Why are most of the tweets mentioning deportation? Surveillance aside, since when has it been a human right to attend a festival in a country you are not allowed to reside in?
1- For face f, is f a member of F_known? (From national ID cards etc.) Assume this gives an answer [0.0 - 1.0].
2- Is f a member of F_suspect? Where F_suspect is a database of face imagery associated with potentially illegal activity or refugee migration. Not that these faces could be from video surveillance (from a border region, train station, migrant camp) or scraped from war zone images e.g. jihadi propaganda, YouTube video of regime critics, talking politics on HN, video of protests in other countries, etc.
3- Not matching anything, and hence also requiring investigation.
All of these have errors, which generally go up as more people are added to the training database. Apparently some ethnicities (okay, black people) are often trained for poorly. This will likely result in 'over-servicing' of some ethnicities.
If local police get a hit for someone going through festival security and detain them on the basis of face recognition software, what is the legal basis for that? Police would say that they had 'intelligence' but can they explain the basis for it? Is this not essentially maintaining dossiers on people who have not committed any crime? They have no evidence a crime has been committed but instead they are essentially running a police checkpoint and saying "Papers!". These are the mechanisms of the Stasi.
One can argue that police should be able to detain those with outstanding warrants. I have no problem with that, except that when police take photos of citizens it is hard to know what is done with those photos. Ironclad legislation requiring they not leave the device or be stored on anything except ephemeral storage would be a good start, along with civil and criminal penalties for non compliance and direct individual responsibility and penalties for the chain of command.
Without a rigorous push back, America will become like China and the UK, where your face must be shown, and it will be recorded and tracked 24/7. Of course in America it will probably be via a company, and police forces will have a subscription, which lowers their fees the more faces the capture.
The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.
You also have those that are in limbo as for example there are several countries that are not taking back their citizens if they are forced there. Afghanistan used to be one of those countries for Sweden so even if someone got a no on their asylum application they could still just say no and stay. However now Sweden has a deal with Afghanistan so people who are not leaving willingly are put on chartered planes down there.
Then there are those internally within EU like beggars who are officially not allowed to stay as long as they do but no one is checking of course.
Most of Europe is very different to the US in this regard. Without being legal/registered, you’ve no chance of getting the equivalent of an SSN, drivers license, opening a bank account, leasing an apartment or in some cases even buy a mobile phone. Consequently, the number of undocumented immigrants is minuscule.
I get the impression that in the US it mightn’t be unusual for the average citizen to encounter undocumented immigrant gardeners, nannies, etc. - this almost never happens in Europe.
So it's probable that many Europeans could have encountered illegal immigrants without realising.
The common point is there a selection of low pay service jobs that attract illegal immigrants, who then become trapped. Some by debt and threats to family, and other more direct slavery. Anti-trafficking and similar groups have been warning of issues for years, and mostly ignored.
It remains a truth that the vast majority of immigration in Europe is legal, but there is a significant level of illegal migration. Thanks to the free movement of peoples within the EU, it is far harder to detect than before those border checks were pulled down.
Here is just one of a selection of pieces that have come up this week across all the press:
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/oct/25/trafficked-vietn...
What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to back up your claim.
The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being irregular/undocumented (http://irregular-migration.net). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US, for example.
Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015, nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10 years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.
So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between 2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in this regard.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache...
[2] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...
[3] https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...
If you want to practice civil disobedience, it can sometimes effectuate change, but it doesn’t always work — especially not immediately — and you have to be willing to be punished in the meantime.
When people argue both that laws are bad, and we need a new law to improve society, I wonder if they're really thought things through.
Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been a thing. There were other issues. These things come and go like fashion. Twenty thirty years ago it was self determination of nations, today its “there should be no borders” which is the opposite of self determination of nations.
It is not. To quote Zach Weinersmith
"Every time I talk about immigration, someone says 'but the US has the right to control borders.' Sure! Yes!
The US also has the right to create a branch of the military containing only monkeys wearing tiny hats. That has no bearing on whether it's good policy or not!"
You might disagree, but perhaps you can think of some other law that you wouldn't want festivals to assist in enforcing. If you can't, do you trust that the government will never pass such a law? If not, you might not want to normalize having facial recognition tech everywhere.
You can't do away with borders in an environment where governments are at each other's throats and there's massive wealth and cultural inequality. At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish? The refugees (small percentage of 3rd world residents who could/would migrate) come from cultures that are unable to fix their own countries' problems from within, granted often due to initial conditions outside their control. So how would they fix our problems — and we have a lot of them — which are equally out of our control to solve? And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Opening borders to absolve our guilty conscience about ill-gotten gains of empires past and present doesn't solve anything. It just makes us feel better. It's like shooting heroin on the titanic.
America was built on immigration from undesirables (an Irish or Italian Catholic ~100 years ago was treated as suspiciously as a Muslim is now), and it seemed to turn out okay. The key difference back then was there was minimal welfare, so immigrants had to find something productive to do or else they'd starve.
>At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish?
This is already happening via outsourcing: see for instance the rise of China, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty while working-class Americans get poorer, and China's rising political influence on other countries. Open immigration would encourage more competition between countries: a hellhole like North Korea would have to clean up its act if its citizens were free to get up and leave.
>And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Do you think current (legal) refugees would agree that they're hardly any better off than they were back in their original country? Why would illegal refugees be any different? (Often the only difference between an illegal and a legal refugee/immigrant is that the legal one is at the front of some queue, the illegal one is at the back).
>the key difference back then was minimal welfare
And an expectation of assimilation. Regardless immigration in the absence of a welfare state is a completely different beast than immigration into a welfare state.
>Do you think current legal refugees would agree.
Current refugees benefit from unequal access to our labor market. If you eliminated that advantage by letting anyone in, not just risk takers, they almost certainly wouldn’t find it so attractive. How is a race to the bottom a good thing?
>outsourcing
Yes Americans get poorer, and the world gets tons more plastic in its oceans every minute. So we all get poorer too. In my estimation it’s far more important that 1st world countries make a stand for the health of the earth. Globalism is completely incompatible environmentalism best I can tell.
Did you pay for the country's infrastructure upon your birth, or did you freeload for at least 18 years before contributing anything back to it in taxes?
Of course it should be a human right to freely travel, in a political utopia. Guess where we don't live? We don't live somewhere called no place.
If wishes (moral and otherwise) were horses, we'd drown in horse shit.
If everybody thought like this, we'd still be in the stone age. You don't achieve change by deciding it's impossible and giving up.
Forgetting about illegal immigrants for a moment, are you saying that visitors to some country shouldn't be allowed at festivals? What have you got against tourism?
There's no right to visit attractions, but there ought to be a right to privacy, and I'd personally prefer a few illegals get to unjustly enjoy themselves over the invasive panopticon required to prevent that.
Do not underestimate the power of "computer said so"
If property is a fundamental right, then shouldn't it be the right of a landlord to rent his property to whomever he wants?
This is a pure strawman.
The efforts and the social impact of chasing people doing something illegal must be balanced with the seriousness of the crime.