When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The majority of countries don’t have birthright citizenship, and Ireland and New Zealand got rid of it in the 21st century. Yet in the view of the New Yorker, that common rule is “not unlike” a rule that would limit citizenship to a specific race.
(I’m a big proponent of birthright citizenship. But the New Yorker’s framing of it devalues it by making it seem like the baseline, instead of an example of American exceptionalism.)
Almost the entire North and South America has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/19/canada-now-...
Canada only is ahead of the US as of 2018. Historically Canada hasn't even been close.
Which is more selective?
Some might dispute that claim.
Please don't post flamebait to HN. We've had to ask you this before. We ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
Moderation is guesswork done in haste, because that's the only way to get through the mountain of content that piles up every day. But it's really bad to get scoldings wrong.
In case you're curious, I read your comment as from a Canadian perspective, referring to the U.S. as a second-world country as a snarky swipe. Most likely I was primed to do this because I'm Canadian and have sometimes heard people talk that way. But clearly you were making an economic argument with that statement, not taking a nationalistic swipe, so there was no need for a moderation reply. Now that I read more closely, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21495051 was the comment that actually did the thing I read into yours, so I'll post a moderation reply there.
Thanks again for what you do on here. HN is my favorite place to exchange ideas.
The refugees we do take in (28k per year is nothing) get a decent amount of support mainly because most of our immigrants are relatively rich Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, etc...
In fact, new U.S. immigrants are a bit more likely to have advanced degrees.
The US takes in more outliers due to high-paying jobs in SV and on Wall Street, Canada takes in richer immigrants on average. Your own charts reflect that.
Edit - look at Figure 3. 40% of immigrants to Canada have a bachelors or advanced degree. Versus only 29% of US immigrants.
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that many immigrants to Canada come here to go to university (paying more than double what local students pay).
If you're a business owner and hire illegal immigrants, you risk up to 2 years jail time personally and a $50k fine. So almost no one takes that risk.
The few that are here illegally generally come legally, overstay and have family to harbour them.
And keep in mind I'm in an industry that, in the US, is known for employing illegal immigrants (restaurants). In 17 years, I've never seen one nor heard of anyone hiring them. I'm sure it happens in a few ethnic enclaves but it's definitely not typical.
I read a statistic somewhere that California alone has more than 10x as many illegal immigrants as all of Canada.
Of course I should also add, we do of course allow more legal immigration per capita than the US, many irregular border crossers are granted temporary status while their cases are processed and in general our bureaucracy seems less insane than the US'.
Or perhaps you've not lived in other countries. Don't get me wrong; the US is doing fine, but honestly it's no so unique or even the best place for an average immigrant. For some highly-skilled immigrants, however, the US is unique in terms of opportunities.
This, along with the grandparent clause, has the probably unintended consequence that something astonishing like a sixth or eighth of the UK is eligible for Irish citizenship.
There is no equivalent to the grandparent thing in the US, but that would be deemed even more racist.
That ignores the difference in immigration and emigration between the two countries. in Ireland, it enables ethnic Irish to return home if their ancestors moved away, whereas in America, it would promote migrants from one non-ethnically American country over another, which in the context of prioritizing white immigrants over anything else, makes it pretty racist
I’m pretty sure it’s worded to imply that the Irish one is pretty racist, but they just don’t realize it because the Overton window in Europe is very skewed on this issue.
> That ignores the difference in immigration and emigration between the two countries. in Ireland, it enables ethnic Irish to return home if their ancestors moved away, whereas in America, it would promote migrants from one non-ethnically American country over another, which in the context of prioritizing white immigrants over anything else, makes it pretty racist
Why should ethnic Irish migrants get preference over anyone else? Would it be okay if the US did something similar for ethnic British?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#/media/File:Jus_soli_...
White was also not considered a race in the 20's. There were Nordics, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Southern Europeans. American eugenicists also were very much into "building" a race. They would have family breed competitions at fairs where families would compete like dogs or livestock for who were the best breeding stock. It wasnt a white vs colored, it was a tall, intelligent, hard-working, disease-free, group of mostly northern europeans vs anyone short, stalky, diseased, epileptic, mentally deficient, criminal, promiscuous, obsessed with art, etc. For instance, Irish were considered a problem because they didnt work hard, were obsessed with art and music, were short, and susceptible to tuberculosis. Mind you, this is not scientific fact, this is just the nonsense they spouted at the time. They also believed in a thing called "Germplasm" which roughly translated to gene pool, but of course even today we're not exactly clear on what's genetically inheritable and what isnt.
I should also mention, this is the deeply disturbing origin of the progressive movement in america. Using what they thought was superior scientific understanding of the natural world, the IQ test, birth control, the gifted student program, the use of performance metrics in school and workplaces to justify glass ceilings, firings, mass deportation, and mass sterilizations of anyone deemed deficient in any way by society. The work americans did to create a legal framework for eugenics would be borrowed by the Nazis to create their own legal framework for the deportation and final solution of the jews.
Yes, it was.
> There were Nordics, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Southern Europeans.
The existence of those groups, and the fact that then-current concepts of whiteness would exclude some or all of them, doesn't change the fact that “White” was the identity of the dominant racial group, and had been for quite some time by the 1920s.
> I should also mention, this is the deeply disturbing origin of the progressive movement in america.
No, it wasn't. Oh, deeply disturbing it was, but it wasn't the origin of the progressive movement in America. It's true that the eugenics movement occurred within one of many (often overlapping in time) movements that took the name “progressive” in US history, but it wasn't the first, nor one historically strongly connected to any of the modern groups with the name.
And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo.
That’s hilarious but...
> The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics.
There, again, have been a number of separate “progressive” movements in US history, eugenics was a minority view within one of them. But, while you are wrong here, it's not nearly so flagrantly wrong as:
> And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo.
I don't think it ever happened; even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great. But, no, white racists that saw the race they favored as the “white” race did not first show up in the 1960s-1970s, as evidence by the Cornerstone Speech in which Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens laid out his view of the central case for the Confederate cause in 1861: “...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ...”
>even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great.
You are so committed to this modern liberal partisan revisionist historiography that you are willing to admit the narrative doesn't make any sense, and yet equally willing to keep at it. That's commitment.
Irish, Italians, russians, and other "inferior" whites were always considered white. "White" has never and will never be the barrier to entry into this country or into the american hierarchy. Looks, charm, stature, sharpness of mind, focus on meaningful pursuits like work, not being too interested in "meaningless pursuits" like art and music. Not being promiscuous, no criminality, no epilepsy, no "feeble-mindedness" or imbecility. This is what race was about. Virginia aristocracy, the Boston Brahmins etc, were spurred on by the leading science and technology of the day, to believe these attributes were genetically inherited and "selected" by nature, which meant they could also be selected with Mendelism. We were not interested in a "white race." Since race was something you could control, we were interested in a "superior american germplasm" a genepool of the best of the best while the rest were sterilized, aborted, deported, or imprisoned in jails, asylums, or reservations. American eugenicists were interested in "building a race." A concept Hitler adopted and was quoted talking about fairly often.
Racism was not white vs black. Its nowhere near that simple
Racism was and is more complex than just white vs. black, but that wasn't your claim upthread that I have been arguing against.
What you claimed previously was that white was not considered a race before the 1920s. It absolutely was, and there are copious prominent invocations of white racial identity in US history prior to that time—as I've shown with the Cornerstone speech—and while racism is more complex than just white vs. black (and ideas of just who is white have evolved), white vs. black has been a key racial divide for the whole history of the country.
Emma Goldman, one of the deported radicals, wrote this 1917.
>>She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison
And when you have the state doing this, than it is hypocrisy for this state to go to war for democracy.
And this criticism is valid, even if the person expressing it, did engage in criminal herself earlier in her life.
The article is somewhat biased, but includes enough information to invite some reflecting on those problems. It paints an image of how many people might have been actually fearing a violent revolution, for example. It also shows how such fears can interplay with how law is executed.
This is why I admire China, and think they will win, even if they had to tie one hand behind their back. This Western notion that we have to uphold certain principles, without actually upholding them, is one of our many Achilles heels. We have to struggle with all this theoretical and historical baggage that people take soooóooo seriously, regardless of whether it really matters, sowing social discontent, and they just continue to do what's pragmatic, sowing social harmony over time as those slighted see that it is for the greater good.
The ego of the Western mind is a force to be reckoned with, for the West.
That's not really deportation. They were sent from one part of the British Empire to another. They remained British subjects.
Where you have to have a concern is about ENFORCEMENT. Because the laws applied equally to a white Canadian sneaking across the border as they do to a Mexican sneaking across the border, but one is more likely to receive enforcement action than the other.
But it's important to understand the distinction between enforcement and legislation. Both should be addressed, but it's silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to understand the mechanism of action.
Yes, immigration law - both application and enforcement - tends to correlate highly with nationality. I'd wager speeding tickets also correlate with drivers.
What should it correlate with?
That is, if 10 Canadians and 10 Mexicans crossed into the US illegally, and all faced similar consequences, I think that’s fine. If there are only 1 Canadian and 10 Mexican violators and this causes limited border patrols to be distributed proportionally between the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, I think that’s still fine. But if 10 violating Canadians and 10 violating Mexicans who were all apprehended faced different consequences, that would not be fair.
French law has a similar kind of droit administrativ / droit naturel distinction.
More importantly, immigration is particularly prone to the law changing under you, so even if you have complied entirely up to that point, you may become "illegal" despite not having done anything, and it may not be possible to regularise your situation.
As an everyday example, suppose you park carelessly and get a lot of parking tickets and then don't pay them. You could run into all sorts of problems and eventually your car might be towed away and sold but generally you can't be arrested over it (unless you have a habit of illegally parking in disability spaces, also please don't treat this as a legal opinion), and your history of illegal parking won't show up on a criminal background check.
This maters a lot because people who are anti-immigration love presenting all illegal immigrants as criminals and use that to justify all sorts of human rights violations with 'but they're criminals!!!' Even the immigration violations that are crimes (like illegally crossing a border after having previously being deported) are misdemeanor-type crimes, but to listen to some political types you'd think it was worse than murder.
Bear in mind too that such misleading rhetoric is used to justify private as well as public atrocities, such as the shooting in El Paso earlier this year where 22 people were murdered.
So I still don’t see why people are averse to the term “illegal immigrant”. It seems accurate to me. The rest of what you point out - like people equating an illegal border crossing with murder - seems like an orthogonal discussion.
If you had paid attention to the context perhaps you would have saved yourself the effort of making a throwaway account to add a moot point.
Deporting people to certain countries can get them killed.
Illegally being in the country and drawing on its resources is also significantly more disruptive to the life of the society than illegally parking a car so it is only natural.
>It's also a lifetime punishment, since it nearly always bars you from further re-entry.
It is not a punishment - nobody but citizens have a right to be in the country so no rights have been denied. Most people in the world are already being "punished" this way since they have no chance to get any visa to the US.
>Deporting people to certain countries can get them killed.
Deportation per se? How? Does it mean that if a car is impounded, and I get to the bad part of town where the impound lot usually is, and some undocumented immigrants or other oppressed minorities who live around those kinds of place rob/kill me then a car getting impounded can also can get me killed?
A brilliant rhetorical sleight of hand - the people aren't illegal - their act of immigration is. By this logic, we should refer to trespassers as "undocumented guests".
What do you call robbing a bank? Undocumented withdrawal? No, it's a crime.
We should call them illegal citizens. Then we can start working towards deporting such criminals as the article demonstrates.
Well international law prevents you from making someone stateless so they get thrown in jail instead. But yes, non-citizens who commit crimes are generally deported.
Also, the US classes crimes as either felonies or misdemeanours (possibly more categories?). In Canada we have indictable crimes, summary offences and things like jaywalking aren't even crimes, just ticketable offences. It's disingenuous of you to compare something like jaywalking to actual crimes.
And in the US, jaywalking is a crime. A crime is a crime, which makes jaywalking a crime all the same. If they decided to jaywalk, then they deserve to be deported for their criminal actions.
For reference: Crossing the boarder illegally is a misdemeanor just like jaywalking.
Because we should try to improve the situation not make it worse. I'm also not sure which international law violations you're talking about.
Felony is overused at the moment, IMHO. Lawmakers that want to appear tough on crime make felonies out of non-violent crimes.
Wrong. Non-citizens who are accused of committing crimes get trials.
Or in the case of asylum seekers and refugees, what is effectively being said is that it's illegal for them to flee a war zone?
Likewise for asylum seekers, it's illegal to cross into a country without permission. You can flee, apply for asylum, and enter when that asylum is granted. There are also rules on when, where, and which countries you're allowed to apply for.
These terms and concepts are not difficult, if you have no intention of misconstruing or creating outrage.