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Some of the issues with the right never doing anything I think comes down to the US believing in Adam Smiths invisible hand and not state power.
The US administration has lowered foreign born population by a few million people for the first time in I believe a century we have had a decline.
For a system that believes in the private sector this is still impressive. It’s much easier for an activists to go to let’s say George Soros and raise a few billion dollars to start a ngo that operates in Central America to abuse immigration loopholes to get people in than it is for the federal government to deport millions. You can’t go to the Koch Brothers and raise a few billion to deport people privately for various reasons. Even ardent anti-immigrationists would see giving the Feds the power to check papers and deport on site as an evil infringement on their own rights though potentially a necessary evil.
I seriously doubt how much the private sector could enforce immigration restrictions. Many of the loopholes that get abused when D's are in power are explicitly written into the legal code as statutes. The solution is to overwrite them!
I remember a conversation we had on this, where your argument was 'you just need to write better laws'.
But that's not how politics works. That very well may be the case how legislation works, but any set of laws can be worked around, given motivation and cooperating actors in a supposedly impartial system. There is no system of rules of which is invincible to the people who operate within it. If you have a system of perfect rules which is immune to shenenigans, please share it with the class. If the solution is so apparent, why don't people just make laws with no loopholes at all?
I never claimed well-written laws will be a silver bullet that will work 100% of the time. But yes, they do help quite a lot. The last 10 years has seen a parade of executive orders from both sides trying something egregiously illegal, and then the courts shredding it. Then they try again, but it's with a watered-down version that sort-of survives.
This ideology of legal nihilism, that laws are all fake and have 0% influence on anything is not backed by recent history.
You're making a legalist argument for a society that has arguably abandoned it. Even the Romans, who were scrupulously so, could not stop Caesar with their laws, with all the religious sacrality they put into obeying it.
I would not call it an ideology, but a fact. The laws do not constrain the great, but the small. I'm sorry, Cato. You've lost this argument thousands of years ago. The Americans of today are hardly more moral or law-abiding than the Romans, much less the Americans of yesteryear. Some would argue a lot less.
How does John Marshal refute Andrew Jackson?
Society hasn't abandoned laws. Court cases end up being important or outright decisive in US immigration conflicts all the time.
Would you tell the Cherokee that? Would your legalist argument somehow undo the Trail of Tears? I'm sure the interned Japanese were happy when Korematsu was overturned, but I think the interned Japanese would rather it not happen in the first place. But I belabor the point. You don't want to be convinced. I bring up all of these examples because it is an example of the law being bent around the interests of the state at the time. By motivated actors, within the system, who ignored the plain American constitution to do as they pleased.
And you refuse to recognize it. It's infuriating. The liberal administration before Trump ignored the plain reading of the law, but somehow you still insist that a carefully written piece of legislation will magic them into compliance. No, that's not going to happen. You would be naive to believe that men would be constrained by laws, especially if they believe they are moral in the breaking of it. Liberals go on how conservatives no longer believe in the rule of law, but don't admit to their own shamelessness in this regard. There are areas of which federal law does not apply. They are called sanctuary cities.
You think conservatives will ever believe that the liberals will act in good faith, after trying everything in their power to cheat them?
That trust is not coming back.
Trump and Biden are not Andrew Jackson. They're largely not ignoring court orders. They both try to reinterpret the statutes in ways that help their sides, but when the courts tell them to stop it they listen for the most part.
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In defense of @TheAntipopulist, laws can be a weight on one side of the scale.
It’s kind of like when you sign a waiver to not sue when you bungee jump. You’re not really waiving away your right to sue. But when you do sue, the waiver might slightly influence the jury/judge.
This attitude is only useful when it is clear eyed. Punting on executive action because you need a new law is naive. But laws are still better than nothing.
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It’s really tough to write legislation that can’t be interpreted in a way that creates loopholes. I feel like you need something else to keep things like asylum from being abused. Especially since you kind of want asylum law to be broad enough to be useful in an emergency.
Even worse, once you get a person in the presidency that doesn't want to enforce those laws, they don't have to. It becomes "prosecutorial discretion" whether or not to enforce the most tightly written law you can think of - and the president, as the head of the Executive branch, determines that discretion.
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I would just not allow asylum except from select European countries.
It's meant to help friends, not enemies.
Only allowing asylum from countries we're friends with doesn't really make much sense. How could we be a European country's friends if, at the same time, we were recognizing that they were persecuting their own citizens, and taking the persecuted citizens' side? I agree that asylum should generally not be applied to people who are themselves our enemies individually, but the obvious use-case is defectors from enemy nations - it's Muslim apostates, it's politically-dissident Chinese. Granting asylum to the denizens of an ally only makes sense in the case of a Ukraine-style war and I don't think that's the central case for an asylum-seeker, those are black-swan events.
You have successfully divined the point. I don't want to help the vast majority of current asylum claimants. A tyrannical dictator or a massive catastrophe are rare, valid events that I want to help. Living standards in Pashtun being shit (because of all the Pashtuns) or interminable ethnoreligious sand wars (a product of the backwards people and religions there) are not.
I do not want to help Africans or Arabs or Bomalians or Gomalians. Not in any way that involves bringing them here, at least.
By "the central case for an asylum-seeker" I didn't mean "the median person seeking asylum today" - who, to be clear, I agree should not be claiming asylum - I meant "the central case for the platonic ideal of asylum". That is, I think asylum should typically apply to individuals, not broad demographics. A catastrophe or war that leaves tens of thousands of people needing help, I think that's very abnormal, and specific decrees can be made when the situation arises. The archetypal asylum-seeker should be some anti-establishment journalist facing purging or assassination in Russia or China; some prominent Muslim-born thinker who gets a fatwa declared against him; etc. People, in other words, whose personal commitment to western-style values puts them at risk in hostile illiberal nations.
I would be willing to offer a reasonable asylum hearing to Europeans being threatened by their governments for proscribed speech.
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Wasn't that the aftermath of WW2, where German jews were displaced across Europe, into culturally similar countries? As in, this was why asylum treaties exist.
Shithole sand wars should not provide a golden ticket for illiterate goat herders to come and leech off of Western states' largesse. Shithole sand wars happen constantly, all the time. It's the default state of the area.
I don't understand why you harp on about the shithole sand wars when I keep saying that my model of asylum wouldn't cover them.
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Well, no. The problem asylum laws try to solve was "they tried to escape before the camps began, and were turned away". (Of course, they're not necessarily the central example of an asylum-seeker at that point, now are they?)
Hence the posture of the laws being that permissive, but they were ultimately meant for Never Again.
What they ended up being actually used for was... well, not that.
And if the faction in the West who wants them imported actually cared, they'd send some military advisors and some weapons with which to defend themselves. Or simply volunteer themselves. Just like they did at every other point in the 20th century (Israel and Ireland being the two best examples), and are still doing in the 21st with Ukraine.
Of course, that faction also conveniently hides behind an identity of "we're not cultural imperialists, that's our outgroup's job" despite the fact they do literally nothing else at home. So they only care inasmuch they can make their domestic enemy pay for it.
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Even then I think it needs to be tighter. Im firmly in favor of “first safe harbor” as a legal principle here. If you’re in danger, you are free to go to the nearest safe country to seek asylum. If you’re a Palestinian fleeing Gaza, you can go to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt. You are not getting in to Europe or North America on an asylum claim because at that point you’ve crossed over half the globe in search of a rich country to live in. It’s crazy to me.
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Maybe you don't get everything right on the first pass, but well-crafted legislation will have far fewer loopholes than slapdash laws, and then you can patch things if/when problems arise. Trump just isn't really bothering.
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