Notably, Aragorn is able to defeat the latter two groups using his sword at the Battle of Minas Tirith, thus repelling them from "The West". I suppose Luckey thinks of his system as a way to repel evil people like the Southrons?
Thiel's companies Palantir Technologies, Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital, Lembas LLC, Rivendell LLC, and Arda Capital are all named after Lord of the Rings.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
EDIT: If you're downvoting this, does this mean that there should be no regulation for who can enter a country?
https://www.fairus.org/issue/illegal-immigration/how-many-il...
>that somehow necessitates things like building a giant border wall
Do you want to tear down the existing walls? San Diego's seems like a success: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhhjfiSy2Y
Walls are relatively cheap, dumb tech. A wall is potentially an investment: https://cis.org/Can-Border-Wall-Pay-Itself
>and enabling ICE, etc
So you don't want illegal immigrants to be removed? I don't understand.
Should Mexico let anyone in south of its border?
I'm not sure how this issue plays out in the US but in Europe most of the media refuse to acknowledge this fact when reporting stories like this.
Another way to think of it is as another variant of "success hides failure", although in this case it's his business successes hiding his personal failures from himself. It's like the pattern of conceited or arrogant people so often being deeply insecure- ironic but sad, and really obvious from the outside looking in, but not at all apparent to the individual.
It's technology without any sense of history, humanity, or culture.
The real issues underlying undocumented immigration include:
* The fact that the American economy depends on undocumented labor, and so we now have an economy driven in part by a de jure under-class in sort of the same way that Dubai and Saudi Arabia are driven by foreign workers with no rights whose passports are held by their employers.
* The fact that the US Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, and so a huge percentage of undocumented families in the US have American citizen children --- who are themselves people who have, like most Americans, never known any other country, and so we now have an immigration policy whose effect is to pointlessly break up families.
* The fact that a pretty significant portion of immigrants actually interdicted at the border are in fact refugees from violence to whom we have stated obligations.
* The fact that our system treats interdicted immigrants (documented or otherwise) terribly, including prolonged imprisonment and pro-forma hearings without legal counsel.
It's pretty clear from how I wrote this where I stand on the issues. There are reasonable conservative reframings for these points. Paired together, those competing framings would constitute a rational argument about immigration. The wall, on the other hand, is mostly just a pointless symbol of nationalist enmity.
Finally, when comparing your lot with that of (say) undocumented Hondurans, bear in mind that by law your experiences aren't the same: we have different quotas and, in some respects, different systems for people of different nationalities.
If Americans actually cared about the plight of illegal immigrants, they wouldn't be against efforts at trying to remove them, they would be for efforts to streamline immigration so that it's consistent, less costly, and lets disruptive to the immigrants' lives. At the same time, the US would also have to be hard on illegal immigration to prevent illegal immigrants from undercutting wages for those here legally. As long as there is a divide in the quality of life between everything south of the US border, there will always be incentive to illegally immigrate. The proper solution is to keep sending them back, make it harder to get in, and HELP the poorer countries increase their quality of life so they aren't incentivized to risk their lives for a future.
But I wouldn't bet on it, too many people like cheap labor, and too many people get emotional about kicking out illegal immigrants.
Yes. If we really wanted to keep illegal immigrants from taking jobs from Americans, the US government could require a higher minimum wage for companies that don't use E-Verify. Then it would be cheaper to hire American.
People forget that there are two sides of the labor/wage coin; there's how much you make, and there's how much things cost. What we want at the end of the day is maximal purchasing power, not maximal nominal wages!
That's before we start talking about trade and the extent to which undocumented labor enables tens of billions of dollars of exports.
All I'm saying is: it's not simple. The deeper you dig into it, the sillier the wall is. But that's the point: nobody in power wants to end undocumented immigration; rather, they want to placate the people who are upset by it.
Firstly that in a country where immigration laws are or will soon be mostly dictated by corporate lobbyists, any immigration restrictions will also be used to manipulate labor costs in favor of capital (see for example how tech companies use the H1B program). Secondly that historically in periods in which the US lacked a de-jure subaltern class of underpaid laborers, it created de-facto subaltern classes it could exploit for underpaid labor, because it's way easier to drum up racism or gut worker protections than to get rid of the demand for that labor. Any solution to fixing labor prices that just restricts workers' movements instead of placing restrictions on capital does nothing to address either of those issues. The sane way forward should not be immigration restriction, but restrictions on capital flight combined with the establishment of international labor standards, strengthening the foundations of the wage floor in a way that helps workers in both countries instead of destroying peoples' lives just for being rational actors in a broken system.
Also, in response to your other reply, I don't see how removing illegal immigrants and dissuading them from coming here is "culling the poor". I illustrated how allowing illegal immigrants to pervade the US actually harms those at the bottom of the income scale, including those immigrants. We should be working to help poorer countries so that they don't need to resort to illegal immigration, but that doesn't mean we should ignore our immigration laws. Either officially endorse open borders for everyone and equalize society, or enforce and/or fix the laws we have now, but the gray area where we look the other way on the illegals that make it through the hoops alive only helps the rich.
Hence my comment that people that endorse letting illegal immigrants stay are being emotional (e.g. father having to leave his kids, kids going back to country they didn't go up in, etc), because in the larger picture, it's just reinforcing the incentives that are causing them to be exploited.
I have no problem with reformist solutions, but there's no worker-friendly way to arbitrarily deport workers that's an intermediate to a future that's good for anyone but the rich
I just wanted to make the point that there were straightforward arguments about undocumented immigration and that none of them really intersect with the wall. :)
The "ELI5" answer to the border wall debate is "it's a policy meant to paralyze discussion while placating anti-immigration activists; it doesn't have a real public policy purpose".
Don't be a vendido, don't forget about the struggles previous generations went through just for you to be able here to comment on the internet.
What percentage of illegal border crossers do you think are native peoples who lived in that region historically and 'had the border cross them', versus people from southern Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc who are using it merely as a migration route and have no connection to the land?
Sure, I'll bite: it's a Class B misdemeanor pursued beyond reason. What is the motivation for kidnapping children from their parents and putting them all in concentration camps for the equivalent of fishing without a license?
It's a simple calculus: you get caught for fishing without a license, should your children be taken away from you?
If you're smuggling children across the border should the children be in the same cell as the trafficker? Of course not. I'm all for making this process as fast as possible, though.
Sometimes bad people do bad things. Like they bring bad stuff across the border, or bring people across the border and do bad things to those people. We want to punish the bad people for doing bad things that we don't like.
There are also good people. Good people don't do bad things, they do good things. They do farming and build things, and make things better for other people. They work very hard at these good things. They can get paid for the good things they do, and that's good for them too.
The good people outnumber the bad people by a lot. That's what's good about humanity.
Sometimes the good people are in the same place as the bad people and want to get away. Other times the good people are in a place where they can't do the good things that they want to do.
It would take a long time to move if they didn't do something a little bad in order to get the place where they need to be to do good things. In a lot of cases it wouldn't even be possible to move. So they do the thing that is a little bad, but when we find out we punish them like they are very bad people doing very bad things. We take away their kids, take their things, put them in very bad jails, and then send them back to where they were.
They are afraid of being caught. This makes it easy for bad people to hurt them. Bad people can take their money, or do bad stuff to them by threatening to tell on them. They also can't go to anyone for help if they get hurt or sick because of the bad thing they did. This means that these people suffer a lot more than we do. (Suffering is when you hurt for a long time). Being afraid also makes them not get as much when they do good things for other people.
Some people think that because they did a bad thing, they should be punished more and that we aren't mean enough to them for the bad thing they did. Other people think that the bad thing wasn't bad at all, and that it was good, and that we are being too mean.
There are also people who think that the good people are bad people and that we should build a big huge wall, and that a big huge wall will keep everyone out except for people who we let in specifically. Some people think that a big huge wall would not be helpful and too hard to build.
You hear stories about kids raised in the US by undocumented parents since shortly after birth, just to get deported to a (more or less) third world country that they have no history in. That's a bit insane, no? And it's not like it's being fairly enforced across the board, either. Try to find any persecution against it that isn't against someone in an at-risk community of low income. It's super unlikely that it's just them doing this.
And the idea that the government can/should keep peaceful people out feels a bit...off, to me. Without serious reform, at least.
As it stands, a lot of the thought processes on the "CLOSE UP THE BORDERS" sort of sentiment are a bit backward. For example, why would we want to get rid of unskilled workers who work for very little? It'd make more sense to get rid of the foreign skilled workers, since they're more than likely taking high-paying jobs. (For the record, I don't like either of those outcomes.)
At the moment, another portion of why I think illegal immigration is fairly sane is just because legal immigration to the US (and many other places, it's not alone in it) is stuck in the Stone Age. It's 2018, there's no excuse for how innefficient it is at this point - especially for low-income people.
When I read this argument, it reminds me somewhat of defending slavery.
Oh they're certainly biased. That's why I said "it can be argued".
>If not an outright hate group
SPLC plays way too fast and loose to be taken seriously anymore: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/southern-poverty-law-cen...
Illegal crossings at the border are currently one of the most controversial topics in American politics and yet the actual impact of the issue on American citizens is much less. This clearly shows how the real motivations behind the border wall are not as claimed by its proponents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/nyregion/deportation-new-...
It might be related to Marx's idea of class solidarity over "bourgeois nationalism", but I haven't thought about it enough to say.
EDIT: could also come (blind stab in the dark) from Maoism-Third Worldism.
That the wall is even a discussion point is a sign of how far the conversation has strayed from logic and reason. This sounds cheaper, better for the environment and far less of an eyesore than a physical wall.