I think that a lot of people see a rise and mainstreaming of White Nationalism and want to push back.
We are largely a nation of immigrants. We've lost sight of our roots. Its proper to stand up against this inhumane and unnecessary behavior. The government is experiencing social consequences of its own making.
> Making people sleep in cages
There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure. It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
> Limiting supplies / legal assistance
There are a finite resources, especially when one party sees every penny spent on immigration matters as "racist". Politicians were sounding the alarms months before this reached crisis-levels, but the other side refused to release a single penny until after it reached critical levels.
> Separating families
When an adult and a child arrive illegally with no documents you have two major facts to deal with: the adult has just broken a law, and you cannot establish familial ties. Given the extent of child trafficking, would you rather just give any adult that says "that's my child" custody, or would you rather separate the child from the adult until you can establish if that is actually a parent? You are damned either way because your critics will say you're "separating families" or "you're a pedophile helping traffic children". Personally, I would rather be told I'm splitting families than enabling child trafficking, but I could see the argument against that preference.
So at the end of the day none of these things are happening because of white nationalism. They are happening because of an inability to control illegal immigration rates, a lack of funding for facilities, materials, and legal aid; and in order to protect minors who may be trafficked.
To me, that is the real problem. One side of the media/political spectrum has decided it's white nationalism. The other sees it as something that has to be done because the alternative is worst. And to be charitable, I am sure there is a tiny fraction of a percent of a segment of the population and people involved who are white nationalists, but to think that's the motivating force is to dismiss the vast majority of people who have good intentions.
What is also exponentially annoying is that both sides have become so polarized that they will never work together on this.
We could choose to do things differently and treat people with the dignity and respect that we all deserve as humans. No matter the color of our skin.
Many of these people who were being caged are people who claimed asylum at the border points of entry; they were not illegal immigrants, nor did they try to sneak in. The correct thing to do in this situation of not having enough room would be to release them into the country pending their asylum hearing, rather than locking them up in substandard, inhumane, occasionally deadly accommodations.
> The asylum seeker must prove to the officer that there is a “significant possibility” he or she is eligible for asylum, and must also be subject to a credibility assessment. If the officer makes a positive finding, the asylum seeker is referred to an immigration court where they will have the opportunity to apply for asylum before an immigration judge. If the individual does not meet the credible fear screening standard, he or she can be deported.
That process ideally happens in a few days, but a system to designed to handle 5,000 people a month getting 100,000 requests a month is going to take longer. In the meantime, those applicants cannot simply be released into the interior.
The onus is on Congress to appropriate the necessary funding to allow for expedited and humane treatment and proper facilities for processing the number of people who are crossing. As long as Congress refuses to provide the funds, the agencies are left to enforce the nations immigration laws without the proper resources, staffing, or even possibly basic sanitation, bedding, clothes, etc.
> There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure.
It is still going on. It is not okay.
> It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
They are not keeping people until they "established their identity". There is not a process where they keep people asking for asylum locked up only until they establish their identity and no longer, that's just not how it works.
These are weird excuses for taking people fleeing danger imprisoning them in truly abominable conditions, for the sin of asking for asylum.
"These things" are happening because the government intentionally decided to treat people asking for asylum _as bad as they could_, in order to discourage people from doing it, and look good to those who just want to treat them bad. This is all well-documented. It was not some kind of forced hand, the level of asylum seekers and other migrants was not substantially different from the past couple decades. Whether it was because of "white nationalism" I suppose depends on what was in the hearts and minds of the decision-makers, but it's pretty darn clear they consciously decided to treat migrants like animals (worse than you are allowed to treat pets really) and it is disgusting, and it is TERRIFYING to me that so many Americans like you think it's okay, because if it's okay to treat anyone like that, why couldn't any of us be next?
We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated. That's a lot of false confidence that nobody we know will ever be in that situation. More and more of us will be though.
What's your source for this? This site[1] indicates otherwise (even the 10-year chart shows a huge growth in applications). And this article[2] states 800,000 people detained so far this year. I'm sure ICE and CBP's infrastructure and processes were never meant to handle populations of this size. Also, note that in [2] many of these people are asylum shopping.
>>>We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated.
The precedent has already been set: impoverished people the world over know that if they are willing to accept some risk, they can lie their way into the US and get free stuff. People are kidnapping kids so they can pretend they are family. Migrants from central Africa have NGOs providing them with French-language documents on not cooperating with ICE or the US government. These people are buying plane tickets to Brazil, then taking buses ALLLLLL the way up Central America (lots of places to stop and apply for asylum there) so they can illegally cross the border into the US. Who is paying the salaries for these NGOs? And WHY? Those are the hard questions that aren't being asked. The narrative is one that appeals to empathy in order to obscure deeper issues.
Look at this article[4]. It tries to paint a picture that the rights of African migrants are somehow being infringed upon because Mexico is not enabling them to move onward to the US. But this is specifically discouraged once you are out of your country of origin and no longer in immediate danger.[5] So again, ask yourself, why is this narrative being pushed? And why now?
[1]https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/asylum-applicatio...
[2]https://www.voanews.com/usa/immigration/us-bound-migrants-as...
[3]https://youtu.be/mJlOmMj21uM
[4]https://prospect.org/power/african-asylum-seekers-u.s.-stuck...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee#Restriction_of_onward_...
Making people sleep in cages on concrete
The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration. Now they are all grown ups.
The better question is, why were Boomers so willing to go along with these policies (and far worse) for decade after decade?
It comes down to nothing more than scoring political points.
Sure standardUser might have thought it immoral all along, but did he attack both parties (when in power) with the same zeal?
Obama got plenty of criticism from the left for things like drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, deportations, the intervention in Libya, the weakness of Obamacare and TPP to name a few. Most of this was during his second term (when that massive group of people I keep mentioning started becoming politically active).
Anecdotes are just that. Just because you weren't paying attention to it doesn't mean it didn't happen.]
Left wing media I paid attention to definitely did not drop the issue of Guantanamo during that time. Just google some common sites - MotherJones, commondreams, Obama, and Guantanamo and you will see the criticism did not disappear for Obama not forcing the issue to an unwilling Congress.
Your history is off. Obama tried to shut it down until it was overturned by Congress.
As soon as the political reality of transferring the prisoners became apparent, all Congressmen blocked the closure of Gitmo. No one wanted to take the prisoners into their own state. No one wanted to be the Senator or Representative to say "I accepted 100 Al-Qaeda detainees into our local prisons! And now our local judges have to put into public trial under our protection, with jury members selected from our State / Cities"
So on the one hand, we had President Bush literally open Gitmo. In the other hand, we have President Obama who tried to close it... but failed because of other more powerful political forces. And yet, you draw a false equivalence between the two.
EDIT: This hits a political pet peeve of mine. False equivalence and whataboutisms. Instead of seeing the differences, a political group deploys propaganda to get their side to believe that there's a false-equivalence on an issue.
And now that you're aware of false-equivalences, I hope that moving forward you'll be better equipped to avoid them in the future. Its an exceptionally powerful propaganda technique. In general, if a group is desperately deploying propaganda to make you believe that two things are equivalent... they probably aren't equivalent.
Obama tried to shut it down
[0] - https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/senate-overwhelmingly...
If you do not wish to discuss a matter seriously, then there's no real point in discussing it at all. This website mostly aims at a higher level of discussion than other websites.
The people making all of this noise were children during that time. Just about everything has changed in the last 5 or so years, and a lot of that change appears to be driven by the historically massive and historically diverse Millennial generation.
Politics hasn’t really changed in the US in the last 100 years.
And somehow that moment of clarity by pure coincidence happened on January 20, 2017? Sorry, not buying that particular bridge.
> The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration.
Literally the same people in the press who promoted the "people in cages" thing were working at the same placed during Obama admin and virtually none of them said anything. There were some very small number that did, but the overwhelming majority said nothing and certainly there was no widespread public outrage about it and no employees told their employers they wouldn't work for any contract with Obama administration because it puts people in cages. No, not buying this bridge either - it was several years ago, it's not decades. They were the same grown ups then as they are now. Only back then their tribe was in power, so outrage wouldn't be appropriate.
It's just like JFK, how the media looked the other way at his affairs.
Rhetoric matters, and planting the concept in the public discourse that they see undocumented immigrants as rapists and murderers has done this administration no favors.
Not true. You just weren't listening.
It's as if the forces of good suddenly decided that any nationalism is unacceptable in 2019.