El Sueño Americano / The American Dream
tomkiefer.com
tomkiefer.com
> Similar to belts, shoelaces are stripped from shoes because they are considered lethal and could be used to harm themselves or others. Detainees subsequently move through the U.S. court system and are deported with no belt for their pants or shoelaces for their shoes.
> All personal property considered non-essential is discarded during intake.
There's a legitimate reason to confiscate items like razors. The case for discarding belts and shoelaces is there, but shakier. Confiscating toothpaste, soap, and books is questionable (only figuratively; the migrants don't get the opportunity to question it). Confiscating and discarding all personal property is unjustifiable. There is no conceivable reason it is necessary to discard a child's stuffed toy.
But the unjustifiability doesn't change anything; Border Patrol has no need to justify itself to migrants. It has the full authority to take any and all items from them. The fact that when given this opportunity, it takes everything, says something about it. The fact that these are not the actions of an individual agent, but a policy of the organization, say something about the nature and purpose of the organization.
The migrant workers don't want to stay in Canada for most part. They just want to work, for $15 CAD/hr, remit money and go home for Christmas.
It's not perfect, as some employers treat them poorly, but that is not the norm. The farmers/country need and appreciate these people.
https://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/a-growing-problem-f...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/headlines/who-s-look...
The vast majority of Americans and Canadians wouldn't do farm work for $30 USD an hour.
long term it would lead to tech improvements like robotics to do more of the manual work and everybody's life would improve
https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program
What we now call Silicon Valley used to be filled with those workers picking and packing fruit during harvest season. It worked pretty well, but was terminated in 1964.
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/training/migrantfarmworker...
This is definitely true to an extent. You can expose yourself to good luck by being prepared, putting yourself out there, etc.
But just take a step back, and you can see it's not the whole story. A good chunk of 'luck' is just luck, and another chunk is systemic, inherited, or environmental. Being born in the right country, or the right time, to a moneyed family, being in the right place at the right time when certain events or changes are occurring, by-chance meeting a CEO in the elevator when they're looking for the exact thing your startup provides, having NASA pay you to research something you then turn into a private enterprise, etc, etc.
ONLY if there is a low/no-cost, simple to navigate, fast, ethical and humane immigration system for individuals to apply to.
Because without that, all we have is a system that forces individuals into a life of "crime" for just wanting better for themselves and their families. Look at those pictures (obviously the items were chosen for their emotional impact) but what kind of a terrorist is carrying Chip and Dale action figures or a Patrick Star purse?
I came to work one day and we were very understaffed. I asked my manager what was going on. She heard a rumor that immigration enforcement was coming to our store and they, our co-workers, were never coming back. People I was friends with, just gone forever.
I wish we could have a functioning immigration policy so hard working people wanting a better life can come here and live without fear.
Oh, and H1-B is the same principle, but for coders and such. It has to be made nicer, because coders have better options worldwide - but it's only made as nice as absolutely necessary to keep the cheap people coming in.
IMO it's about labor pressure on actual US citizens. You know that some illegal immigrant could be hired to take a low-wage position over you, therefore you don't have actual labor bloc leverage from withholding your labor from those positions. Prevents unions, prevents wage raises, prevents strikes, prevents all progress in those classes of work. They use these folks against US workers all the time.
That's why the executive is sabotaging immigration control right now, it's like telling the world come to America. 10x more Cubans, Haitians, Brazillians crossing the border cararraja why? To stop that inflation! No unions, no inflation, no dignity in the workplace, up that unemployment in real life (but not on paper, turn those 9's into 6's).
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happe...
I actually think we should have more immigration. But it should be controlled with strict vetting, not random people paying coyotes to smuggle them across the border.
"By comparison, the proportion of repeat border crossers was much lower in the 2019 fiscal year (7%), before the Border Patrol began regularly expelling migrants during the coronavirus outbreak."
indicate that illegal immigration has gotten harder. Isn't the real problem with illegal immigration the immigrants that aren't discovered?
Or do you have an alternate hypothesis that fits the data?
This evidence runs exactly contrary to both the "open border" and "unprecedented numbers" theory and indicates a change in policy that directly explains the new numbers.
And yet the quote I just gave says the increase is due to people being removed from the country and trying to get back in.
But then it's an official system and the immigrants are recognized by the law, which means they can't be exploited as much - which defeats the purpose of the whole thing.
For example, if Julio from Mexico falls off poorly constructed scaffolding and is disabled for life, he could sue his employer, but he'll have a hard time doing that if he's deported back to Mexico two weeks later. Whereas, if he was here legally, he could sue the company for millions, which would increase the price of construction, which would make American houses less nice. People like nice houses though, so things will probably stay as they are.
But yeah they want all these nice things but...they can't swing it legit, like yeah the top brass of a town's bank can have all this, but a middle-class family? So they find work-arounds.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-a...
Sometimes the facade of a convenient modern life is built entirely upon an underclass who are intentionally kept in that situation just so they can continue to be exploited. This is of course neither healthy nor sustainable.
Of course incentives and promises of upward mobility after some hard work are nice, but one must question themselves: if the local economy will simply cease to function when there are not as many people willing to be exploited, is this model still ethical?
Why would them leaving be viewed as a "broken" immigration system? I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them.
It would be trivial to set up a system to validate the right to work in the US. In fact one already exists - E-Verify. But many groups have resisted the national roll out and penalties if businesses don't comply (similar to how we have sanctuary cities).
The funny part is that in all the other countries I've lived in, this issue never comes up. Sure, there are illegal immigrants, etc, but nobody questions when they are sent home or when businesses are fined for violating immigration law.
I'm not sure why it's such a contentious issue in the US.
I have no idea how much they were paid, if it was regularly, or if they benefitted from mandated labor concessions like lunches and breaks.
So odd that we so often label people on one side of this transaction as “illegal” but have no popular words to describe the other.
Post E-Verify in my state I noticed we hardly hired anyone illegal. I worked in 3 chain restaurants and it was always the same. Even then the restaurants didn’t care at all if the number was stolen or reused, as long as the SSN or Tax ID number passed the verification.
I'd say it's broken if the laws are bad.
It's a broken system that allows them into the US in the first place, then denies them reasonable opportunities to work and settle down, then deports them on a whim.
We need the labor; let them in legally, pay them a fair wage, and allow them to pursue their dreams like any other resident.
The fact that after decades they still haven't adequately addressed the error rates or the recourse process does not lend confidence that this is something that should be mandated.
Behind the counter were 4 people (including the cashier) making the burritos. They were fast, communicated efficiently, and very accurate with orders.
Immigration enforcement put some pressure on Chiplotle and they were all gone one day. Replaced by 7 locals behind the counter who didn't listen to each other, were insanely slow and all around bad at their job. It was hard to go in there and order and watch them just kinda ... be there, but not do much right.
Fast food might not be the best measure, but man those folks worked efficiently and accurately.
Can you expound how they are related, and if you have some insight, where this has been researched?
And it's not awful, and people are not rude, just not "fake-friendly" as americans.
I think the differences in customer service expectations are cultural in nature.
It was an eye opening experience for me. I take as a fundamental human right that people and capital should be able to travel without sovereign restraint. You should be able to vote with your feet.
I get the pro-isolationist arguments regarding wages, of course, but restricting immigration because your wages are at risk is a zero-sum game where one side the winner violates a human right.
The EU gets this and allows people to travel to work between countries. The US gets this and allows people to travel to work between states. Why does a line on the ground invoke magical worldviews and forced tribalism supporting sovereignty?
Human laws reinforce power and social dynamics, stable equilibrium solutions the result of thousands of years of human conflict.
There are no "rules" beyond physics, and the rule breakers often wind up ahead.
The rule makers don't want to pay for those that cannot contribute more than they consume. To put it another way, they don't want their taxes to go up. One lever to control this is through immigration policy.
The voting class is told unskilled immigrant labor is a net negative. Skilled labor, a positive. One side tells them skilled labor threatens their jobs and total compensation, another side tells them it's alright and that we're at a shortage for labor. There are abstract reasons you can point to for each of these ideologies, but ultimately each side is fundamentally concerned with money.
Every one of us is ultimately about consuming energy. For those of us fortunate enough, we can care about Starbucks, how many homes we own, and what kind of luxury goods we have. But at the end of the day, if it were all taken away and we had to fight for food and energy, nearly every one of us would.
Step out into the Serengeti alone and you'll be eaten. There are no rules.
I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.
But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).
The lack of social safety net, decline of publicly accessible assistance in healthcare and education, and the unpredictability of immigration enforcement has led to an increase in emigrants from the United States back to Latin America and Asia.
To give a personal anecdote: I was helping a woman apply for advanced parole, which is an immigration action that allows for someone who entered the United States illegally to re-enter in the future, provided certain qualifications were met. In the irony of ironies, she had spent the last several years saving enough money to go back home (and to pay her respects to one of her parents who had just passed), and wanted to preserve the option of coming back the the United States, if possible.
After reviewing the details of her immigration history, I advised her that she was unlikely to be granted this parole, and that if she left she would be unlikely to be allowed to re-enter.
My translation of her Spanish is poor, but the essence was, “If I’m going to struggle, I want to do it where I have friends and family whom I can help, and who can help me. There is no help here.”
She left without parole, effectively banning herself from the United States, and based on the message she sent me the following Easter, it seems to be without regret.
To borrow your words, I think “[o]nly an extremely naive and privileged person would even pretend” that poverty in the United States has a superior character to poverty elsewhere.
You seem to have quoted someone somewhere concerning “poverty is worse.” I’m not finding it in my text. Did you mean to reply elsewhere?
Life under 21st-century American capitalism is bad, but it's even worse outside of the imperial core. Two things can both be true.
Then you talk to people who came to the country with literally nothing (refugees) and now they have a comfortable middle class existence, own a home, their kids are American citizens going to prestigious colleges.
It's really eye opening.
Do you think the fact you're a "US white guy" has any impact on your ability to land such a role? Or the fact you're qualified for it (i.e. access to quality education in the US)?
I immigrated to the US as a highly educated engineer from a poor Asian country. My country was poor, but not terrible, not a dictatorship, etc. If I had never immigrated, I would still have done fine, although in absolute terms maybe I wouldn't be as rich as I am today.
My journey was completely different from a farm laborer from Latin America. People like me came through university student visas, converted to worker visas, and paid fees to immigrate legally. We feel that we achieved everything through our own hard work, talent, and grit. We are blind to our own luck and privilege.
We will often look down upon illegal laborers and want the process to be "strict" for them, too. We don't even really understand things through their point of view. Our attitude is the same in our old country--- we are already the elite there, and we have little sympathy for poor people's problems. We call them lazy. If only they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps like we did, they could also have the American dream.
That's us, one type of immigrant. We're not really different from native-born, well-off Americans. The only difference is, we also look down upon those American engineers who whine about being displaced by H-1B immigrants. We have no sympathy for them, either. They need to deal with it, just as poor laborers do. It's just logic.