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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.
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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?
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