Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
americandragnet.org
americandragnet.org
This is good for citizens, I've been hit by someone driving an unregistered, uninsured car who was undocumented and it was a nightmare to deal with. I had to eat the cost of fixing my bike, and luckily I was covered by the military health insurance for my injuries or that would have been exponentially worse.
Using this data for immigration enforcement pushes drivers back to the illegal, unregistered, uninsured situation that existed before. It puts a tax on regular citizens who are following the rules.
It reminds me very much of backscatter machines at the airport and the insistence that we don’t bring bottles larger than 3 or 4 oz on a flight.
"Small government" is just a pleasing label that is more marketable for their priorities.
Anyway, I agree. To them, and I would count them in the demo you describe, "Freedom" is just a logo and "small government" is just a meaningless slogan. It has more to do with their specific cultural and moral fears.
> Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. *The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.*
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Some people might argue that we should be dedicating our scarce housing resources towards expanding the number of legal immigrants with high value skills, not uneducated illegal immigrants, and that illegal immigrants deserve to be deported for entering the country illegally.
- Existing homeowners trying to prevent denser/more housing
- Regulations and codes that make building much more expensive
- (As you noted) existing housing being wasted as an investment
and I'm sure there's much more.
People don't have a right to live in the US just because they decided to walk across the border illegally.
No they aren't. This is xenophobic claptrap.
Or at least it isn't self evident they are, and you've failed to provide any evidence they are.
As in, failure to build enough supply for demand has driven up prices?
Do you also believe that labor is subject to the same forces of supply and demand?
And I'm pretty sure we could absorb a lot more labor and have a stronger safety net for the folks who currently need to work three jobs to make ends meet.
Closing borders really only tackles a high level symptom. If we're not excited to have more help building society, we're doing something wrong.
Simply put, do you believe that increasing the labor supply, in the reality that exists today, is subject to the law of supply and demand, or not?
If so, then aren't you agreeing that the parent commentator is actually correct? If not, why not?
Labor is not fungible, even so called unskilled labor is actually quite skilled and requires significant training. (Put me in a strawberry field and I guarantee I'll be slower and worse then existing workers.)
Several sectors are struggling to hire workers, and have been for a long time. But until the pandemic, they really didn't see much increase in pay, despite demand.
We have regulated price minimums on labor.
Unions exist, and can ensure increased labor pool doesn't dilute pay.
The number of immigrants is small relative to the number of working Americans. And the rate of their arrival is slow. Also, we require working people to have work visas, further limiting the number of people who can impact labor pool.
This is invented nonsense. It would be just as reasonable to say "People don't have the right to live in the US just because they were lucky enough to be born there" or "People don't have the right to live in the US just because their parents were US citizens" or whatever.
"Walking across a border illegally" is an imaginary thing we made up because some people (probably xenophobic people) thought it was a good idea at some point in the past. I don't think unrestricted immigration is necessarily the answer either, but the system as it is clearly does not work.
That doesn’t mean they’re nonsense, or that instituting the opposite of current laws would be “just as reasonable”.
The system as it is does work. Could it work better? Sure. Perhaps we could actually strictly enforce immigration laws, and the result would be ideal.
You can argue against the idea of community membership being predicated on more than just showing up, but simply calling it “xenophobia” isn’t an argument.
Furthermore, when one side is doing everything possible to undermine the established laws, it’s not convincing when they point out the resulting reduced efficacy as if it were an inherent flaw instead of their own doing.
This feels good to say, but it assumes there are no downsides whatsoever with no longer having deportation as an option and that we can 'solve' housing.
I personally think we can make housing better but housing issues have existed in every civilization throughout recorded history. I can't help but think it's an emergent phenomenon when you get plenty of people living together in a world where land is limited and two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Not that we shouldn't try to help, but the issue will never truly go away. And, letting anyone who steps foot into your country stay for as long as they like seems like a recipe for creating housing demand that can never keep up with supply.
It also means people who might not get hired before, such as those with criminal records, would be more likely to get a job.
Further, my understanding is that the employers of day-labor off-the-table construction work don’t much care about arrest records.
> "While those reforms do not address surveillance itself, they are the most direct way to undercut ICE surveillance authority."
This website, https://americandragnet.org/ , seems dedicated to curtailing dragnet surveillance in the USA. The facts around that surveillance are so disturbing that I'm amazed we can sit around and talk about deportation when it's a just a side show compared to the surveillance. The facts that they're laying out:
- ICE is tracking your address, your home moves, and your driving habits (or at least, they're doing so for ~75% of people in the USA)
- ICE is hijacking government functions like our DMVs and our utility companies without oversight in order to find out who you are, where you live, who you live near, etc. in order to detain and deport... well, I'll leave the who up to you, but if you're not uneasy with the start of that sentence, I doubt any way of ending it will either.
It's not the deportations that are concerning; it's the paths we're taking to get there.
If you can't visit in person, then start here: http://www.auschwitz.org/en/gallery/exhibits/evidence-of-cri...
History will eventually regard the imperialist behavior of the US quite negatively. This is no comparison to Hitler’s Germany but it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore that they designed the racial Nuremberg laws on Jim Crow America. Racism, segregation, and the like are an intrinsic part of American history and one of its exports.
We built concentration camps for Japanese during the war and nothing came of that either.
What exactly is imperialist about border and immigration enforcement within the United States?
Our border enforcement is a small piece of a much larger program of imperialism. We overthrow and destabilize central and South American governments which are not sufficiently pliant client states. Then we make a show of rejecting groups fleeing those conditions even though the vast majority of undocumented immigration does not happen via border crossing.
Heck, ICE doctors haven’t been caught performing forced hysterectomies for almost two years:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/16/us/ice-hysterectomy-forced-st...
It’s insulting, naive, and simply wrong to suggest an equivalence to our enforcement of immigration law on people voluntarily emigrating to the United States.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20326/mexicans-non-mexcians-a...
The real solution is to hit employers that employ them, as how many people are in this counry illegally has very little to do with actual border control(meaning watching the border).
That said I did make a mistake, I had read somewhere it was above 90% but on searching again it was referring to "non-central america undocumenteds" not all as a whole. But that doesn't change that hardly anyone comes wandering through a desert and climbing over a wall/fence.
Just FYI I live close to the border and go often there and it's swarming with officers, all cars are being checked even when on the US side and crossing the border is quite an ordeal even if you are a citizen forget being an immigrant.
What happens is,
Immigrants will come to the border and claim asylum then once they're in the country skip the asylum court hearing. The judge issues a deportation order but by then there is no way to find them.
https://nypost.com/2019/06/11/homeland-security-chief-says-9...
Also, most people that cross at the Mexican border have legitimate asylum claims, but the US has intentionally defunded the judicial system, leading to camps and long wait times. Disbanding / defunding the courts is pretty much the definition of not enforcing the law.
However, I’m not sure how ICE warrantlessly surveilling US citizens is related to any of this.
Unsolicited tip:
If you want to sneak into the US illegally (and don’t want to bother with getting a visa to overstay), then come in along the East Coast, West Coast, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Canada. Those places don’t have names that sound like “Mexican”, so conservative politicians don’t really bother funding border security for them. Thanks to tourism, this is particularly true of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
This is what the vast majority of illegal immigrants do. Most scenarios where coming in via Mexico makes sense involve intentionally being detained in order to apply for asylum.