And yet they put up with “San Peeedro”.
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Did he? I can’t recall that he did. I followed his presidency with a certain amount of care but don’t recall he ever did any of those things. In fact the lack of ‘shovel-ready’ projects was, if memory serves, one of the reasons the stimulus went where it did.
Am I wrong? I may have missed something.
Okay. Point taken.
Are they allowed to do this? Legally? It seems like that’s not something you can choose. Or can you?
I’m not asking rhetorical questions. I am honestly baffled.
People’s Car, yeah, I know what it means but what is it meant to communicate? That I am a Nazi? Why? That the idea of making cars for the masses is fundamentally fascist? Has anyone told William Morris and Henry Ford? Dante Giacosa? That Keynesianism is fascist? Has anyone told the economists?
@AcerPlatanoides
That would make those local law enforcement officials illegals too. It’s amazing how fallacies and othering works.
…what? I am sorry are you arguing with me or someone else? Who mentioned ‘illegal’ anything? I didn’t even stake out my position[1], for heaven’s sake. Is it ‘othering’ to wonder if you can just pick and choose which laws you enforce? What about some bastard choosing not to enforce laws if the victim was of a unfavored race or poor? What about bastards choosing not to marry people because they don’t fit dictates of some religion or another?
[1] I personally prefer open borders, in case you are wondering, or some deal like what @gracchus suggests where freedom of movement for capital must entail free movement of people.
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Yes, what about that false equivalence? and that one. and that one.
Go away with your lazy emotional appeals.
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What you have to understand is that original poster meant “enforcing the law selectively against darker-skinned people.” Sanctuary cities choose not to enforce federal immigration law that disproportionally impacts darker-skinned people in the same way that local NYC authorities don’t go after an Irish bartender in midtown or French au-pair on the UES who came there through JFK ten years ago on tourist visas and never left.
I doubt that nathan824s has ever given a moment’s thought to the “peril” created by those undocumented immigrants and the White House isn’t threatening to cut off NY’s funds because of non-enforcement, but for some reason they’re all worried about the Mexican busboy who illegally crossed the Rio Grande or the Iranian-born physician coming through Logan Int’l on the way to her postdoc.
To give a specific example of this kind of bigoted mentality at its worst look at Rep. Peter King of NY. He remains one of the loudest proponents in Congress in banning Muslim immigrants because of terrorism, and yet he was also a longtime and unapologetic supporter of the IRA.
The bigotry works differently in Europe, where ethnicity and nationalism are more deeply intertwined than they are in the land of the “melting pot.” Here, if your skin is reasonably white and your religious heritage is Christian your descendants will eventually go from subhuman monsters to “real Muricans” within a couple of generations as far as the Midwest is concerned. Meanwhile, I’m sure that somewhere in the French countryside there’s a lily-white family whose ancestors emigrated there from London in the 18th century who are still considered “les Anglais” by the locals.
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Yes. Yes, they do.
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Fascism has a particular conception of “the masses” that isn’t shared by competing ideologies.
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The Republicans as a political force are toast at the state level. If you think of Reganism as a virus, we were ‘Patient Zero’ but the state body built up immunity over the years, forcing Republicans into a vestigal condition. Unfortunately, the virus has migrated to previously healthy states like Wisconsin, and it will take some time for them to reject and recover from the illness.
To answer your question, there are many gerrymandered districts where troglodytic Republicans like Issa and Dana Rohrabacher are guaranteed their national bully pulpit. Thiel is not really a Californian, but a rootless global elite who’s politics have literally been given currency by Citizens United. While the Silicon Valley techno-libertarians are political geniuses inside their own bubble, they have no base among real Californians, and are more interested in Prepping than in governing.
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No. They’re simply not enforcing it.
Just like when they make enforcing marijuana laws the lowest possible priority for the police, so they should always have something more important to do.
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The non-enforcement of marijuana laws is a good analogy because they were often selectively enforced against darker-skinned people.
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Except for the communities that will be cut in half, the indigenous burial grounds that will be disturbed, the funds that will have to be diverted to actually productive goals, and the further racism that it will promote.
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Why the hell are you convinced that I am arguing for a position I don’t hold? How is it a false equivalence? It’s picking-and-choosing what laws to enforce, isn’t it? I don’t think some laws should exist at all (as I said, I favor open borders or as close to it as possible), but I don’t think that everyone gets to choose from a menu what to enforce. That seems dangerous. Your counter-argument is to yell at me for believing things I don’t believe.
The hell?
Okay. This I understand. So it basically isn’t enforced properly anywhere and the fight is which selective enforcement to ban and which to let take place? Have I got it right?
If so, I have a question: Why not change immigration laws? Hell, why not just sign some sort of open-borders agreement with Mexico? Reading comments here there seems a lot of political will for this and it could have trivially been done 'round about 2009, couldn’t it?
Well, the family on my father’s side is still known as “The Germans” in our ancestral village because we were apparently mercenaries in Germany.
In the sixteenth century.
Yeah. Pretty much right.
Again, agreed, I’m just confused what the hell it has to do with me.
Well damn. I didn’t know they were going to run the damn thing through where people live. I just thought it was a vast concrete folly in the middle of nowhere much.
There goes the one good side to it: that at least it won’t do anything.
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Reactionary, not radical.
And quite a few of us do still make a distinction between the dictionary definition of the word “conservative” and what it has been turned into.
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My apologies, @Melizmatic. He’s apparently independent, although he supported Governor Pataki. To be fair, Pataki isn’t who I picture when I picture the GOP.
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Almost. It’s enforced according to the letter of the law only against non-white people, and now will be to a greater degree thanks to the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S.
Why not change immigration laws to make the border more open? Same answer: racism. Also, white Americans who aren’t members of the ownership class used to not worry about dusky foreigners taking away menial and service and skilled labour jobs from them, but since at least 2008 they’ve been worrying a lot more about it.
So when that part-time bartending job at Applebees suddenly starts looking like the best option, John Whitebread is going to grumble a lot more about Jose Jimenez being behind the bar taking “his” job than he will if Joseph Jameson from County Cork is serving the drinks.
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I can’t confirm that; I’m just going off of what John Oliver said last year:
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I would rather they spend the money on literally doing just that. It’ll still be clear that they’re wasting taxpayers’ money but without any diplomatic repercussions.
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But why not do it when, say, the Democrats are in power? Because if I get this straight, the platform of the Dems is to be against this sort of discriminating enforcement?
But, yes, thank you, I get the rest.
I was misled by my colleagues consistently complaining of having their visa applications denied when trying to give invited talks on conferences and such (I work at an university) and thought that this was a fair representation of how this sort of law is enforced.
I don’t even have that much. It just seemed incredibly stupid to run a wall through towns. Or a border, for that matter. America and Canada, I know, have a clear-cut 6 meters wide no-touching zone between them. I assumed that America and Mexico had something similar and that the wall will go through that sort of space.
So would I! But that’s not on the menu, and neither is a massive rebuilding effort for infrastructure or lead pipes or what-have-you. While I thought the Wall would do nothing at all (it may be otherwise, it so transpires) I thought that it was by far the least destructive thing Trump has promised. It does nothing, good or ill, and functions as a stimulus with the most of the money going to the bottom of the income distribution (I hoped) where it is needed and can do the most good, to boot.
But it seems it might actually do something. Bad, of course. It can’t do anything good. That much was a given.
The wall will do something.
The wall will increase the number of undocumented immigrants in this country because they can’t move back and forth over the border, bring back more violent border disputes between cartels, displace US citizens, and give Trump more Midwest voters that will always, always choose to fuck places they will never go when given that option on a ballot.
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I was hoping it wouldn’t do anything. Just a big concrete folly. It was my optimism ration for 2017 and I’ve gone and spent it unwisely.
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They may in the future, but not as long as the Third Way Dems run the show. As in many policy areas, they still persist in believing we’re still living in the fat and happy days of 1992.
In those days, the Dems could easily satisfy, say, a liberal resident of Beverly Hills who hired cheap undocumented Mexican workers to do his landscaping and to bus tables at his restaurant, because neither party ever goes after the employer. The working class voters they cared most about were legal citizens and residents, many of them PoC who were on their side and most of whom had secure employment or benefitted from welfare. So they let the Republicans be the bogeymen when the racist base needed to see roundups of Mexicans outside the hardware store, but otherwise kept out of making any changes, stricter or looser.
If left-wing populists take over the DNC in the near future, they’re more likely to tighten things up at all borders than they are to loosen them. It just won’t be predicated on bigotry as with the GOP.
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