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Comment by bluehorseray | Hacker News Reader

Haha I would love to hear how the left made immigration all about race as opposed to the right.

All the left is, is identity politics. That's why you elected a rich old senile white dude to head your patriarchy

I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.

One party believes that if you are a certain race you should vote uniformly the same way "or you ain't black". At it's core, these are people who think other races are "too stupid" to be self-sufficient and would much rather have a steady stream of dependent people to use for support

>I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.

Simply false. Historically, US labor unions were anti-immigration because of competition for their own members already in the country. Go look up Cesar Chavez's view on allowing more Mexicans (especially illegal aliens) in to compete against his United Farm Workers. Unions being for unlimited, uncontrolled entry from outside the US is a very recent phenomenon.

The left wasn't pro immigration back when they were the party of workers.

Which part of "identity politics" was it when Biden got on national television to tell everyone he wanted to fund, not defund, the police?

Incoherent and politically illiterate rants like yours aren't really appropriate.

Democrats have better party discipline than Republicans do, but that leads to weird outcomes like the people who most distrust the police voting for the author of the crime bill. There seems to be a tacit understanding that elections are for a political machine and not an individual person, so Biden can poll poorly and would still get votes.

"political machine and not an individual person" Not true at all for Republicans ie Trump vs Neocons. Trump became bigger than the political machine that originally wanted Jeb.

Every time Trump talked about illegal immigration, the left said he was talking about all immigration, and then that being against all immigration was because he was racist.

I'm a left-voting Brit and I can see that. The endless accusations by the left US media, politicians, and activists of people being -ist has caused massive credibility damage. Not to mention, they have significantly devalued the real victims of genuine cases of -ism.

Sounds a bit unhealthy to pay attention to him from over there? Especially since he was lying - illegal immigration to the US stopped around 2007 and has been negative since. This doesn’t stop people from complaining about it, most people’s political options are 5-10 years behind reality.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-21/the-my... (not sure if you can see that but don’t have a better link)

> Sounds a bit unhealthy to pay attention to him from over there?

What does this mean?

Don't you have a PM with even worse hair to be reading news about?

As in I shouldn't ask you what you mean, because I should be doing that instead? I'm confused.

Every time Trump talked about illegal immigration, it was a nativist dog whistle.

Anti-immigration dog whistling has been a fairly standard tactic for right wing politicians since the 90s, where John Howard referred to asylum seekers as illegals, railed against "queue jumpers", and called for immigrants to respect the "Australian way of life" [1]. Like Trump, Howard also constantly went on about how he represented "ordinary Australians", unlike the "elites" with their "vested interests".

[1] https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12...

I know it was described that way, but I also remember a lot of legal immigrants getting very frustrated at illegal immigration, and even more frustration at left-leaning media constantly reclassifying any mention of illegal immmigration as referring to any immigration.

To me it seems like a category error, and I can't believe it's an accidental one. Some people do some things that we agree on are okay. Some go too far. That doesn't mean all do.

Slightly more broadly, I think there's a healthy discussion to be had on open borders, and whether immigration should be illegal at all, but constantly assuming someone means something they aren't saying is incredibly destructive to our ability to reason about topics.

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