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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.
It is not clear to me that that is true, but I tire of trying to engineer semantics to cast what someone "really" means (especially when this is done to me) rather than just asking them directly.
I suppose in fairness I should ask @The_Nybbler directly, then. Does "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten" mean one believes no illegal immigrant should ever be arrested and deported under any circumstance?
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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".
The two statements you quoted are not perfectly consistent.
Adjectives, adverbs, and qualifiers alter the meanings of sentences.
Rhetorical flourishes don't really change the meaning. The way you changed the terminology was much worse in that regard.
I wasn't using rhetorical flourishes. I was using words to communicate things that I actually believe.
You read my statement and your conclusion is that I believe "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 immigrants is cruel and should be verboten."
Is that correct?
I was talking about Nybbler.
You were also paraphrasing his argument in a way that was no longer faithful to what he actually said.
No, I read the Nybbler's statement as an accurate paraphrase of argument to be exaggerated but accurate portrayal of the arguments being made here. Your personal opinions on the topic don't enter into the conversation. This is just about your claim that Nybbler's statement is a strawman.
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