Yup. I hope other countries take note and put pressure on the US to be less horrible.
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This is copied from this thread, written by a fellow Australian.
Seeing a lot of Americans suggesting cruelty to asylum seeker children will be the thing that ‘finally turns the tide’ against Trump.
Take it from those of us whose governments have been running deliberately cruel asylum regimes for years: it won’t.
Kids ripped from their parents? Indefinite detention? Dehumanisation? These are features, not bugs. A sizeable enough chunk of your electorate, as with ours, will support these measures not despite their cruelty but because of it .
If you’re waiting for those who think citizenship is some sort of metaphysical natural kind that outweighs common humanity to say ‘woah, now that’s too far,’ well friend, you’ll be waiting a very long time.
‘But now religious leaders are turning aga-’ yeah let me stop you there. Ask the churches here what they think of Australian refugee policy. Their opposition doesn’t move the needle at all. Yes we’re a more secular country than yours, but even so.
If you think the sight of a baby taken from a breastfeeding mother is going to radically and permanently shift public attitudes, cast your mind back to Aylan Kurdi’s body lying on a Turkish beach. Now look at European refugee policy and attitudes since 2015.
If you’re expecting that image to spark some sense of parental solidarity among the ‘build a wall’ crowd, read this recollection from @RaimondGaita to understand what you’re dealing with:
To be clear: yes, you should expose these stories. Yes you should make every American aware what is done in their name just as all my compatriots should be aware of what is done in ours. But understand what you’re up against. These policies aren’t accidental overreach.
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I can honestly say I hope the same thing, but they’re already doing so in the economic realm (with the tariff situation, for example). The problem with America is that we have a history of dictating international norms, and then resisting when asked to abide by them. The most other countries can do is alienate us, which is hard when we have a military installation in so many places. Other countries would of course go as far as to expel our diplomats, but that seems unlikely to happen with our military bases, too, which is where the real power lies.
I don’t know. It’s horrible.
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FGD135
June 16, 2018, 7:16pm
46
It’s almost like the US finally wants to give fascism a try because they feel they’ve missed out in the 1930ies.
Speaking as a descendant of a people who did give it a try in the 1930ies - don’t.
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Regrettably, no.
Family separation and child detention are a basic feature of American deportation proceedings, even if the government isn’t pounding its chest about it.
Est. reading time: 7 minutes
There seems to be confusion. To be clear, family separation and child detention are a basic feature of American deportation proceedings. They occur on a routine and systematic basis, even if the government in charge isn’t pounding its chest about it.
In fact, immigrant communities were outspoken on this reality for many, many years.
Family separation was a frontline issue for immigration activists for the last decade or more. They warned of a generation of orphans scarred by the loss of their parents. They cautioned that Obama expanded deportation forces on his own to a degree that would be horribly exploited by a Republican president. (At the time, they were worried about Mitt Romney.)
The Obama administration conceded as much on the issue of separation in 2011, when Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, told PBS, “Even if the [immigration] law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.”
Many liberals contend Obama never ripped babies from the arms of screaming parents. They should ask, for example, the over 150,000 immigrant children separated from their parents due to detention and deportation proceedings in 2012 if that’s true. Or the over 500,000 immigrant children, who experienced separation between 1998 and that year.
The majority of those children were under 10 years-old. Over 5,000 were placed into foster care. Specifically, these were children whose parents were deported, not minors who came to the border unaccompanied.
Yes, Trump is worse. But Obama was already very, very bad.
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xeni
June 20, 2018, 12:15am
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