Immigration in the US has always been more complicated than "no papers? gotta go." Moving north to do some seasonal work then moving back south is a very old thing, and was enshrined into law by the "Bracero program" in the post ww2 era. In the 60s, however, it was ended abruptly, giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally. ... and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
As others have pointed out in the thread, those who slurp up the surplus value of the labor of these undocumented workers would hate to lose this leverage of "Oh you want the same rights American workers get? Don't want me making a phone call to my buddy over at the police department!"
That happens occasionally. But it mostly doesn't happen. Mostly, the people who end up with criminal charges are the illegal immigrants. If you dig into the numbers it tells the story of a vanishingly small number of companies (like hundreds per year out of millions) getting scrutiny. The industries which get the scrutiny are the ones where people could end up dead or injured (construction, meat packing, etc.). (According to Gemini - grain of salt)
A few years ago there was a huge set of raids at Tyson facilities - 900+ undocumented immigrants working there.
Awkwardly, it was made known to the media that Tyson knew all about it, to the point where they had provided those workers written instructions and tips on how to stay under the radar with respect to taxes, financials, immigration, etc.
When a journalist asked about this at the press conference where DHS was crowing over the success of the raid? "That's not something that is being investigated as part of this operation." Well, what about separately? "We are not investigating the company."
A lot of the theory was that like some other food production firms (Hormel dealing with people getting sick from y'know, inhaling aerosolized pig brain), that it was very much a "won't someone rid us of these meddlesome immigrants" (the ones advocating about child labor, wage theft, OSHA violations). Come round these ones up, you get a press conference and we solve a labor issue.
You have to prove you are actually verifying these things and our government has done a pretty bad job at it. We have at this point hundreds of incidents of legal residents and citizens caught in this fascist net.
Couldn't you just better fund the court system so the court date isn't years away? Or improve the citizenship process? Maybe some of that $100 billion we gave to ICE could have gone to the courts for faster processing of these specific cases. That would seem like the more civilized way to do it.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
Well, as it happens these immigration court judges were appointed by previous administrations, and they were intentionally slow walking every case. The Trump admin fired a bunch of those judges earlier this year, was sued, won, and now the cases are actually getting processed.
The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).
People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
> The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
> we could use state police to deport people
So much for states rights.
> both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
In what ways? I don't see a lot of police unions supporting left-leaning or Democratic candidates. Democrats have voted against things like the Patriot Act in much larger numbers than Republicans. Democrats have introduced bills like "Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2026" which have basically no Republican support. The biggest private advocates for an increased police state (Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Palmer Luckey, etc.) are huge Republican supporters and donors.
> Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
It sounds like you’re saying we should all just accept that our visas mean nothing, and that in practice literally anyone should be able to just show up, claim asylum, never show up to court for their hearing, and what we should do is absolutely nothing. In “blue” states they are strongly encouraged to sign up for driver’s licenses and welfare programs, and state agencies are forbidden from even asking their legal status. State and local police in those states are often banned from spilling the beans even when they commit crimes.
So, overstaying legal status can’t be addressed by states because Dems think it’s too mean to send them home, and it can’t be actively done by federal agencies because to do so, they have to come into states and investigate people to determine if they’re legally here or not and we don’t like the possibility that they might ever get it wrong.
This is why Democrats lost all respect from moderates like me who used to proudly be part of that party a decade ago. They’re not serious anymore. They appear to want a system that pretends to work but which everyone ignores because everyone knows it’s never enforced. Like driving 70 on the freeway in a 65 zone - everyone does it.
I never said any of those things. I simply pointed out the legality of things today. If you think it should be changed, you should state that and own it.
Instead, you completely ignored the "both sides" portion of my comment to build a strawman to rant against.
> Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
A lot of states make it illegal for state police to participate in immigration enforcement. And there's a reasonable argument that immigration enforcement is properly the job of the federal government rather than the states; which then requires a federal police force to do that job.
Or, given the fact that normal folks come here and live normal lives contributing to their communities, the US could just make easier paths to citizenship.
We already have paths to citizenship, people just need to wait their turn. People with skills we need can already get in under programs that exist for that purpose.
We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.
It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.
Hah, what? I have skills we need. I came here legally.
It would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper for me to come here on a visa waiver, marry a USC against the terms of that waiver, and ask for forgiveness (i.e. "adjust status") than it was to do so the "proper way".
Undocumented immigrants are a useful scapegoat politically, because it allows those in power to point the finger at them for all the country's problems, but those immigrants have no political power themselves since they can't vote.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
The Bracero program was ended, but the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm labor remains active, with no numeric cap and hundreds of thousands of visas issued each year. I don't blame workers for making a living, but is there some reason why these business owners requiring seasonal labor could not obtain the proper visa for it?
> They can pay them less, treat them worse, then if there are any issues, deport them. It's very gross.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
I strongly believe all people are equal, and we should not apply different ethics based on national borders, race, sex, etc. They should be able to come work any jobs, and be treated the same as citizens.
It's actually better in many cases for businesses to hire undocumented workers, since it makes the workers position much more tenuous. They are much less like to unionize, demand higher pay, etc. if the threat of deportation is hanging over their head
Tyson Chicken was shown to have provided written instructions for undocumented workers on staying under the radar. And yet when DHS arrested 900 workers at their facilities, they also announced there was no plans to investigate the company itself (strange - knowingly assisting an undocumented immigrant with such is a felony).
Friction of paperwork. Not saying it's right, but it's a reason.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
Yes, again, I don't personally blame the employees. I think the vast majority of people who unlawfully immigrate to the US mean well. There's actually pretty broad agreement on that, despite the psychopaths running enforcement right now; CBP is still paying bonuses for voluntary departure.
>> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
Yup, and 50 million “Democrats” assisting them, people who’ve been convinced that maximizing the number of foreign citizens living here without valid visas is the enlightened and cool policy to aim for, or at least that if the other party won’t let them automatically naturalize everyone as they sprint across the border, that this is the next best thing.
At the risk of a committing a "No True Scotsman" here... it isn't a properly left wing position. Or at least it hasn't been for most of the history of the left.
That’s an extreme take. What other laws do you think should be ignored? Traffic laws? Building codes? Tax laws?
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
That's a definition you just made up, which has no precedent and is clearly untrue.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
The term combines two concepts:
Nation: A group of people who identify as belonging to a shared community.
State: A political entity with a defined territory, a government, and sovereignty over its internal and external affairs.
I would argue this requires at least some sovereign control over borders.
The EU defines their borders as a bloc. States are not nations - and that’s one of the reasons why.
Border control is an important expression of state sovereignty. If you have zero controls the state would experience net migration until conditions declined below the global average and nobody wants to move there anymore. That’s pretty self evident, it’s how economics works and how systems maintain an equilibrium.
Both legal and undocumented immigrants in the US show lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans in major studies; the picture in Europe is different, with clear overrepresentation for non-Western and asylum-related groups. Fiscal impacts depend heavily on skill/education level rather than legal status alone, with low-skilled migrants (legal or not) more often a net cost over their lifetimes.
So control over borders is important, and having standards is a good thing.
There is no magic soil. A nation is the people who make it up. Bring in the violent, stupid, and culturally incompatible people from the shithole countries they are trying to escape and things will trend downwards to some average between those terrible places and our desirable countries. That’s not racist our xenophobic, it’s acknowledging the facts.
People are not equal. Countries are not equal. Education and culture and religions are not equal. There are better and worse versions of all of them. Again just facts. To ignore that is to live in fantasy land that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I have traveled to nearly 50 countries. I have lived in the developing world. My ancestors have had to flee countries and been refugees. I know what I’m talking about. You sound very idealistic and naive.
America itself brought in the people from the countries in Europe throughout the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s - Irish peasants, Jews, poor and uneducated Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Norwegians.
It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
You’re arguing with a strawman you’ve built from my comment.
> If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration.
I don’t mean that. I’m saying you do have to control the borders and you do have to deport people who break the rules and enter our stay illegally.
It seems we agree that at least some of that is necessary, and we can both disagree, at least partly, with the way it’s currently being handled.
> The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration.
Where did you get that idea? The riots are caused by the immigrants. Look at them, there’s hardly a single European among them. These are undesirables they let into their country and they’ve been paying a price for it ever since.
So you actually think the USA, the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, is unable to police its borders? That is the only alternative to what I said (which is that they are able but not willing).
> I’m saying you do have to control the borders and you do have to deport people who break the rules and enter our stay illegally.
Again, nobody really denies this, if I interpret you charitably. But the question is always how rigid the laws should be, how many other rights you are willing to sacrifice in order to hit the "deport illegals" metric. If you overstay one day, what happens. If you overstay due to a medical emergency, what happens. If you are in danger in your home country and need to enter illegally in order to claim asylum, what happens. How much of a soviet-style "papers, please" dungeon are you prepared to turn your country into in order to find all the illegals.
You will never ever police any crime to 100%. Immigration is very hard to police effectively without adding literal military-style checkpoints and sending in the gestapo (as is happening in the US). Besides that, if you look at the big picture, the vast majority of these people are harmless and have perfectly reasonable reasons for wanting to come. Remember that it is an accident of history that you get to live in a rich country.
The US in particular has had massive unregulated immigration through most of its history, by the way, and it didn't cause the place to burn to the ground. So please keep a bit of perspective.
A nation-state, technically. A state is an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. There have been historical states (eg. European kingdoms of the high middle ages) that meet the definition of a state while still having very fuzzy borders.
Deranged. Someone said that allowing bright minds to immigrate over freeloaders and criminals is preferable and you denigrate them as a fascist who can't even be spoken to. Absolutely and utterly deranged.
Statistically this is false. No amount of hand picked undocumented drunk drivers will change this. A large majority of undocumented immigrants follow the law closer, aside from the obvious immigration laws.
So yes, if it quacks like a fascist duck, it's a fascist duck.
Statistically what is false? Nobody made any quantifiable statement. Clearly you just get off on calling people fascists. You probably think it makes you a better person when it actually makes you look like an unthinking drone.
Could they not just have fruit picking farms in the south and export it here? I think that will be a win win for everyone. The big losers will be the US farms I guess.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
I'd encourage you to read the entire last sentence of my comment and not focus on the racism part if it bothers you so much; there is a non-racist argument for deporting all illegal immigrants as well.
"The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA"
Calling everybody a racist who wants laws enforced is weak. Immigration laws are made necessary by a welfare state I happen to not support. The conversation has literally nothing to with race or racism. We're talking about the laws that govern the country and whether we should enforce or ignore them.
What do you think? Do you have any profound insight or ideas to share?
Laws aren't moral. These laws are bad, and shouldn't be enforced. They should be changed, but we don't have the political will to do so, so "rounding up all the brown people and shipping them to Mexico" is not the second-best option.
Sure, but when 1 party blocks that continually due to racism (and kills programs put in place like DACA that help the situation), then funnels money to "law enforcement" specifically for the thing they helped make illegal, then it's fair to criticize the "law enforcement" as a tool of racist politics (and make no mistake, before anyone comes claiming racism isn't the reason for it, Stephen Miller has plenty of choice quotes stating that's exactly why he is pushing for ICE deportations).
Don't know why you think I don't understand that, I'm just pointing out that a law being a law doesn't shield racist people who support racist laws from being called racist.
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
You could imagine a sane policy regime to unwind the "look the other way" approach to illegal immigration and the under-the-table low wage labor market that it created.
Instead we get... well, whatever the fuck this gestapo shit is.
I guess regulatory reform doesn't really play with the kind of people who will gleefully vote for mass deportation on the grounds that they just want immigrants gone.
Because the business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything.
This is a bipartisan issue: as evidenced by farmers crying uncle in Arizona and Florida, resulting their respective Republican governments scaling back on enforcement after crops started to rot in the fields. The same thing happened with meatpackers in some ruby-red midwestern town after an immigration raid on a meatpacking plant. Unsurprisingly, Republican voters are down for "mass deportation now", but not in their backyards, or place of business.
Every issue affects the entire society directly or indirectly, but one party has lower illegal net migration numbers vs. the other having higher illegal net migration numbers
So if the premise is "business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything", then the logical conclusion is that the party with the higher illegal net migration is the one that the premise refers to, right?
None of these sources prove that "the Democratic party is the one that wants to let in US as many illegal immigrants as possible."
If anything, it proves that point completely wrong tying higher immigration numbers to better economic conditions. Bush had more immigration than Obama (who deported more people than Trump). Trump had higher levels of immigration than Obama, until COVID happened and basically shut things down. As the economy recovered, immigration went back up under Biden.
What the source says: "Overall, net immigration increased the most under current U.S. President Joe Biden's term. CBO estimates for 2021 to 2024 project that the U.S. added over 10 million immigrants."
It doesn't seem like you are looking for an honest discussion.
A sentence saying that the number of immigrants went up is not proof of the claim you made that: "the Democratic party is the one that wants to let in US as many illegal immigrants as possible."
How hypocritical of you to say "doesn't seem like you are looking for an honest discussion" and then go on to claim that the number of immigrants merely "went up" when the source clearly states it was the highest, "the most"
Then you claim again "tHaT dOeSn'T pRoVe AnYtHiNg"
Let's look specifically at the tally of illegal migrants under Biden: +7.3 million net illegal migrants
And during Trump's first term? It's -34,000 (yes, that's a negative number)
How about the tally for Obama's second term? That's +493,000 net illegal migrants
Numbers and facts speak for themselves, but you speak a different language
I don’t know how you can say this. Obama deported so many people he was known as the “Deporter-in-chief”. Biden deported more people in his term than Trump did in his first term. He also was ready to sign a comprehensive bipartisan immigrant bill before Trump told his party to tank it.
By what metric does the Democratic party want “as many illegal immigrants as possible” and why would they be deporting so many people if that were the case?
The numbers say Biden's immigration policies contributed to historically high unauthorized immigration, that deportations did not keep pace with arrivals, and that the administration failed to enforce immigration restrictions effectively. They don't say they wanted unlimited illegal immigration. They especially don't say that about Obama, who had Bush-level numbers.
What evidence shows that Obama and Biden wanted to actually maximize illegal immigration, as opposed to having different enforcement priorities or failing to control immigration effectively? Noting again that they were ready to pass a bill and sign it into law, but Trump tanked it.
It seems to me if there's a problem, and people want to fix it, but someone says "no", it's that person who wants the problem to persist.
Lol, your claim is "the numbers look bad for the Democrats, but they never explicitly said they want the country to be invaded with illegals, they just did it"
That's the most brainwashed thing I've read all day
Don't trust what the politicians say, look at what they do:
- Illegal migrants under Biden: +7.3 million net illegal migrants
- During Trump's first term? It's -34,000 (yes, that's a negative number)
- How about the tally for Obama's second term? That's +493,000 net illegal migrants
As shown by those numbers, border enforcement does not need special legislation. If the people in power want to curb it, they can do so. If they want to turn on the tap of illegals, they can. And the Democrats did turn up the tap to the max.
You made a claim you can't support. Just move on. The numbers you're citing don't prove what you claimed, and they also don't support "an invasion of illegals" that's a political characterization. Net positive migration does not mean they want as many as possible, even if the numbers are larger than you want. You can ask ChatGPT for further explanation if you're still confused as to why, I'm not engaging with you further.
I agree, we should revise the laws to reflect what the people actually want- a reasonable path towards citizenship for immigrants working, paying taxes and not causing problems.
But that isn’t what the right wants; a modern coalition of racists who want no immigrants, and opportunists who want a underclass of labor that can’t organize, vote or otherwise fight back currently is in power.
And that coalition is in power after successfully scapegoating immigrants to average Americans who have no idea what the Byzantine legal citizenship process looks like now when they repeat that they want “legal immigrants”.
The fact you think all your political opponents are racists and evildoers is why the left lost in 2016, and in 2024.
The non-strawman argument is that giving someone citizenship of your country should not be automatic and quick. We want it to be difficult to get in, because otherwise, to borrow your word, “opportunists” find a relatively well-off, trusting society easy pickings to rob, cheat and steal from. And because we don’t want our country to turn into a place that looks like where some of these immigrants come from.
Notice how it isn’t Australians or Germans ending up having to be rounded up by ICE. It’s because they come from a country that believes in laws. And before you say “but that’s because you’re racist!!” I’d like to point out that the same thing applies to people from the Philippines or China who don’t look or speak like white Americans, but for the most part they come here legally.
> The fact you think all your political opponents are racists and evildoers is why the left lost in 2016, and in 2024.
I didn’t say that, I said that the current administration is an ally to racists and business owners who benefit from undocumented labor. This is just established fact at this point.
> Notice how it isn’t Australians or Germans ending up having to be rounded up by ICE.
Which begs the question, why are white South African refuges welcomed by the admin while skilled work visa South Koreans are not?
But I think we agree more than we disagree- there should be a reasonable path towards citizenship that is rate limited. I think we might disagree on the rate limit and the reasonableness of the current path, but that’s an argument I would love to have over the current one we’re having over if the masked federal officers should be allowed to racially profile people and hold them at gunpoint without identifying themselves.
That response article (whether intentional or not, I can't say) horribly misunderstands and misrepresents the POSIWID axiom.
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
Lol, in your example you're conflating a side effect with the main purpose of a system (double fallacy I guess - cherry picking AND hasty generalization)
"Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom."
So, in your (faulty) interpretation, the axiom applies perfectly to the fact that cars kill pedestrians
This response fails to deal with what I explicitly called out: actual evidence that the outcome is not accidental.
And it also fails to address that if a system is continually failing to achieve an acceptable outcome, even if the people operating it are attempting earnestly to do something correct, the people who can and would make the call to discontinue a program that fails to meet their expectations continually (especially when they are doing so to other programs that fail to meet their expectations) are clearly showing that they either have divergent standards, or have a different set of expectations than the operator believes.
We have lots of laws that aren't meant to be followed 100% of the time. We don't ticket everyone who speeds. Even those who get caught are often let go with a verbal warning. Speed cameras that automatically send tickets are illegal in some places. Weed is still illegal at the federal level and in many states, but people aren't always prosecuted for small amounts for personal use, even when they get caught.
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
You mean the process the Trump administration is arguing they don't have to follow, and have actually circumvented to deport people as fast as possible just so they don't have a chance to argue their case in front of a judge? Their whole position is the executive branch is the judge, jury, and executioner of deportation proceedings, so they can be (and have been in violation of court orders) done summarily.
"The department actions in this case are unquestionably in violation of this court's order."
Homeland Security's interpretation of immigration law would: "deny access to that protection to a substantial swath of noncitizens who are sent to third countries with no notice of their destination"
Should the consequence of speeding be forfeiture of your car and license?
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
You've connected to very unrelated things unjustifiably - Immigrants and criminals
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
> If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Real life isn’t so neat and tidy. Your comfort with treating your fellow humans with such cruelty if their situations aren’t in alignment with our existing clusterfuck of immigration laws speaks volumes about you. Be better.
But isn't the enforcement of every law indifferent to the sufferings of the one who is breaking the law when it tries to set things straight? Why is immigration special?
You: "But isn't the enforcement of every law indifferent to the sufferings of the one who is breaking the law "
The 8th amendment to the US constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
That is, quite explicitly, the constitution saying that there are limits to what we will do to punish someone.
I can understand your frustration. It is quite understandable when you are
losing an argument.
You are losing the argument because all your responses are about "punishment". I am talking about "stopping an illegal state of affairs from going on". Even my comment that you quote, is about that. You are making the argument about "punishment", because that is something you can outrage on. It would quite pathetic display you are putting, if it was not so amusing for me.
Lmao I am not frustrated. I enjoy telling unserious people like you to fuck off :D
You might even call it a hobby!
The 8th amendment also applies to what we do to stop what you refer to as an illegal state of affairs.
Using the "someone in your house" example you've used a few times, would you be OK with the Air Force dropping a bunker buster bomb on your house, killing the home invader(s), and you, and your family/pets/etc, and destroying your stuff, and the same for several neighboring homes?
Or do you think that might be an excessive enforcement mechanism?
>I enjoy telling unserious people like you to fuck off :D
Yes, same here, but I use reason, not bad words. And thus I have sent of dozens of "Fuck off"s to you in the time we were talking...And I don't know what you mean by "unserious people". I just like picking apart shallow reasoning..
>would you be OK with the Air Force dropping a bunker buster bomb on your house, killing the home invader(s), and you, and your family/pets/etc, and destroying your stuff, and the same for several neighboring homes?..
No, but no one is doing that as far as I can see. And only the bare minimum is done to correct illegal status, namely sending those people to their native places. If you have a lesser action to correct it, do share.
Don’t imagine you’d get much pushback from the people you see as your political opponents if you supported going after businesses for hiring undocumented immigrants. You face pushback when the solution is punching down.
IF better immigration laws are not possible because people want to exploit illegal migrants THEN why would it be considered cruel for someone to oppose illegal migration?
Opposing illegal migration is not cruel on its own. The methods currently being employed to resolve it are extremely cruel and idiotic (e.g., forfeiting due process)
You're comfort with ignoring our laws, promoting policies that drain other countries of their most ambitious and productive citizens, encourage exploitative labor practices, and make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country via legal means, speaks volumes about you. Be better.
P.S. When has anyone ever responded to the the sanctimonious phrase "be better" by actually "being better". You don't want them to "be better", you just want to try and shame them into adopting your ideological views.
Yea! Laws must be enforced! Let’s arrest all those illegal oral sex havers in Maryland. And those criminal face-makers-at-dogs in Oklahoma? Lock them up! Those horrible people singing while wearing swim suits in Florida? Straight to jail. Those deviants eating apple pie with ice cream in Kansas surely need to be put away. Women driving cars without their husbands waving flags in front need to be locked up, too! Laws are laws, after all. Better enforce them, lest you be a scofflaw.
How does, e.g., deporting a person who was illegally brought to this country at the age of 2, back to their “home” help their home country? What about the Haitian who came here legally under TPS, then, after Trump ended TPS, is now “illegal”? The Dept of State’s own website currently says of Haiti: “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” How is deporting people back there helpful?
If you can't understand why laws need to be enforced, and also why it's bad for countries to lose their people to other countries, I'm not sure we have much to discuss here. I guess the US is the only country that matters to you.
It's a civil infraction, like a speeding ticket or a heavy equipment rebuilder that makes the mistake of painting a bunch of stuff with paint that doesn't meat whatever this years EPA VOC rules are.
If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
It's a pretty important legal difference. The administration is now trying to treat it as a criminal offense, trying to enforce it as a criminal offense, using that to justify calling huge swathes of immigrants 'criminals', etc.
Consider this scenario. A friend of yours walks up to you and says "man, I got a ticket yesterday." You will have a general idea of the level of enforcement involved, how that's looked at by the government and others, etc. You probably do not see your friend as a criminal.
Now, suppose the same friend walked up and says "man, I got arrested yesterday, I just got bailed out." You will have different ideas of the enforcement model and perceptions of that. There is now a greater probability that you see your friend as a criminal.
gestures at the numerous overcrowded ICE detention facilities, the rotten food, the denied healthcare / resulting deaths, the separation of children from parents, the shuffling to frustrate habeas petitions and other legal interventions, the constant rhetoric spewed by admin officials
But deportation and the related procedures are not a punishment. Things that you list is similar to what would happen if a cop stopped you for speeding, and you couldn't get to somewhere that you should, in time, and some bad things happen...
My point is that what you describe is NOT punishment, but steps taken to stop something that is illegal from going on...
And your response is....weird? It is as if there is nothing at the bottom of these (your) arguments. You poke a finger and it comes out of the other end..
Because when Trump said “we are going to deport the worst of the worst” people took that to mean criminal gangbangers. Then all of a sudden he’s deporting hairdressers, students, and abuelas and people are understandably surprised Pikachu, saying that’s not what they voted for.
It’s a sleight of hand, they say “the worst of the worst” and what they mean is “all immigrants (not just the illegal ones) are the worst of the worst”
This is why they’re going to lose their majorities next week.
You first: would you feel punished if you were forcibly taken from your home and relocated to a country you've never been?
There are two axes here: whether something is a punishment, whether it's deserved. You've moved from arguing it's not a punishment to arguing it's deserved. So you need to give a straight answer.
Anyway, your posts have too many exclamation points and curses, so I don't want to engage anymore. Have a nice day.
It's nothing. It's completely outside the criminal justice system. It's not even a misdemeanor.
Without a current visa of some kind though, you are deportable, mostly at the whims and mercy of the government. But you wouldn't be committing a crime and deportation is not a criminal punishment.
When you do crimes, you get criminally punished (hypothetically) citizen or not (jail, fines, etc).
Whether the government can, should or must carry out a deportation are all truly separate considerations, often with distinct, case-by-case answers.
And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street and incarcerated indefinitely by ICE and subjected to ghastly conditions
>And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street
Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
Said what? That deportation isn't a criminal punishment? Oh no, you got me! Checkmate I guess.
I'll answer as if this is a good faith rejoinder, even though we both know it isn't.
Deportation is drastic. Very drastic. It's also very expensive and often very disruptive to many people's lives, including American citizens. Think households with an undocumented spouse, for example.
It's generally a bad thing to do without very good, justifiable reasons. Not the least of which how expensive it is for the state.
> Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
>I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
What about pulling a gun on you, if the cop suspects you are hiding something and not complying with instructions to search you. This put your life in mortal danger, much worse than imprisoning you.
I think frankly people are not thinking this through.
I have no idea what you're even trying to say here
When you have to reach for such increasingly strained and indirect metaphors to talk about an issue instead of dealing with the issue directly on it's own terms, it's a tell you don't actually know much about it all
I can see in your other replies you've really latched onto this "it's not a punishment" line, that you literally just "learned" a couple of replies ago from me (as if it's some magical auto-win button). You're making it up as you go along
And you've even gotten that wrong. I said deportation isn't a criminal punishment. To put it another way, deportation doesn't imply some wrongdoing or a guilty verdict from a judge or jury
But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though, so it's not something to be done lightly without very good reasons. It's drastic, life-altering, sometimes life-destroying, grave and serious thing
To bring it back to some real facts here: There are estimated to be over a million households in the US where an undocumented person is married to a citizen. Many of them have children who are US citizens. Deporting the spouse/parent utterly destroys families, there's no morally justifiable reason to go after these people, except in rare, exceptional cases.
> literally just "learned" a couple of replies ago from me
This is not correct. I only saw your comment after I made the ones you are referring to. I think this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281449. There is probably no proof that I can give. You ll have to take my word for it.
>But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though..
It. doesn't. matter. If you take a loan from a bank, and bank forecloses your house for non-payment, you and your family is going to be home less. It is very consequential, sure. But that what "law enforcement" mean. And without it, there will be chaos.
You are not being realistic. Because you don't see the slippery slope on which your argument stands.
"Realistic" you say, as you offer yet another metaphor completely disconnected from the reality of the issue under discussion, because you don't know enough about it to actually discuss it directly
You can't speak coherently about the actual facts and realities of immigrants or the immigration system, despite the vast ocean of facts and stories you can use to educate yourself
But hey... imagine a cop, the pope and a bear walk into a bar ... therefore deport, or something. Think about it!
These semantic tricks are so tiresome. If you broke a law to enter the country, I'm sorry, but you're here illegally. No amount of redefining of terms is ever going to change that.
Somewhere between half and a solid majority of undocumented immigrants came through ports of entry and have overstayed their visas. Again, this is not a crime
Or perhaps there is a semantic game, but it's coming from the other direction - from those who would demagogue immigrants in order to portray them all as scary, evil criminals
Thankfully, for most people, such simplistic notions die at first contact with an actual real-life mass deportation campaign as they witness the wrecked homes and families they leave behind.
Most of these immigrants aren't islands unto themselves, they are here b/c they have ties here, or have even spent their lives here, and you're ripping them away from their families. Many of the dreamers they're trying to deport right now haven't lived in their "home" country since they were toddlers
That sort of thing leads sensible people to ask themselves, "what good is actually being done here?"
This is why immigration went from a winning issue to a losing issue with Republicans in the span of 2 years.
Of course it's going to be a messy process when you try to finally enforce your immigration laws after years of not doing so. Enforcing laws isn't always pretty, but it's the only way to deter future behavior. The results speak for themselves. illegal immigration has dropped to historic lows. We are doing what pretty much every other nation in the world is doing when it comes to immigration enforcement, and in a lot of ways we're more lax than most. But for some reason we are singled out as uniquely cruel for doing so.
Here we are, still fighting with illusions created by the term "illegal immigrant". Legal/illegal is a false binary.
Millions (if not most) of the immigrants who have arrived here in recent years entered through ports of entry or presented themselves to Border Patrol to initiate the immigration process, and have pending immigration cases or asylum claims working their way through the courts. All perfectly legal. Guess what bucket they fall into?
And what exactly are we trying to deter in those cases? Nothing that should be deterred in the first place.
Want to deter illegal border crossings? Sounds good, but we're already pretty good at it. Apprehension rates have been pretty consistent over the years (before and after Trump)
What problem are we actually solving with more "deterrence"?
Reducing the backlog in immigration courts? Fair enough. I agree that's a problem worth solving. But the solution is straightforward: increase the system's capacity to process cases in a timely manner by hiring more immigration judges and implementing a few easy legal reforms.
Instead, we're building a nationwide network of detention facilities, pouring a military-grade budget into an immigration enforcement agency with serious accountability problems, and incentivizing aggressive enforcement through high quotas and broad discretion. The predictable result is the kind of situation we're seeing now, where ICE detains people as they show up for their damn naturalization ceremonies and is quickly turning itself into a domestic military/spying agency.
It's deterring immigration, period.
Net migration has turned negative for the first time in decades. The total US population declined for the 1st time in history in 2025. If that's not turned around, and fast, we're cooked.
The president is an actual felon / insurrectionist / adjudicated rapist who ran a fraudulent charity, and you want to know why people might feel immigration law doesn’t really matter?
I really don't think anyone is taking Trump's misdeeds and poor character into account when making the decision to cross the border illegally or overstay a visa. I'm quite sure they are thinking more about economic opportunities, getting out of a bad situation in their home country, reuniting with family, or other things along those lines.
I’m not talking about what they’re thinking, I’m saying why should immigration laws matter when the President is an actual criminal?
The social contract is: the President isn’t above the law. Right now and as long as he’s President, that contract is breached. So do immigration laws matter? I don’t know, because the plain text of the Constitution says those who swear an oath to the Constitution and foment insurrection against the US shall be barred from office. And yet, an insurrectionist is the executive right now, enforcing laws against people he doesn’t like and waiving laws that make him rich. So then why should immigration laws matter at this time? And under what authority?
So you're advocating for a complete disregard for all laws until Trump is out of office, is that right? Traffic laws, domestic violence laws, regulations around food safety, etc.
Or maybe you mean only federal laws, like laws around human trafficking?
Or is there something specific about immigration law that requires it be voided when the president is a lawbreaker?
What I'm saying is this executive has violated the insurrection clause (14th amendment), the 12th amendment, the foreign emoluments clause, the domestic emoluments clause, the take care clause, the first amendment, fourth amendment, fifth amendment, habeas corpus, appropriations clause, taxing power, war powers... he's been on an actual crime spree since 2016 violating campaign laws, extorting foreign countries for bribes, extorting governors for votes, fomenting insurrection, stealing and attempting to sell state secrets, violating the Constitution from beginning to end -- all that doesn't matter.
So then why does immigration law matter? And how does that guy have the moral authority to say anything about anyone violating any laws?
That's pretty interesting, what sort of people have you discussed this with? I'd imagine that many people in the center and leftward would at least try to inject some nuance into such blunt statements.
Well, one that immediately comes to mind is an asylum seeker. Whether or not a country is willing or able to accept this person is, in my opinion, secondary to that person's immediate safety. I would hope that that person would be a well-behaved resident and go through the proper avenues to get documentation. In the meantime, I would consider their illegal immigration a "good" thing.
> Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
>Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
A similar thing is said here in europe but an important caveat is that they typically had no way of drawing most support. No commonly accepted way of regularisation. Buying property. Etc.
One can easily go back but will more easily go back if there's no point in staying beyond the momentary moneymaking and essentially just no future.
It's imo how china manages to have roughly as much migration as Berlin despite sharing a border with pakistan, afghanistan, etc and without large militarised force to kick people out. Simply don't give to incentive.
We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.
What are you talking about? Can we avoid the Reddit/twitter style of comment? If you have an argument or a point to make just make it.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
The point is that families didn't just evacuate when it turned into US territory. There are very strong ties to Mexico in the southwest that will never go away.
And what does it have to do with foreigners illegally coming to do these seasonal jobs? People who were here when it became US territory just became citizens.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
Its too much work, we did violent rounding up of brown people to have images to re use for campaigns and now we can use the paramilitary force for chasing political dissidents like any normal democratic goverment would do.
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
When it was irish, they were white. And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
You are mistaken: the Irish may be white now, but they weren't then! Whiteness evolved over time, it used to be exclusive for WASPs, and excludes the Irish, Italians, Jews, slavs, and other groups widely accepted as white today. Race is a sociological construct.
The 19th Century was full of anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. There was even a political party devoted to getting rid of Catholics who became known as "the know nothings".
The other immigrants from Catholic countries were also perceived as being "not white", which is why there was a lot of anti-Italian and anti-Spanish sentiment along with the anti-Irish folks. Along with the "they are not real Christians" sentiment (still held by many Evangelicals), they were perceived as "taking orders from Rome" much like (during the Cold War) communists were perceived as "taking orders from Moscow".
Yes, this isnt true. It's from a 1995 book and just invents a history.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.
The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.
Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word
EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:
Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.
See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,
> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.
This is patently wrong. And just look at images from the time. There are many Italians, especially from the south which was the main immigration areas - Sicily, Sardegna, Lecce - who are less white than many Latinos.
What's wrong? I don't think i've made any non-empirical claims.
The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.
The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?
You think the 18th race-"realists" (urgh), "who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one", would stop there and not begin to divide white people between "good" white sub-races and "vile" white sub-races? You really think that those racists thought that once you're white, you're all good?
"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw in Ireland. .. to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much"
Benjamin Disraeli, 1836:
"[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood."
_The Spectator_ News magazine in 1882:
"The Tragedy at Maamtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians."
H. P. Lovecraft (yes, the famous author), in 1921 (!):
"If the Irish had the 'right' to independence they would possess it. If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does ... It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme. Why have not the Irish conquered and colonized the earth if they be so deserving of regard? They are brainless canaille."
You are deeply uneducated on the topic. I would suggest you stop commenting on a subject you know nothing about and learn a thing or two before interacting again.
Right, so you agree that the Irish were classified as white. And that presumably, 'white' entails nor means as such 'white superiority' and presumably that 'white' all along was in reference to a european lineage and the american 'white' diasopara is a european one from the start.
Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.
The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.
If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.
The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.
With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true. It is only true of absolute numbers, *not* rates of change. Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.
Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.
You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.
Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.
> The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true
To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum
> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
citation needed
> The type and character of the immigration matters
No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter
> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK
What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.
SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.
Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country
> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own
Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.
But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...
Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?
> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.
That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.
South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.
Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission, executing people is not.
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
Only if they have a deportation order. There are scenarios where people are in an in between state or have the ability to challenge a deportation order
I outright think deporting every person here undocumented now is not ethical, or beneficial to society, given the history of immigration and enforcement in this country.
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
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edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
I agree, but that is not for ICE to decide. Democrats should have fixed this a long time ago, USA isn't a one party state so if Democrats wanted to fix this they could have. But they too didn't want undocumented immigrants to gain full rights, it is very useful to have abusable second class citizens around for the upper classes.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
Of the half-dozen or so attempts at immigration reform in the past 25 years, every one of them has been blocked by Republicans.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
It is extremely important to distinguish between people who are here illegally and people who are subject to a deportation order. ICE's mission is to deport people with deportation orders, and get people suspected of breaking the law in front of a court. The way you've worded it makes it sound like their mission is to go straight from "here illegally" to "deport" which it very much is not.
It’s also the federal government’s job to go around arresting everybody carrying or smoking weed, as it is still illegal no matter what any state says and every single person consuming it is a lawbreaker.
Every time the police gets to choose whether to apply a law or not you add more power to the police, I don't want the police to be more powerful.
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
You're mixing up cause and effect. The police in America aren't more dangerous and powerful because they have choices, they have choices because they are dangerous and powerful.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
I do actually think that we shouldn’t have laws we aren’t willing to enforce, so we agree more than you think. I’ve been against states unilaterally legalizing it for years because I worried what happens when states buck laws that I do agree with, such as voting rights or basic protections for all people.
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
Things aren't that simple. Some illegal immigrants were brought here long before they were old enough to have a say. Some were here legally but then Trump canceled their asylum.
The law dictates who can be deported, generally not who must be deported.
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
> Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
The law is assumed to be in line with "protect America", it isn't up for ICE to decide that. If you think current laws are not protecting America then vote to change them.
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
When you have trouble meeting the daily quota set by the administration, I guess you wouldn't have time to ponder if the 73-year-old grandma who has been here 30 years is a threat to America.
And civil rights are merely a speed bump on the way to the detention center.
Then why is the administration revoking immigration status, and we have evidence that a significant portion of those detained have zero criminal background? Worse, why are you acting as an apologist for fascist and xenophobic policies?
But they aren't prioritizing dangers. That is false. They have quotas set by a white supremacist. And I think talking about the Trump administration's direction of ICE and ICE itself is a distinction without a difference.
That wasn't the campaign promise and isn't worth spending money on. Also they are deporting and detaining people who are here legally and even killing American citizens. Even if it isn't a official mission it's the inevitable side effect of funding a domestic law enforcement agency like a military and making them explicitly beholden to a political agenda.
Sure but keep in mind that most of these people pay taxes into a system that they don't actually benefit from (social security for one), so by doing so you're actually causing more economic damage than you think you're fixing.
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
First a judge would have to order them to leave, and then they would have to disobey that order for a certain time, and only after that can they be deported forcefully. That process takes too long for the people who want them gone right now.
We have evidence now that they execute people without a criminal record.
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately
stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car,
thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists
manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
This should be obvious to anyone that has seen the videos from this incident. In any normal civilised country 10% of adult population would protest something like this next day in every city and town. Then those "agents" would be arrested and they would have a very public court case.
A mile is supposed to be (1 / 60 / 360 / Earth.circumferenceOf()), so a 1.5mi radius or 3mi diameter circle is (supposed to be slightly short of) 3/60 or 0.05 degrees on a map.
A yard is just 10% short of a meter, just the same thing for most practical purposes.
Metric rules and imperial drools, I agree, but I reckon if we put our minds to it we can multiply by 0.9 and 1.6 (or 0.91 and 1.61 if you are genius). Keeps the mind sharp in this age of outsourced thinking!
The title says "Claude discovers" not "Anthropic discovers". The latter would be fair since they seemed to have funded the research. "Claude discovers" is just marketing hype.
"Apple" word roughly covers them all. No one says that iPhone comes from Foxconn, despite Foxconn making them (or whoever is making them). Same with LLMs and people running them.
That's just totally different. In research, you have attribution. Mainly because if you're an employee you generally understand that you're trading work for coin and don't expect to be mentioned in some way. Perhaps very few industries do it, like movie credits etc.
This would be the equivalent of "the crane built the skyscraper" or "the bulldozer produced timber". Yes in raw joules they probably did most of the work but you see it's not the usual way we do things.
Actually, I would like that for every single manufactured object around me. Not a physical book of course. But knowing who contributed and how to the construction of the fork I am about to eat with is definitely something I wish we had.
If I'm using objects whose construction involved child exploitation and benefit pedocriminal CEO and stakeholders, I should be aware of it.
If I'm using objects which where produced by a great place to work cooperative filled with happy consentent and well remunerated adults, I should know it.
I would also like to be given lesson or humility against the complexity of building every single manufactured object around me, and a manual of "how to build one by your own means".
As a vibe test, I tried some system prompting in DSv4 Flash to the effect of ~"Always do your internal thinking in Chinese, and always respond to the user in English" (but translated to Mandarin).
Subjectively it seemed to reason faster and better, but sometimes it would indeed output responses in Mandarin nonetheless; so I didn't pursue it further.
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