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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.

Note that no one, most republicans included, seems to actually want a secure border.

I don't think any significant percentage of Americans will enjoy the kinds of tactics necessary to achieve successful mass deportations. It all depends on how it is reported, of course, but the kind of police state necessary to achieve a significant dent in the immigrant population will not happen without the end of functional democracy or will consist of the politicians involved performing self immolation to prove a point.

The level of police state necessary to actually overcome those, such as a full mandatory national ID system, intensive audits of homeowners to make sure they're not renting out the basement illegally, and other such things would in fact be a big problem for civil liberties.

I disagree - in fact the US already has a police state that's fully capable of doing all of those things. The NSA spying and tracking programs that Snowden revealed were not actually ended in any real way, and you could hook those up to the advertising databases in major tech companies (if this hasn't already been done) and identify 90% of illegal immigrants within a single day. This would be a big problem for civil liberties, but that's like complaining about how a fire would be bad for your garden when it is already a smoking mound of ash.

I mean, I for one am against the potential for police-state-on-tap that surveillance capitalism allows for, so I'm not very warm on the "crank it up" idea.

If you required people to be here legally to go to school, to work, to drive a car, to rent a place to live, to open a bank account, etc. then most people here illegally would leave.

Texas does require legal residency for most of that, although not all of it, and the laws are either unenforced by the police because they have more sympathy for the Mexican working class than the politicians who make the laws, or are routed around by sleazy businessmen who take advantage of their clientele's inability to complain to regulatory authorities.

And continental Europe is full of unreported illegal migrants; they just call them “failed asylum seekers”.

Not sure how it works in the rest of Europe but in Ireland those people are just called asylum seekers. Getting your third rejection on your appeal for the decision to refuse asylum doesn't change things for you, you just try again.

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