metrics. Yes its absurd to call the sick 70yo a criminal, she's not being deported because she's a criminal. She's being deported because I don't want to pay for her healthcare.
https://tracreports.org/immigration/detentionstats/pop_agen_table.html
I am not contesting that, in fact, I think I was conceding it explicitly. Naturally they have a higher crime rate than the native population. For the illegal immigrant laborer trying to get hired for anything at Home Depot, the idea "or perhaps I could just spend today stealing smartphones and wallets" sounds a lot more attractive than for someone working as a teller in a bank. Nor do I dispute that lower classes are generally more likely to solve an argument using violence. (In July 2019, the last month for which a detailed record exists on your site, about 2/3 of the deportees were male. That alone is sufficient to get a higher rate of rapists and murderers than the general population.)
"ICE classifies an individual as a convicted criminal if they have been convicted of any criminal violation. Violations can range from serious felonies all the way down to a purely immigration violation (such as illegal entry which is a petty offense under the U.S. Code), or a violation which results in only in a fine such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, driving a vehicle with a tail light out, etc"
They point to the historical data, which shows the most serious conviction for July 2019:
Most Serious Criminal Conviction (MSCC) Total
All 55,654
No Conviction 38,978
Illegal Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1325 only) 2,938
Driving Under Influence Liquor 1,703
Assault 977
Traffic Offense 858
Larceny 457
Illegal Re-Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1326 only) 443
Domestic Violence 390
Burglary 382
Drug Trafficking 381
Robbery 279
Sex Assault 246
...
Homicide 123
...
Various specific kinds of homicide 57
Various manslaughter 47
Generally, homicides are a great anchor in criminology because the dark figure is thought to be rather small compared to the reported cases. Here, I will presume that the US is very unlikely to deport murderers to their countries of origin instead of charging and sentencing them, and that it is unlikely that homicides will have a worse crime on their rep sheet.
(There are nits to be picked in either direction, sure. Some people will commit an involuntary manslaughter and an armed robbery on separate occasions, and thus not show up in the homicide category. And some homicides are rather far from the central example of a homicide. The mother with three kids in her car who is distracted, oversees a red light and gets into an accident in which one of her kids is killed is a homicide, after all. And likely one of the 381 people whose MSCC is drug trafficking is also responsible for some gang-related killing for which he was not caught, just like there are murderers at large in the broader society.)
Still, this means that 0.4% of the deported were homicides, or 1.3% of the deported who were convicted of an offense were homicides. So much for Trump's murderers and rapists -- they are clearly part of the deported, at much higher rates than in the overall population, but still only a tiny fraction.
USC1325 (the most prominent one) for example is a 'duh' charge. Yes, most illegals from Latin America cross the borders illegally rather than overstaying a student visa they would be very unlikely to get.
In the current statistics, "Pending Criminal Charges" is even more wishy-washy. In the unlikely case that you want to deport an immigrant where Thiel's computer systems can not even find a single citation for jaywalking, you can just charge them with a trivial offense. Google AI thinks the statue of limitations for USC1325 is 5 years, so you can try to slap this on anyone who popped up on your radar in the last five years. The other ones likely filled out some form at some point, so you just charge them with some federal petty crime to that affect. The point is not that you would have to make the charges stick before a judge, after all. Just to have something so that you can tick "pending criminal charges", then deport them. You could just charge every one of them with desecrating the corpse of Lincoln, if you wanted.
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I feel like your take would be a lot more reasonable in a world where the epicenter of resistance didn't just so happen to be the city where a billion-dollar fraud ring with probable links to high-ranking state officials was just uncovered.
what links to high ranking state officials are there? im under educated on the whole somali fraud situation but aside from having some white women in the upper echelons of these fraudulent orgs i havent seen anything that points to, for example, the grants being given to them knowing that they were fraudulent
Also i feel like your take would be a lot more reasonable in a world where the president didnt just send his anti immigrant task force to one of the states with the least illegal immigrants per capita. Easier to be the epicenter of resistance when youre also at the epicenter of the opponents crosshairs
Whistleblowers claim they were retaliated against, see here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yyqdZT3J4qY
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Local governments do not have the power to decide who gets to live there, either positively or negatively.
I want the 70y/o women and 6y/o children deported just as much as the criminals. Hell, the criminals probably aren't costing me as much in taxes an an old lady getting benefits and a young kid leeching off the public education system.
That is an entirely coherent position. The point I made was entirely against the argument "the people we are deporting are really bad people" made by the DHS and some posters here.
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Digression, but the blue tribe is not a monolith.
Commenters may argue that "The purpose of a system is what it does". Therefore, Biden's intention was to flood the US with immigrants. However, outcomes based evaluations opens a can of worms that may not help the red tribe cause. Broadly, I don't believe the outcomes were the policy objectives, as much as the equilibrium result of internal infighting.
On this forum, we acknowledge sub-tribes within the Republican tent. Tech right, single-issue abortion voters, isolationists, heritage Americans, conspiracy theorists and anti-wokes, and so on. As the conversation evolves, I'd like to see the criticisms be targeted at different sub-tribes among Democrats, instead of the blue-tribe at large.
Sadly, Biden was senile and Kamala was a powerless face. This made them particularly ineffective. As a result, faceless staffers & unelected ideologues who caused the worst outcomes have avoided the public eye. Makes it hard to identify the leaders within the blue tribe who want open borders at the expense of American people. There is some real guerilla warfare going on there.
Name a single democrat elected official in federal office who has spoken explicitly in favor of deporting more illegals.
Maybe not in those exact words but does Ruben Gallego senator from Arizona count? Here is his plan
https://www.gallego.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/immigration-plan.pdf
No, he makes no mention of supporting deportations in any capacity in that doc.
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Does John Fetterman count?
Does he? He is basically an R these days.
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Huh I'm surprised but I guess it counts.
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I was about to say Manchin, but he's no longer in office and I'd forgotten he was officially Independent his last year.
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Does 2016 Bernie Sanders count?
2020 Bernie Sanders buried that guy too effectively.
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This 2016 bernie sanders? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-senator-bernie-sanders-deportations https://web.archive.org/web/20160317081749/https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-fair-and-humane-immigration-policy/
I see not a single thing advocating for removing illegals, but tons of breathless advocacy for the importation of millions and millions of foreigners and also giving them citizenship.
Sorry, I'm thinking back to 2007 when he nuked a pro immigration bill.
The years seem to run together these days.
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Seems like there's roughly 4 types of Democrats on this issue:
I know people on the right who fit into (1) pretty well too: "We're fine with immigrants, but we should enforce the laws as written because that's the process. Those laws could maybe be improved (exact direction unclear), but distributed decisions to not enforce laws is not the way to change them." Those folks are generally pretty positive about legal immigrants and naturalization, although maybe there's some skepticism of specific programs (H1-B).
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I would describe myself as a proponent of a more reasoned, systematized form of 3. I regard illegal immigration per se as something that certainly should be illegal, but which it is wholly disproportionate to repress through life-ruining violence, especially when we are in a status quo where millions of people are involved. Treating every illegal as if they were some sort of dangerous felon seems as obviously daft and inhumane to me as clapping people in irons for jaywalking.
If there is an epidemic of jaywalking in the country with millions and millions of jaywalkers, and death tolls from traffic accidents start rising as a result, then certainly you should take top-down measures to curb the phenomenon - but going after individual, benign jaywalkers with the full force of the law would be an absurd and nasty way to do it. If a strict interpretation the law as written designates millions of perfectly harmless people as serious criminals, then there's an unaccountable chasm between the letter of the law and the reality we're faced with. Ruining random people's lives (and in some cases ending them) for daring to do what hundreds of thousands of people do every year, what half the population of their own country would sympathize with at worst and actively praise at best, is not how you deal with that - it is not kind, it is not just, and it's frankly not that effective, compared to a more systematic solution that treated the cause instead of bashing the symptom.
You can stop a jaywalking in progress by getting the jaywalker out of the street. It seems absurd to me to compare that to an ongoing crime where halting it requires forcing the perpetrator to move their entire residence.
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Well a couple of things.
First you listed a number of false positives, people being wrongfully arrested/deported. Any sufficiently large scale operation will have mistakes. If you tried to crack down on disability fraud surely you would end up mistakenly depriving some genuinely deserving people. As you said, the optimal level of crime is not zero, similarly, the optimal level of wrongful convictions/arrests/deportations isn't zero. If you could demonstrate that it was egregiously error-prone then there would be cause for concern. But at the moment I don't trust the media to be objective. Surely the Obama administration occasionally wrongfully detained a legal immigrant but the media wasn't shouting it from the rooftops when it happened.
Regarding the theatricality. Of course there is an element of theater to it, as there is with the protesting. What good does blowing a whistle or shouting "fuck you Nazis" actually do to impede their activities? Basically nothing, it is entirely theater. The theatricality of ICE and the focus on Minneapolis is largely about sending a message loudly, publicly and clearly that "no, blue states do not get to veto federal laws whenever the choose as they have a history of doing." The protestors do theater and ICE does counter theater. We can argue that their theatricality is losing in the court of public opinion, but I appreciated it at least.
Well whistles aren’t just intended to be annoying (though imagine having to work with whistles like that all the time). They are intended to warn illegals of your presence. It isnt just theatre.
IMO "subjecting federal agents to noise likely to cause long-term hearing damage" (impossible to tell from the videos, but quite believable) probably shouldn't be allowed. Having them don hearing protection and ignore people talking to them seems the worse option there.
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Obama did more than that - he deported four US Citizens.
He also ordered the extrajudicial killing of a teenage American citizen.
Claim not supported by your source, according to which the teenager was killed in a drone strike against someone else - just bad luck.
Fair. His (citizen) father's killing was ordered extrajudicially. The son was a bystander in a separate ordered extrajudicial killing.
Interesting to see how the level of outrage Trump gets for capturing Maduro is orders of magnitude more than the outrage levied at Obama for extrajudicial killings.
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No police force had their procedures written with the assumption that random people will stalk them to run into their operations blowing whistles constantly. And nobody is making these randos run into the middle of active police operations blowing whistles and starting fights. ICE seems to be moving around conducting targeted raids, not 'going door to door getting in fights with protestors'. The fights with protestors seem to be things that, frankly, are self inflicted- even if ICE climbs the escalation ladder too quickly, running into active police cordons blowing whistles everywhere and attempting to obstruct them will get some police response.
This did not mean Alex Pretti deserved to die. But a strategy of 'interrupting police cordons to physically obstruct operations and then attack police for trying to arrest people' will leave bodies lying in the streets. If the Trump admin was competent they'd use the FBI and US marshalls to start arresting protestors that physically obstruct ICE after the fact. But still.
I think the Trump administration may be skeptical of the FBI's loyalties.
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I'm curious as to why someone in the country for 26 years who has been compliant with regulations isn't given asylum or citizenship. I'm not doubting the story, but if this is so, then the entire system is backed up worse than a toilet and is clearly not able to handle the applicants it has, on top of the new applications flooding in.
As to the whistling, etc. yeah it's annoying rather than dangerous but at the same time, it is intended to interfere with ICE agents doing their jobs. Imagine you at your own job and someone standing nearby yelling, blowing a whistle, etc. Would you just shrug and go "well it's not illegal and I'm not in danger of harm" or would you get security to bounce them out the door? The protestors are there to interfere with ICE carrying out their duty, so they have to expect ICE to question them and even arrest them.
EDIT: Also, your harmless peaceful protestors are plenty able to engage in mob behaviour themselves; invading a church because, apparently, the pastor has the same surname as an ICE official. No checking out who the guy is, if this is the right place - nope, just storm on in and disrupt the service. Luckily this time nobody got hurt, but this is the kind of mob behaviour that can go bad.
The whistling is coordinated signaling as part of the insurgency that's being run.
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People who came in illegally and lived law-abiding lives for decades are still technically here illegally. There are avenues for such people to pursue naturalization and citizenship, but it's not simple and typically they have to leave the country and spend a minimum number of years outside the US before being allowed to reenter. As abused as asylum laws are, not everyone can just claim asylum ("Really, you were fleeing from the dystopian failed state of... Ireland?") So yeah, there are people who have been here for years, raised families, pay taxes, but technically could be arrested by ICE even now. Reagan issued an amnesty in the 80s which allowed many long-time illegal residents to naturalize, but there hasn't been such an opportunity since.
And how exactly is a life illegally spent in the United States "law abiding"? Literally every moment they aren't choosing to leave they are participating in an ongoing crime. I'm not even that invested in this kind of demographic control of the US, but the mental gymnastics the left employs to pretend that immigration law in the US isn't really US law are mind boggling to me, and it seems like normies basically just accept it. If anything violating immigration law should count extra for lawbreaking because it's literally the first area of law you'd need to investigate upon entering a foreign country.
Keep in mind that every time someone smokes weed in the United States, they are still engaging in an illegal act (yes, it’s legal in many states, but still illegal at the federal level). Every time one goes over 55 (or 65, or as much as 80) on the freeway, they are engaging in an illegal act.
There are a lot of things people do in their day to day lives which are illegal, but enforcement is selective.
For years, decades, we have allowed “illegals” to come here, we have allowed them to work here, heck big portions of our economy depend on their “illegal” labor (let me tell you, house maintenance has been a lot cheaper for me because I’m English-Spanish bilingual). It’s something we have permitted because it has benefited us as a nation.
Trump coming down this hard in “illegals” is unprecedented, and while there is a lot I dislike about the Blue Tribe, I can see why they’re so up in arms about ICE’s raids.
Yes, and if the National Motorists Association set up teams to impede the police from catching speeders, they'd be arrested and jailed and get no support.
Do you think people flashing their high beams to warn about speed traps should be arrested and jailed?
I'm not talking about mere warning, I'm talking about deliberately physically interposing themselves between the police and the speeders.
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Fined, probably. Arrested, if they start blocking traffic. Sure, why not?
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I agree that there are many laws that are wrong, should change, and even that it's proper and moral to break and improper and immoral to support or enforce. However, there is no meaningful dispute whether or not the law is in fact being broken. I personally disagree that immigration law is in this morally illegitimate category of law, and I certainly think it's unwise to break regardless of the morality of the matter. Any of these people could have been deported at any time, even if they were statistically less likely to be under a politically different administration. That's the whole reason that evil scumbags like doing business with them, because they've all got a massive blackmail threat hanging over their heads.
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Some grandma staying in the US illegally is very much not a central case of what people think by "criminal" (the directional opposite of "law abiding"), any more than an elderly hippie who grows some pot for personal use is.
I think there are circumstances where 99% would be willing to violate the law of their host country (e.g. if the alternative was to get deported to Afghanistan). I will grant you that there are illegals for whom going back would not be a matter of life and death, but 'merely' an inconvenience.
I also am generally doubtful that Republicans are really as much into obeying the law as they claim they are. Rolling coal seems to be very much a Red Tribe thing, after all.
(Or hypothetically, suppose that a liberal SCOTUS ruled that 2A only applied to weapon designs existing in 1791, and Congress banned all newer guns. "Too bad, but the constitution says what SCOTUS says it says, so I better get all my guns neutered and buy a nice flintlock pistol for home defense. After all, the law is the law, even if I do not agree with it. I certainly would not want to own an illegal firearm, after all!" is what a law-abiding person might think. I think plenty of Republicans would instead break this law or condone others breaking it, and red states would simply decide that enforcing it is not a policing priority.)
79% of refugees in Sweden have gone on holiday back to their home country. In the US, almost all illegals are economic migrants. I get trying to pick the most tendentious phrasing possible for a statement which is technically true, but you've got to ask which one is actually the edge case you imply.
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Yes, of course it's law. It's not all migrants from third world countries, though. There are people who overstayed tourist or student visas, maybe had some kids, and because of various complicated personal situations, couldn't or wouldn't become legalized. Are they breaking the law? Sure. Do I think they made avoidable mistakes at some point? Yes. Should they all be tackled by ICE outside their homes and shipped home in cuffs, even if they've been working and paying taxes for decades? Yeah, I am aware this gives some people a hard-on.
Should every single one of us be subjected to maximal enforcement of every law we have every violated? Okay, fine, you hate illegals. I think illegal immigrants should be prosecuted and deterred. I think people who break other laws should be prosecuted and deterred.
I hate drunk drivers. DUI is bad, I think they absolutely should be punished. Should the police pull every drunk driver out of their car at gunpoint? No. And I don't necessarily think everyone should go to jail on their first DUI, but certainly on their third or fourth. But some people think you should go to prison and lose your driving privileges forever on your first DUI. I disagree with these people. It doesn't mean I think DUI is okay or shouldn't be enforced. Some people think DUI is a minor violation and no big deal and everyone does it. I think those people are wrong too.
Local right-wingers of The Motte, and especially if we have any actual Red Tribe good ole boys left, do y'all's social groups make the weird sexualized insults towards the left, too?
I only ever see it as a left against right thing, or whatever Amadan is against right apparently, but I assume that's mostly a social bubble effect.
I am not really a Red Triber but the online right has no end of weird sexualized insults towards the left. Many of them are funny. Sexualized insults are pretty common among young guys in general
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Yes. Usually 'the men are fags, but the women are so ugly who could blame them'. Referring to female activists as desperate for male attention or male activists as sleazy rapists is also popular.
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"xyz gives some people a hard-on" is just guy talk. I don't see it as "weird(ly) sexualized" in any way, and I'd be surprised if it were a left-coded way of communicating. I'd be more surprised if someone took time to do a study to determine this.
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If you hang in spaces with actual leftists, >90% of their personal insults to the right (i.e. outside political insults like "fascist") are based around sucking cock or some other accusation that the right-winger is actually a gay bottom in the given situation. What that says about gay/queer/etc. left-wingers' views of themselves is left as an exercise for the reader.
That is not my experience, though I admit I don't exactly hang around with the Hasan Piker fan club. Mostly what I see in the way of insults is they are evil and devoid of human feelings, or they are stupid and uneducated. The most "sexual" common insult is claims that their guns/SUVs/McMansions/etc. are compensating for small dicks.
Dunno where you see all this queer talk. Maybe you are deeper in leftist circles than I am.
Ah, I don't mean in leftist spaces where they're talking about rightoids rather than to them - I mean in contexts where left-wingers and right-wingers are talking to each other (which is, I know, a highly unusual occurence, and probably has some variance per space). I suspect this greatly changes the makeup of the insults used.
Thinking about it, though I rarely check twitter comment beefs, a lot of the retweets there are "you are evil and devoid of human feelings", but I guess Twitter has that element of performing for a like-minded audience, and those still get dragged pretty often (the most recent one I recall was Joyce Carol Oates getting ethered by "wanye").
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The right equivalent is usually calling leftists pussies, cucks, or otherwise implying they are weak and womanly.
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Calling the left cucks is an extremely common sexualized insult from the right.
It's a sexual metaphor, but the point is the concise metaphor and not the sexual aspect: the person being insulted is meant to understand that they are willingly handing over or choosing not to protect something that belongs to them in a craven way. On the other hand it seems like the sexual aspect of "it gives them a hard-on" is the intended reading.
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I haven't heard that one for a while so it dropped off my radar. Fair enough. The right has cuck, the left has "makes pp hard," it seems. Gross.
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This analogy would work better if the drunk driver was choosing to drive drunk every single day for years. He can stop at any point, but he chooses not to. Residing in a country illegally isn't committing one crime, it's committing the same crime every day for however long you stay in the country.
Okay. Lots of people walk around every day committing some form of crime, whether it's minor violations they aren't even aware of or an ongoing illegal behavior. I am just not moved by "EVERY SINGLE DAY THEY WAKE UP ILLEGAL THEY ARE CONSTANTLY IN A STATE OF DOING CRIME!" Yes, that's true. I disagree we should make every one of them eat pavement and boot and there's no other remedy but that, but I understand this is a minority view here. Perhaps if you stretch your capacity for charity a bit you can understand this does not also mean I think everyone should be allowed to COMMIT CRIME EVERY DAY with impunity.
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I'm just objecting here to the rhetorical pose of remaining in the country illegally as "law-abiding" behavior.
If I inserted the word "otherwise" would you be less distressed?
Yes, though it's a loadbearing "otherwise" and I think it unravels the argument you're trying to make, as you're trying to argue the state should be less aggressive in punishing a completed crime, not that it should be less aggressive in stopping an ongoing crime.
I'm arguing the state should exercise discretion in punishing crimes, not all crimes are equal in severity, and not all criminals are equal in deleteriousness to the public good. This is why we have courts and judges and a Constitution, though I am increasingly persuaded by those who argue that these things are fabulations and all that matters is who's holding the gun. I think that's a very unfortunate descent.
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Also it's presuming that the median peaceful resident of the USA is productive simply by virtue of not actively commiting crimes. It's still eminently possible to be a net drain on public resources whilst holding a full time job
Sure, but that also describes many people who voted for Trump. Should we deport every working-age able-bodied adult who falls below a given productivity threshold?
Potentially one grandfathers the existing legal population then applies moderate filtering to try and ensure that new additions are net positives?
That well is utterly poisoned
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If that is the deal that needs to be made to get far more deportations then that is the deal that should be made.
Genetically inferior America is a huge risks to civilization. Indian doesn’t invent tech despite potentially having as many IQ individuals as the west because they have a lot of low IQ people do. Civilization would entire be dependent on China if America fell.
If we could only do deportations based on measured IQ then we should do it.
Keep geniuses hotties and femboys, shoot everyone else at the border. There is literally zero downside to this rationale.
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If they are immigrants rather than than citizens, then yes. All immigrants should contribute to their host country.
But deportation of illegals isn't a punishment or a form of demographic shaping, it's correcting a breach in the law, like repairing a vandalised window. France* shouldn't be deporting the native French underclass because they are rightly France's problem, but France absolutely should deport its immigrant underclass, especially if they arrived illegally. Similarly, the heritage American dysfunctional Trump voters are America's problem, why should any other country be obliged to take them?
*I chose France to avoid the mess of birthright citizenship, which should obviously be abolished due to the moral hazard it represents.
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I've encountered my fair share of Irish people unironically describing it as such. They lack perspective.
Is it the "I survived the Irish theocracy of the 90s" type or are they saying Ireland is like that now?
The latter. Personally, I don't think the standard gripes about a shortage of accommodation, unreliable public transport and an imperfect public health service a failed state make.
A lot of my friends are non-natives, and I often joke that, in Ireland, there are no issues, problems or inconveniences. There are only crises.
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No, they don't take time out of their day. They are interrupted from performing their jobs by these people who are interfering with arrests.
No, this is actually applying the law as written. Someone who applies for refugee status still does not have a right to walk freely in the United States. The law is for them to be detained until their case is processed. The problem is, we started letting these people out into the US on bond and everyone in the entire world learned that they do not have to follow US Immigration procedures but just had to show up at the border and say the magic words. Then the number of people applying for asylum got too big for us even consider detaining them all until their cases were evaluated.
Congress gave ICE explicit authority to revoke this bond for any reason, as there is no legal right to wander the United States if they are not citizens or here on one of the official visas.
Acting harshly here is the only way to stop the spurious asylum cases that ballooned under Biden.
In Sanctuary States, these people do not need jobs, they can have a US Citizen child and live on welfare. I would love for Federal mandated E-verify, but we cannot pretend that would solve every problem here. There would still be a need for targeted enforcement.
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Enforcement specifically in Minneapolis is kind of a stupid waste of time, as there's not that significant an illegal immigrant population and it's more kneejerk responsiveness to a combination of the Somalis and the general vibe from major Minnesota figures such as Walz and Ilhan Omar.
On the other hand, the situation is showing the weakness of trying to do any sort of aggressive policing in the age of short-form video content as even the most compliant, disciplined and skilled police force ever are going to occasionally throw up incidents where they look oppressive from some angle if redacted sufficiently. The conditions that ICE is operating under with regards to 'random interlopers on all tasks actively interfering with police work with no particular expectation of punishment' are also incredibly rare for any sort of a police force to have to work under. I don't believe ICE are necessarily massively less trained and equipped than other legal forces in effectiveness terms, but 'you are trying to do your job in the face of the Armed Minneapolis Vehicular Vuvuzela Orchestra' is going to inherently increase the friction and likelihood of issues.
Doing anything at scale is going to produce edge-cases, especially something as messy and emotionally charged as this. Completely derailing the artifice of state every time something somewhat sad happens is what produces the massive scope drift and inefficiency that is slowly choking the Western world. The protestors even having the privilege of acting like this is reflective of the extraordinary liberal permissiveness of the USA by any real historical or world political standard.
Once again, Minnesota and New York are easily the two most adamant "sanctuary" states and that's why the focus is on them.
As I keep saying, the Feds don't need to enforce compliance on states that are already cooperating.
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It’s not about vibes or Somalis - it’s because a state can’t just say no to federal immigration laws.
You say it's not about Somalis but doesn't it seem a bit convenient that the epicenter of violence just so happens to be in the same city where a billion-dollar fraud ring with probable links to high-ranking state officials was just uncovered?.
There might be an independent causal factor.
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Ironically, it's mostly not ICE there, it's CBP officials under Greg Bovino because Homan, the head of ICE was against this whole plan and so was the actual head of the CBP who was bypassed by Noem and handed off to Bovino.
https://x.com/EWErickson/status/2015289632385024333
The Noem/Miller/Lewandowski faction especially fucked up with their messaging immediately after the shooting and internal politics has shifted against them and towards Homan, via Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/2015571364212609379
Now as Matt Finn (another fox news guy) points out, the decision to send Homan into Minnesota reflects a notable change in the Trump admin's posture. Again, away from the Noem crowd which fucked up and towards the Tom Homan view. https://x.com/MattFinnFNC/status/2015784517789794574
They wanted a spectacle, they got it twice in a month. Be careful what you wish for.
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