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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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