Feels like this conversation is full of people getting hung up on arguing the technicalities and exact phrasing of this situation. Is that really important to the broader conversation?
C-f "metastatic cancer"—1
There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?
This IS the point, the goal, and the purpose.
Regardless of the ways they have been marginalized, and how much marginalization they have done to themselves by failing to engage with the complexity of the world and following malicious leaders instead, this is where we are at. We need to stare this bare reality in the face lest the supporters, enablers, and fence-sitters continue soothing themselves with rationalizations.
Yes. This.
This is what drives facism: It is not your fault you feel bad, it's them, over there
This is why it is so important to "cuddle a facist".
Facism feeds on violence, showing love and compassion to those whom you disagree with robs fascism of its oxygen
And they have been giving benefit of the doubt too many times already. At this point, it is absurd to pretend there are good intentions in the core of this.
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_immigration_detent...
I can only imagine how full of grief she was to learn that her dad suicided in such a wasteful way.
Love, and hope will defeat facism
Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.
I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…
(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).
As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.
No. It. Does. Not.
Violence begets violence, and it is all our interests to fight against violence wherever, whenever.
Fight fire, with water
Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
Because it is not
But she did something illegal? Like while I agree with her ideals, if she did something illegal than she can get arrested.
Did she pose an imminent danger to society if she remained free? Was she a flight risk?
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2024-08/O...
Deplorable.
If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost. So much damn talk over the decades I've been alive about patriotism and liberty from America, but when a moment unquestionably calls for action, it turns out Americans were just unserious cosplayers the whole damn time.
I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
Last time around, I could at least soothe myself with the idea that he only won because our electoral system is idiotic, and a lot of voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. This time? He won the most votes, and everyone had every opportunity to see what they were getting. I can only conclude that my countrymen are fucked in the head.
In reality, around 22% of the US populace (not just voters, but everyone) voted for Trump. Similar voted for Harris.
The rest didn't vote. I refuse to attribute justifications, since they are too numerous.
But that is correct, peaceful protests like 50501 aren't going to do much. Their value is more networking and mutual aid creation/management.
What does work, especially historically, is violence. As a historian, when you look at pivotal points in history, changes were only won after a LOT of violence was applied.
The trick is that groups like 50501 are absolutely needed for a different reason. The governments cannot negotiate with 'terrorists', but can save face by negotiating with 'peaceful groups'. We see this recently with MLK and Malcolm X, Sinn Fein and IRA, Ghandi and dozens of separatist factions.
I'm not publically advocating violence, but the more fascist they become, well, that will be inevitable. Different people and groups have different lines in the sand.
We're already talking about breaching medical records for 'defectives' (autism) list, turning trans folk into non-humans, kidnapping/disappearing people off the street, tattle-tale emails and phone#s to report people, lebensraum (Canada, Greenland, etc), off-country concentration camps (CECOT), and more. And we're only 3 months in of 4 years.
If I had the ability to get out, I would have. But I'm guessing that even the better off here also don't have the ability.
I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
Oh, I absolutely am counting every human in the US, and not registered voters. Total counts are like 45% of the whole population voted.
I chose total counts to get a better idea of density vs political affiliation since we have those at the district level.
> I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually, the back and forth between statist democrat and statist republican weren't that much diverging, although campaigns would portray the other side as baby-eaters.
This is different. And even just 3 months, I'm seeing apolitical people come out of the woodwork and actually start being political. And even though I do vote, I get the idea of 'as long as politicians do decent, I don't care'.
> I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
I'm not seeing a fight ala lines of militia lining up firing in lines. I'm thinking what we're headed towards is much much more like Luigi. Or more historically, what we saw in France during WW2 - sabotage and hit-n-runs.
And the battle lines are also pretty defined as well. Its going to be a fight between rural and cities.
Like I said, if I had the ability to leave until the situation here comes to some semblance of sanity and stability (along with respect for human decency), I would leave. But at the moment, that is not an option for me. So instead, its a "what can I do to safeguard me and mine, for the foreseeable future?"
(So far, my answer is: grow my own food, get to know local farmers and pay/trade, connect with local mutual aid orgs, become more self-sufficient, canning and food preservation. That sort of stuff. Goal is to just blend in, and help non-violently where I can.)
If everyone hates it, you only need to fight it if has external support. A regime needs considerable active support and even wider at least tacit support to operate; if everyone locally hates it, it cannot function as a regime (but, if it has sufficient external support, can perhaps function as an occupation, that you do have to fight.)
> I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports.
You fight it by actively seeking to make it one that has much less support, by means such as revealing to the people who would oppose various acts the things that it is doing that have been effectively concealed or misrepresented to them that they would oppose if they understood.
MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.
Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
Here’s my hands-on experience: at least half the people you meet are defective, to a scary extent, functionally in terms of empathy. Probably two thirds have serious executive functioning deficits. That means they can neither understand the plight of their fellows; and, even if they could, they could not generalize their own situation into a policy to help everyone in the same situation.
EDIT: most people don’t vote. A disproportionate number that do are both empathetic, and high have high levels of executive functioning skills. The flip side of the coin are activated people who are missing one-or-the-other skills, but are voting out of some other errant ideology. I want to be clear that the distribution of voters is “both sides”: there are disgusting and enlightened voters on both sides of the spectrum. We’re all trapped in the box, together.
It does. Constantly making bad decisions makes them bad. What it doesn’t do is make them any less entitled to all of their rights. Something their badness has paved way for robbing others of.
Are you a moderate who has a better plan? I ask that sincerely, if I've given up its not because I prefer peace but because I know a losing battle when I see one. We don't have a charismatic leader like MLK. The democratic party is in shambles. They're afraid of fighting the tariffs and alienating the working class. There is no one in the party who is broadly likeable, who has any chance of bringing the voting public together. Voters on the left still cling to their own personal pet peeves and insist they will never vote for anyone who doesn't specifically address whatever they think is the _real_ problem.
The sad reality is that Trump's policies are still really popular and if people are unhappy they are only unhappy with the execution. You see that in this thread. People see the this news story and see it as an unfortunate side effect of a basically good policy. They think illegal immigration is hurting our economy, they think 'anchor babies' are people taking advantage of a loophole that should be closed.
They think this country suffers because of tariffs and maybe they think Trump got carried away but they still support the idea. They are sick of Ukraine and think it's time we walked away. They think DEI means a black women will be hired over a white man under any circumstances. They think DEI in schools means our kids are being taught that the US is full of horrible backwards racists and sexists who need liberal saviors to make it better. They think that government agencies are overpaid and over bloated and full of people who don't do anything but get a fat paycheck.
These beliefs cut across people of all genders, of all colors, of all ages, of all states and cities. We can't even blame the boomers anymore and insist the younger generations will save us. No one will save us.
stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person. find someone with charisma like obama. there is no magical moderate voter that the dems keep hoping to appeal to. they already have been the center right party for decades now.
I think you are right but I think half of democratic voters think the party has gone too left ( abortion, gender politics ) while half thinks it has gone too far right. The democratic party is trying to have it both ways and utterly failing, but in their defense I don't think fully embracing either side will be enough for them to win. The problem is largely the voters who absolutely refuse to compromise on their personal hill to die on. Republican voters will unite on anyone as long as they piss of the left.
> find someone with charisma like Obama
That person does not exist, or if they do they are too smart to support the shambling mess that is the democratic party.
I think the party is gambling that Trump makes such a hopeless mess of things that voters will have no choice but vote blue. I'm not sure they will win that gamble.
Theoretically, abortion in the US used to be extremely liberal (in the original meaning of the word liberal).
Materially? No one wait week 22 for an abortion unless it's an emergency, considering the damage it does.
The percentage of childbirth death plus late stage abortion in the US is barely superior to the one in my country where abortions after weeks 18 needs to be argued by two doctors and a social worker in front of a judge. And that percentage is only superior because US have a very, very high childbirth death for a developed country.
Materially, Usians do less late stage abortion than other developed countries where those are way more restrictive. Because people love to talk about 'theorically' when they talk about other people body and choices, never about what really happens, and that bothers me greatly.
Jack shit probably but that doesn't mean right-leaning Democrats are going to vote for Bernie Sanders and cross their fingers that none of his proposals get enacted.
Obama was a moderate politician with massive charisma
2) Moderates do, in fact, have stronger appeal than leftists. It's empirically true. As evidence, see: literally just about every election where a leftist is on the ballot, with the possible exception of AOC who has Obama-tier charisma factor and also not-coincidentally has moderated her image a bit the past few years to the point where the most lefty leftists think she's a sellout.
People like Tester and Manchin overperformed in their deep-red states for a long, long time. People like Collins and Don Bacon on the other side overperform for the same reason.
The point of moderation for a Democrat is not picking up Republican votes, it's picking up votes from the 30% of the country that doesn't identify with either party, most of which are moderates.
Also, the black community is the core of the Democratic coalition, and they are pretty moderate politically, especially on social issues. Latinos are the same and that's part of the reason we've been losing them.
I wouldn't say I'm a moderate, but I do have a better plan: https://runforsomething.net/
1. They don't know what they can do that will be effective.
2. They don't want to be targeted as dissidents or non-loyalists to the regime.
3. They're drained by their individual economic situations and worries.
4. They're drained by severe disappointment in large swaths of the electorate, and in the failure of checks and balances.
5. Events are so upsetting that they're in denial or consciously avoiding it.
It might be reassuring to see huge protests, but I wouldn't encourage individuals to do that anymore, because most of those people will be identified by the various surveillance technologies that we've built. (Half of the surveillance built by techbros, incidentally.) The identified can then be further suppressed with automation, and the barriers to doing that are much lower than mass physical roundups and concentration camps.
Each side is so encumbered with baggage that I don't want to support them.
One is breaking law and processes in egregious ways. The other thinks that law should not apply to illegal immigrants and even legal deportations are a due process violation.
Where? Who? You're just making this up.
What do you think? Should all illegal immigrants be deported?
As Reagan was good for Amnesty, the right can find it in their ideals go support it.
It worked for Regan because there was bipartisan support to enforce the law moving forward. I don't see that today so we get a yoyo effect
And there was a bipartisanship solution under Biden that got nixed when Trump, then an unelected citizen, cried to congressional leadership about it hurting his chances for reelection. Like so many other things this weak autocrat cries about, he made things worse.
This ended up being fake news. Who would gain from enraging Americans with divisive fake news?
Justice Department attorneys argued that it was in the child's best interest to remain in her mother's legal custody and suggested the child could return, writing, "V.M.L. is not prohibited from entering the United States."
Trump administration officials told the court that the mother had informed ICE agents that she wanted to bring V.M.L. with her to Honduras, providing a handwritten note in Spanish that they said confirmed her wishes.
It seems we as technical people give little reason for giving us a leading role in society. I admit that the media doesn't help as they keep the big picture out of frame, but then again, we are very easily cornered with minor details.
Anne Frank's house is not far from where I live. I bet that the term "forcefully" in a sentence like "She was forcefully deported" could have been up for debate too, who knows, but in the end it would not have really helped the girl.
Why it's ineffective is, again, something that's been impossible to research for as long as I've been paying attention to immigration. I genuinely don't know where I could go to get answers. Other than a couple people spinning evidence-free conspiracy theories about their political opponents, nobody seems interested in analyzing it.
IMHO, it's essential.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States_(2015...
"Zero tolerance" policies are a generally a tool of the Sith.
Jury trials do. Administrative trials never have.
> It's broadly labelled "prosecutorial discretion",
Federal DAs win 98% of their cases. This discretion is not what you think it is.
> IMHO, it's essential.
Well, unless they're J6 defendants, or any other group labeled by the media as undesirable.
Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1]. A U.S. citizen's right to habeas has been wilfully abrogated by the state. If this stands, I'm absolutely for taking all the pardoned January 6th nutters and sticking them in Guantanamo or wherever come 2028 or 2032.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Origins_in_Engla...
More an honest reading of the history of power. If one side seizes a previously norms-gated tactic and is allowed to use it, the other side either seizes it, too, or ceases to exist. (Obviously, the preferred outcome is this is not allowed to stand.)
Norm erosion and law breaking often see tit for tat retaliation with the notable exception of when norms and order are productively restored.
I follow your comments because I find them balanced and often insightful, even (or perhaps especially) when I disagree. For this reason, I was surprised to see you advocate more unjust and amoral behavior, even if it is in the form of retaliation.
> even if it is in the form of retaliation
The most important part is messaging the expectation of retaliation ex ante: If you break habeus, we—too—will use that power. (And it won’t be our moderates who will be the first to seize it!)
Otherwise, we have a two-party system where one team seizes advantage through force while the other pudges along hamstrung by norms only they respect. Also: once a norm is eroded, it’s impossible to regain it through norms alone. (I don’t recall any historical example of norms escalation being peacefully rolled back. It takes a shock for people in the moment and in the future to be able to point to for why that norm is necessary. Somehow the Nazis, Japanese internment and the Argentinian economy aren’t enough anymore.)
Unfortunately, the norms being violated now probably require a Constitutional amendment to reïnstate. So I’m pessimistic about an off-ramp versus this being the new status quo. Maybe both sides being clear about what suspending habeus really means is the kick in the ass America needs to restrict pardon powers and/or give the Congress and courts limited direct enforcement authority. (Or maybe, as it was with Jackson, it will be Trump’s economic ineptitude that brings the shock.)
A lot of these technicalities are parsing “what did the press actually say” which is the first step in dealing with an untrustworthy source of truth.
Parsing out what the article says is necessary.
It’s how articles are written, and how reporters and editors ask they be read.
“John Doe committed a terrible crime, the FBI said” does not mean the press is reporting the John Doe committed a terrible crime.
I wish the press would respond to cultivated mistrust by committing to high standards, but they have not.
…is also misinformation.
Yea, by the press itself, or, do you honestly believe the billionaire owner class of this form of media has done an excellent job reporting truthfully over the past 30 years?
Pull yourself back from your politics and genuinely consider this.
The best way I know is to carefully parse the text in its most literal form. That is what the “good reporter” is saying. The “general idea” of what is being said is probably what the editor wants.
Owners and editors want “wow” articles. Journalists know most of what they report is just “somebody said something.”
You also seem to forget that journalists sometimes leave and become owners in their own right. Where does that blurry line begin and end, actually?
Means, motive, opportunity. It's always the same triad and you can't avoid applying to all parties involved.
Given that and the importance of broadcast media I can't imagine why anyone thought they were getting the truth. Or even if they were somehow not a highly selected and edited version of it. Designed to manipulate and control not to inform.
Your pessimism in all media is unfounded.
Slowly stopped looking for insight here on any topic that involves even a small amount of larger picture thinking, really quite sad.
The broader conversation is simple: there's an estimated 10 million illegals (low ball estimate, some go as far as 22 million) in the US, what should be done?
For if the numbers are really that gigantic, there are going to be a few revolting cases when people are getting expulsed.
Dems have been hard at work, for many years, funding ONGs with US taxpayers dollars, ONGs that'd actively facilitate and help millions and millions of border crossing and relocating illegals all across the US.
It certainly feels a bit like now is payback time: this may be one of the reason Trump won... US citizens being fed up with that "border" that was basically a wide-open highway.
I want to go live to the US: I raised my kid for ten years in english, she's only ever been to english-speaking schools. But as a non-US citizen I can't. We can't come to the U.S. $5m to buy the golden visa is a bit steep.
That's the broader conversation: close to 2 billion in africa, 1.5 billion chinese, 1.3 billion Indian many of whom (for a variety of reason) want to leave their country. For the EU. For the US. Some europeans, like me, who want to go to the US too.
Can the U.S. take them all? Every single one of them that wants to go to the US?
If there are 8 digits number of illegals, something has to be done.
You ain't dealing with 8 digits number of illegals without having a few "revolting" cases.
And of course leftist media and orgs (like the ACLU) are going to carefully pick their fight, here's an headline that'd be frontpage:
"Trans autistic mixed-race dwarf sick kid forced to leave the US".
Calling a majority of EU and US citizens "nazis" because they're fed up with uncontrolled, illegal, migration ain't intellectually honest.
As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
“Think of the children” works when you are in a super white rich neighborhood, if you never lived in slums you won’t understand the abuse of the system by “think of the children”, you just don’t see it from the other side.
This is a story about citizens being deported without due process, without access to lawyers, without access to healthcare.
You don't have to be "ok with cheaters" to still want those people to have basic human rights and to see the system have legitimate judicial review.
The punishment here is far worse than the crime, and it's directed at children who didn't commit the crime, and it was doled out in a horrifyingly abusive totalitarian police-state style. Maybe you're not seeing things from the right side?
Maybe stop making hypotheticals designed to excuse what happened and fake concerns. There was no attempt to keep family together oe do right by the kids.
Are you saying he's figuratively American, or that the father is a U.S. citizen. Because VML's petition for writ of habeas [1] doesn't mention the latter.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/1/v-m-l-v-harp...
The "kid cant be without a parent" excuse does not work there.
We grew up with the idea that America was a beacon, not a whites-only gated community.
There’s no reason for us to think less of someone just because they want to be here. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing.
It sucks that you’re here complaining about the Statue of Liberty.
I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-raid-l-maternity-h...
These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".
And life happens. The woman that became my wife was here on a temporary visa, life threw us together, our hearts had their own idea about the situation despite both of us mistakenly believing the other was not available. And, no, there's no way she engineered it--the choices that threw us together were all made by others.
(1) in previous centuries, the US accepted as many immigrants as could arrive “on Ellis Island” and it only took a few weeks. All of the immigration barriers that you overcame were added by American legislators many centuries after my ancestors came to America. I don’t view “illegal immigrants” any different than I viewed my own ancestors who came to America in the 1500s.
(2) US law affords legal pathways to residency/ citizenship for refugees and political asylum claimants. Just because you used one slow legal workflow doesn’t mean you should look down on people who used a faster legal workflow. They aren’t “gaming” the system — they are using the fast lane that was installed purposefully. If anything, we should use the legislature to revisit the fast lane (the refugee and political asylum claims)
(3) an infant didn’t have any volition in this situation. Maybe they were born here as an “anchor baby” (which the Trump Admin is trying to redefine as not-a-citizen, breaking with all of the jurisprudence). If they were pushed over the border by their parents or someone else, we have a duty to make sure their life is handled with care, not malice.
(4) there are political and media interests in making “legal immigrants” like you hate other immigrants. It makes native born Americans feel like they have cover for their hatred of immigrants. You should sit with the thought experiment of whether it’s actually relevant to the conversation that you “spent years getting here the hard way” or whether the conversation would be more productive without it.
(5) the reason the “immigration system is broken” is because there are multiple factions in America who can’t agree on what kind of changes to make to it. Famously Obama tried to force Congress to deal with it around 2013, but the “Gang of Eight” couldn’t come up with even broad guidelines for changes that both parties would agree to. There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration. Are you perhaps in this category?
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.
Please show your homework because the underlying logic seems exactly opposite of the facts.
People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.
None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.
Liberals aren’t against immigration because it is corporate welfare but because of the strain it places on the social safety net and effects on jobs but both of those could be overcome with a rational policy on special economic zones.
Robots did my dad's knee replacement surgery. I don't think this argument holds water anymore. Maybe if you make your claim more precise: delicate + scale. But, if that's the case, the scale problem is solved with money.
Very few agricultural products are harvestable without the use of hands at the current prices. And when states have cracked down on illegal immigrants, farmers cry bloody murder that native-born Americans can’t last 1-2 days doing that work. American living standards are FAR higher than those of the people who are willing to work agricultural fields.
Interesting.
I agree that (slave like) misuse of cheap labor is a problem.
We have a similar issue here. (Bad cleaning, by badly payed, overworked cleaners).
I'm a bit angry because I looked into fixing it by (partially) automating it, but the supply chains are rather bad. The currently available mainstream robots (Dreame, Roborock) are not up to the task (no proper support in Europe). The only interesting option seems to be cleanfix from Switzerland.
To make things short: that anger shouldn't have targeted you, because it boils down to my own current incompetence to fix a real problem. Sorry!
Policy should be made to cater to factual objective reality, not to make people feel better.
Ezra Klein isn’t for the unwashed masses. He’s not even interesting to the average Democrat. His content is specifically for people who care about boring facts and policy. Obviously MMA and WWE fans and crude comedian fans will respond more to show of force, peacocking, and loud brash speeches. These things are vapid when it comes to politics. They only serve to elect Dark Triad figures, not good policy makers.
The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
Also worth pointing out that it’s likely that Democrats didn’t move on securing the border earlier in Biden’s term because all of the people criticizing Biden’s immigration policy were crying wolf for years or decades before it actually became a huge problem.
>The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
What would be helpful here is if people who state this so plainly as a matter of fact actually took the time to interrogate why they think that way. I don't think this statement is true, quite the opposite. You are sort of hinting at the real problem in your parenthetical, not sure if you were intentional in that regard. One should probably determine why the birthrate in a particular nation is below replacement before concluding that the only solution is "infinity immigration". Moreover, economic growth is not the end-all-be-all of a country, since these are places with history and a people in them and not a "special economic zone" there the only reason anyone lives there is to conduct economic activity.
The voters are free to vote for whoever they want for any reason. The burden is on the candidates to win them over.
Don’t have a counter argument?
Was the stock market at historic highs. Yes
Was inflation falling and the lowest in the OECD. Yes
I am not going to go point by point. And they aren’t “true at the margins” when taken together as a whole. They are a manifestation of a broad policy that created improved conditions in the country that would have continued. And the CHIPS act was the exact policy to set us in the course for how the world will be over the next 30 years rather than what it was 60 years ago.
If deportation of the whole family is the best for the child, then you do that. If placing the child with relatives or foster care is the better choice, you do that. Children aged 2, 4, and 7 can't "game" the system, and so its the adults job to take responsibility and find a solution that address the rights of the child.
And I don't see the system particularly being gamed. The reality is an awful lot of people are fleeing oppression. The gangs and the cartels etc make it so the people don't have an option but to turn to them.
And despite what the reich wing says most of the immigrants are not a problem. And the reich wing specifically set out to ensure Biden couldn't accomplish anything. And now we see high profile and often wrong deportations, yet a lower total rate than under Biden.
The reason? I’m a white guy from Germany.
The entire process was easy for me. No one ever questions where I’m from because I’m white, have a white collar job, and speak fluent English. That seems enough to be enough for any fellow American to not consider me a “foreigner”.
If everything else about me was the same except I had darker skin and an accent I would be extremely scared right now that I could get rounded up based on nothing more than someone’s vibes of me.