Comment by _V_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _V_ | Hacker News Reader

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That's what I find so strange as a European - how can you be in country for decades & still function? Like getting a bank account, employment, medical assistance - all of this should be virtually impossible. Or atleast in the Europe it seems to be the case.

Of course, if US did not enforce immigration policies for decades, I can see why people are upset when they suddenly start being enforced. But on the other hand I'd also have to ask, why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws? I mean if the Democrat party (?) mostly stands for not enforcing these immigration policies, they certailny had their time in power, right?

And without getting into the details about whether deportations are right or wrong, it seems to me that most people that are protesting right now should actually aim their anger on the Democrat party who actually left everyone hanging. This administration (atleast from my "outsider" point of view) just does what they said they will do all along.

Or am I missing something? Thanks for your comment though, I honestly did not know that there was little to no enforcement of these laws for so long.

> why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws?

There have been efforts by all presidents over the last 20 years to do so.

Obama increased the rate of deportations and doubled border patrols as part of a gambit to reach consensus on immigration reform. Congress didn't take up the offer. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/01/29/preside....

Trump (first term) put forward reforms that never passed the Senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act).

Biden late in his term put forward an immigration reform package that Trump, as a candidate, guided his party to reject. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/unraveling-misinformation-...

The US Congress is not an effective institution. It is captured by lobbying dollars. And the specific geographies each member represents in the House of Representatives have been organized to create partisan (far-left/far-right) districts that don't elect middle-ground candidates. Congress is more partisan than the country in general and also corrupted by financial influence. By design, the US Congress requires broad consensus to operate (bills need to pass the house, the senate, and then be signed by the president; to pass the senate, many bills need 2/3rds approval in practice). Congress has been largely unable to reach this broad consensus (on many issues, not just immigration) over the last many years.

Thanks for the clarification! I don't really watch US politics up close that much so this is a new info for me.

But if these things are true, it means that political representation in the US is utterly broken and needs to be somehow re-shaped. I mean the fact that there were attempts to do something for past 20 years and nothing has been done (effectively) is just mad. Right now you seemingly have some kind of status quo, that can be shifted to one side or another through executive orders, right?

That's insane, it seems that after 250 years or so you basically ended up with a crossover of a monarchy and corporatism.

From the outside the congress seems really extremely polarized to me - either extremely conservative people (10 commandments in every classroom, no abortion, no universal healthcare etc) or extreme progressives (no difference between man/woman, cannot tell what a woman is etc). There seems to be no "sane" middle grounds on the US political scene - or atleast it is not visible to the outside.

I kind of feel for you, that actually really sucks. And the worst part is that I personally don't really see any "non-messy" way to change this system because it is controlled by the very people you would need to get rid of in order to make it actually work. And all of them will fight for the status quo, because many of them have been part of the system for so long, that they could not survive by doing anything else.

When thinking about the complexity of the United States it might be useful to compare it to Europe as a whole. The US is physically larger. The EU has 1.5x the population. Spain, Germany, Italy, and Hungary are four very different places. As are California, Ohio, Alabama, and Alaska. Does it feel strange to you that there aren't EU-wide social or health insurance programs; or that Hungary has different politics from Luxembourg; or that Greece and Germany have different economies? It is a very sloppy analogy. However, it is closer to comparing like orders of magnitude.

I'm thinking about the US in the similar manner as the whole EU, and this is probably the source of my misunderstanding.

I'm not surprised by the fact that California has a different politics to for example Florida (I hope I picked good "extreme" cases there ). That is, as you said, very similar to the EU - you have extremely conservative Poland/Hungary and you have very liberal France (for example). But in EU the federal enforcement mostly works through the local governments and is not a completely separate entitiy.

In the EU we really don't have "federal law" in the same manner you seem to have in the US. When the EU passes a law, all states implement it locally (even though the local implementation may vary) and the local law enforcement enforces that law. We don't really have a federal ICE for example, it is always a thing that is handled by the local state. (Well, perhaps there is an official part of the Europol that handles immigration, I have never really heard about it nor have I seen anyone).

We don't have a "federal" EU army, too. Every state has its own armed forces, that are completely independent (well, chain of command-vise) to the others.

Another difference is - as you pointed out - that we are much more densely populated (like 3 times the population density). That's why some of the things we said really surprised me, because you cannot really escape others in the EU. Almost anywhere you go, you are at most 30m by car to some form of "civilization" (for example city/village with working internet and a pub). Btw even though this might be a little bit of an exaggeration, it is not a big one

> no difference between man/womnan

For the record, nobody says or believes this. We believe one should be free to change their gender, eg a woman should be free to live as a (trans) man. That's an entirely different thing than saying the man/woman dichotomy doesn't exist.

That was, of course, a little bit of an exaggeration just to paint a picture. And it was not that important to the overall argument, that's why I formulated it so lazily (I wanted to sum things up in few words).

However if we'd go in there, I think there are many people on this side of the argument that really believe/push the extreme version of this. Atleast that's my impression. But since we had for example biological males competing with biological females in strenght-based sports, I'd say this impression is not that inaccurate.

That is, atleast for me personally, an insane thing. Even though I personally fully believe that trans person should be able to live freely their live, I think there are some limitations simply because of that dichotomy and sports are one of those few examples of things trans person should not automatically be able to do and it should be strictly on the case-by-case basis.

But maybe I'm wrong - I'm of course very open discussing other points of view. These sensitive topics are rarely discussed in a civil manner online, so I'd be honestly glad to do so, because I really want to try & understand what drives people on this side of the argument.

And that sex is not an immutable property but rather something that can be changed with medical transition.

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