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I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
I never suggested giving up civil rights. You are acting like asking someone likely to have committed a crime, based on a group of factors which includes but is not solely ethnicity, is against civil rights. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled clearly and recently and specifically about this and said ICE's policies here are within the bounds of the Constitution.
Here is where the crisis is coming from:
Politically, when immigration laws are selectively not enforced, specific political parties can basically import their electorate. Instead of a Democracy, where the people choose their leaders, we are in an Anti-Democracy, where the leaders chose the populace. The United States has a few unique political considerations:
The first is that the apportionment of representation is based on the number of people in an area, not solely the number of voters, citizens, or lawful residents.
The second is that we do not have voter ID for national elections. To vote, someone must check a box claiming they are eligible. Many people check this box who are not eligible, either on purpose or accidentally. Many of these people vote.
The third is Birthright citizenship. If someone is born on US territory, they become a citizen. Even if they are raised in another country, they can enter at the age of 18 and vote in our elections.
Basically, the point I am trying to make here is that immigration is a national issue. Even if every immigrant went and stayed in California, it would not affect only California. The rest of the country would be impacted politically by the change. The courts have ruled again and again that immigration is a Federal concern.
Then there are the economic considerations. Let's look at a small example: Non-domiciled CDLs are a mess. Truck driving is an actually good job for people without college education! This is a job Americans love to do! If I wasn't college-tracked from Kindergarten and had terrible eyesight, I would have loved to be a truck driver. I simply adore going on long cross country drives.
During 2021, the price of shipping went way up. Full truck load routes that cost 4k went up to 6k almost overnight. Fuel costs increased, cost of living increased, and truck drivers needed to be paid more. I'm not an industry insider, but I do book a lot of full truckloads and I saw it happen.
Then - suddenly - shipping prices went down. Not because we had deflation and the old truck drivers didn't need to be paid more. Because new truck drivers were brought in from outside America. Ones who could be paid less because they weren't supporting a lower-middle class life for their American family. Ones who could be paid less because they were fudging their insurance paperwork. Ones who could be paid less because they fudged their log books and spent an illegal amount of time on the road.
The American truck drivers started going out of business. They could not compete against this influx of immigrants committing fraud left and right. The Biden administration meanwhile would not investigate this fraud, because they were trying to lower inflation, and bringing down shipping costs help with that.
Meanwhile, news reports about immigrant truck drivers who cannot read traffic signs in English killing people on the roads has become a weekly occurrence.
Meanwhile, the shipping services we procure at our business have decreased in quality rapidly. It is really sketchy and unavoidable. We pay for full truck loads because we need to have product delivered to a specific place at a specific two hour window. We have had multiple cases in the past three years where one person picks up the load from our warehouse, then they swap drivers and we cannot contact the new driver. We have had multiple cases where the driver just goes missing for days after the delivery was supposed to take place. We've called the police to report inventory as stolen. We've had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to compensate for the unreliableness of truck drivers.
This was completely unheard of before 2022. Even if a truck broke down, we would quickly have a freight company volunteer to swap out the trailer onto a new truck to try to get close to our needed delivery date. Communication was good, service great.
The basic bones of this story has repeated itself many times. Industry starts to get expensive (partly due to government regulations and inflation costs out of the industry's control). Corporations begin importing sketchy immigrants with the government's help or complacence. Immigrants undercut local jobs by ignoring the regulations that made business expensive in the first place. Service gets shittier, there are hidden costs borne by many, and Americans are out of jobs.
I disagree, and seemingly so do the Dems proposing these changes.
Ok so the median voter is 3% further left, big whoop. Immigrants are not automatons who just vote for whoever wants more immigration. Hispanics only voted a little more for Harris than Trump, and I'm quite sure that would flip if the Republican Party would stop courting the votes of actual racists. The CBP agents who killed Pretti were Hispanic!
Biden's immigration policies were very unpopular and there is quite a broad base of support for restricting immigration. There is plenty of political capital to change things. That's probably why Trump won. There isn't some pro-immigration conspiracy. My preferred policies are unpopular. New illegal immigration has basically stopped. The anti-immigration side is winning. Nothing here warrants the performative cruelty, the wanton disregard for human rights, the dishonesty, the disregard for the legal system that we are seeing from the administration.
Ok, illegal immigrants in the trucking system are causing problems. I don't believe that the solution to that is stopping random Hispanic people going about their day on the streets of Minneapolis.
Honestly, I feel like that's coming from a place of not knowing how normal police work happens. It's also a legally fraught position, given that the SCOTUS ruled otherwise.
It's pretty normal for someone likely to have committed a crime to be stopped and have their ID checked. It's incredibly normal and actually statutorily required for an non-citizen to need to keep their identification and visa documentation on them at all times, with the expectation that they may need to produce said documentation at any time. A strong accent is actually a very strong indicator of someone being a recent immigrant - as strong as someone with a bloody knife walking away from a murder scene! If the recent immigrant is here legally, they are statutorily required to keep documentation on their person and present it. If they are here illegally, then the stop was justified. If they are in the 1% of American citizens with a strong accent, then they have a funny story to tell and can then move on with their day.
Basically I don't see anything justifying the response from the left to very normal police work.
This is not in the data.
By the numbers, Trump's ICE is going a fantastic job at not harassing ordinary Americans compared to Obama's ICE. Trump's ICE is doing a fantastic job at keeping detainees alive.
The legal system is not being disregarded by Trump, every court order has been obeyed.
The performative cruelty and dishonesty is coming from the left, who is terrifying minorities into thinking that ICE is some kind of collection of racist loose cannons who are just yeeting people out of the country without due process. Who lie about the authority ICE was given by Congress and the whole process of being arrested for breaking criminal immigration laws. This terror campaign by the Leftist news media and politicians has been cruel, dishonest, and has directly lead to the deaths of two Americans and will surely lead to more deaths if it continues.
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I think this comes back to the fact that what the left wants from a police force is fundamentally incoherent:
If a young black man gets shot dead in the ghetto, the odds are overwhelming that the perpetrator was another young black man, and thus the best way to ensure that the perpetrator faces justice for his crime is for the police to aggressively investigate young black men who the victim knew. Is this "racial profiling" (or more accurately, "demographic profiling": the "young" and "man"* parts are almost as important as the "black" part)? I guess so. But I'm not persuaded that the right of young black men not to be questioned by the police automatically supersedes a murder victim and his family's right to justice, and refusing to properly investigate a crime solely because it might "inflame community tensions" is exactly the kind of attitude that led to Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. It's just one of many trade-offs that come with living in a free society. Of course it's not the fault of any young law-abiding black men that they belong to a demographic which commits a disproportionate amount of violent crime (esp. violent crime within their own demographic group) and I don't want them being harassed morning, noon and night, or their civil liberties persistently violated, on that basis alone. At the same time, denying police the right to exercise their own judgement and use statistical heuristics in pursuing lines of investigation because it might result in some hurt feelings seems like a recipe for a) a dramatically reduced murder clearance rate and b) a vastly higher murder rate, once murderers realise it'll be much easier for them to get away with their crimes.
And this isn't just a "he whose ox is gored" situation, where I'm indifferent to this topic because it'll never affect me or anyone I care about. My uncle (Irish, like me) lived in Britain at the height of the Troubles, and was routinely questioned by police officers whenever there was a bomb scare (his bright red hair made him difficult to miss). His sister once cited this example (in a debate about present-day racial profiling) and said it was outrageous, but personally, I didn't really understand the complaint. During the Troubles, most Irishmen were not in the IRA, but most (if not all) IRA members were Irishmen. Whenever a bomb scare was called in on the British mainland, it was usually done by an Irishman. Of course there are familiar examples of miscarriages of justice in the period (the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four), but I'm not persuaded that the investigative method is fundamentally unsound. If the IRA calls in a bomb threat, it's reasonable to assume the perpetrator is Irish. If a man goes to a crowded place and bellows "Allahu akbar!" before attempting to blow himself up, it's reasonable to assume he is Muslim (and consequently that he is a member of an ethnic group disproportionately likely to practise Islam).
*Indeed, everyone accepts that most murders are committed by men, and I'm sure the police, knowing this, will much more aggressively investigate known acquaintances of a victim who are men than those who are women. Is this "sexual profiling"? Is it fair that men will attract disproportionate attention from the police on the basis of their basic demographic traits? As Rob Henderson recently noted, nobody interprets the overrepresentation of young men in prisons as evidence of ageism on the part of the criminal justice system.
When investigating a crime, it is perfectly reasonable to investigate people who have some connection to the crime, and mostly it isn't a huge problem if there is profiling in choosing which of those people to investigate.
It's also perfectly reasonable in most cases for the police to use statistical evidence in looking for and deterring crimes, if doing so in ways that do not impose any real cost on a person (say driving patrols, something that is more valuable in higher-crime neighborhoods).
It is not reasonable to randomly stop people because they are statistically more likely to have committed a hypothetical crime. You can't stop young black men just to see if they might have stolen goods in their pockets and you don't get to stop hispanic people just to see if they might not be legal immigrants.
I wouldn't say I'm a total hard-liner on this, it's more reasonable to investigate people with a more tenuous connection to a crime when problems are more impactful and more intractable. The Troubles is a good example, El Salvador's gang problem is probably another. It is inappropriate to use similar tactics on something that a large percentage of the populace doesn't even think is a big problem, and certainly so in a community where a majority of the people who are supposedly being impacted by the problem would prefer you weren't enforcing it at all!
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Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
Sentence, ideally no. Arrest, yes, though the bar is high. Suspect/investigate, all the time.
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Police do not only arrest people who have already been found guilty in a court of law. There would be no criminal justice system if that were the case.
Here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police, then keep him detained under suspicion until they get a clear picture of the accident.
ICE isn't arresting people for "being 'likely' to commit a crime." They are arresting people for being likely *to have already committed a crime." We know millions of people have committed the misdimeanor of coming into the country unlawfully. The crime has been committed, they are investigating and making a suspect list.
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We don’t arrest people but we do question them for being “likely” to commit a crime. See the original quote:
Nothing here about arresting people based on ethnicity
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People who care about actually stopping the thing in question. It's a huge point of data that we're supposed to ignore, what, just because it gives you warm and fuzzy anti-racist feelings and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
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Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Racism works. It’s efficient.
How was it efficient for 2 decades 70 year old ladies had to take their shoes off at airports when we could have just racial profiled every Muslim male for additional screening? Then everyone could leave for the airport 30 minutes later because airport security did not exists for them. And here’s the thing about racial profiling it’s better for Muslim men too. Since they are about 1% of US airport passengers they would have a security guard screen that thoroughly for 10 minutes which still saves them 20 minutes of their day.
Suicidal empathy like you described worked as an argument 5 years ago. Today people just want a society that functions well.
Racial profiling is good because it improves net happiness in society.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
Your argument basically breaks down to just saying it’s wrong. A very typical leftist response of the variety “these are human rights so we can’t debate these things”.
Since racial profiling works and is very efficient at reducing crime or terrorism that means it’s a “true” model of the world.
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
Because racial profiling “works” it also means that you are willing to allow some obvious bad things to happen if we don’t do it - more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
Fair enough. This is more of a costs-benefit argument. Your initial argument was it’s wrong because it’s wrong. I pointed out that big racial differences in crime are “true” and you can get big efficiency gains by utilizing that data.
El Salvador seems overall happier they did profiling and just locked all the people with gang tattoos up.
Would you agree now if you can save X amount of lives or reduce Y amount of bad things that profiling is a proper tactic? It’s not just wrong because it’s wrong?
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The counterargument is that you are not really reckoning with the real-world costs of the politics you are advocating. You position is that you are content with a larger number of innocent people raped and murdered because you find it morally distasteful to make assumptions about individuals, even when they are warranted. It's a fairly extreme position, so you can't expect to win the argument by declaring the other side is "wrong" as though that is fully explicatory.
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It should be pointed out that Israeli airport security includes racial profiling so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized, yet their policies have largely escaped outrage.
Discrimination by Ashkenazim against Mizrachim does not line up with any US protected groups, so western SJWs (who are either American or have American-addled brains) don't care about it. (See also widespread blindness to anti-gypsy racism in Europe). But given the demographics of Israeli airports most of the people hit by racial profiling of "people who look like Arabs or Muslims" will be Mizrachi Jews, and Ashkenazi-on-Mizrachi racism certainly used to be a live political issue in Israel.
I do not think that TSA can distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims by sight*, and the people who support racial profiling against "Muslim" flyers are the kind of people who are just fine with generalised government harassment of brown people in the US, which is what it would turn into in practice. There are enough white ethnic Muslims (Chechens, Albanians etc, including Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), fair-skinned Arabs who could pass with some makeup (including Mohammed Atta), white converts, and ADOS/Black British black converts that an organised jihadi group would have zero difficulty recruiting people who would not be profiled to actually set the bombs off.
* Note that traditional dress of Islamic cultures is not a good tell for "likely jihadi" because jihadis don't wear traditional dress while blowing things up. The 9-11 hijackers wore business suits, and the 7-7 bombers in London wore sportswear. They also shave their beards.
I support profiling by sex and age. Both German and Australian airport security profiled me when I was a military-age man, and were right to do so.
"Try our free ribs for expedited security clearance"...
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Yes this is true. I simplified with just spot the Muslim and profile them at the airport. It seems like the Israelis have a system that works.
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We actually do arrest people for having 'likely' committed a crime. That's what "probable cause" is. And as @LotsRegret points out, we sometimes do detain people on an even lesser standard even if we think they haven't committed a crime yet (the original "articulable suspicion" case, Terry v. Ohio was about a robber casing a target, IIRC)
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It isn't required to arrest someone, you can detain them pending investigation as long as you have reasonable articulatable suspicion, then you can arrest them with probable cause.
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