ICE is creating a new citizens' academy to train civilians to arrest immigrants

I’m not talking about fieldhands. Or just fieldhands
it’s grocery store workers. Kitchen staff. Meat processing.

All fields where employers save by hiring and abusing undocumented persons. All to your determinent.

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I agree with both [fix inserted], but the American establishment is not interested in either solution. The first goes against the holy writs of white supremacy and saving taxpayer dollars, the second goes against the holy writ of maximising shareholder value. The U.S. has to renounce 40 years of promoting neoliberalism as the only way and centuries of Nativism (trending worse again in recent decades) before it can even hope to implement those two things.

It’s a shame. This country was built by immigrants, often undocumented, who – badly treated though they were – were given a path to citizenship so that their children and grandchildren could prosper as they made their own contributions. Now (as I’m sure you’re acutely aware in your own situation) there’s hostility toward even documented immigrant workers.

Ladder-pulling descendants of immigrants – shamefully including some simplistic left-wing populists – would sooner starve themselves than take that into account. Anyone who brushes aside this issue has never had to worry in his life about missing a meal for more than a day.

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The 21st century has made this an amazingly difficult task.

We are being led by a dick.

We are being drowned out by maskless dicks.

Dicks are everywhere. And I could really use a live living non-dick to help re-calibrate my phasers out of dick mode and into something more useful.

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Ignoring the history of how how we got here and how much violence that caused is just burying our heads in the sand and making excuses for the violence it’s causing in the here and now, too.

They are made up, doesn’t mean they don’t have power over us. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be made into a better system.

Keep in mind that this system of passports is just for plebes like us, not for the elites, the rich, and the powerful. They are systems of control to keep labor in check. This is to control YOU, not to hinder capital.

Passports and border controls that are difficult, if not impossible to obtain, are in part to ensure a cheap labor force via undocument workers.

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No. It hasn’t. As much as modern communication has encouraged bad behavior, it has also given you the tools to educate and better yourself. If you don’t take that opportunity, then it’s on you.

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Agreed. Going through trying times and hardships is NOT a free license to be a dick to other people, many of whom are also struggling.

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Yes, that will be especially beneficial to the literally tens of millions newly unemployed.

You are discussing long-term consequences of change. There are short-term ones, too - like, for example, if you kick all the undocumented workers out today, everyone starves tomorrow until that labour pool is corrected for.

You are posting generic talking points here without substance, that is against our community guidelines. Cut it out.

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I thought the topic was America’s immigration policy, and ways to better have that meet the needs of the citizens that policy that is meant to serve, e.g. instead of having ICE go after poor undocumented persons, go after the rich citizens who exploit them.

Sorry for ranging outside the proscribed topics and themes of discourse.

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This absolutely should happen. The point is to make it happen in a way that doesn’t unduly affect those same citizens negatively - i.e., make sure those citizens can handle the consequences of that change, especially if it means their quality of life may decrease in the short-term as a cost to better quality of life in the long-term.

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To me the ideal plan would be that if you have no immigration papers but can prove an American has paid you to work even ONCE,* you get amnesty – and the person who hired you gets fines up to all your personal and corporate assets and jail time.
The exploited would get forgiveness; the exploiters would literally pay for it.

It wouldn’t change things overnight, but it would change things significantly.

  • Proof could be a pay stub, a cancelled check, a text confirming work for hire, second-party confirmation, etc.
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The ICE news release currently doesn’t mention anything about training in arrests or firearms – I don’t know if it was removed in the aftermath or what. If so does that mean they’re not doing that, or just no longer mentioning it? It does show that it (the news release) was updated today.

EDIT:

Evidently there’s a discrepancy between what one of the agents said, and what the agency said:

https://www.newsweek.com/ice-launching-citizens-academy-course-how-agency-arrests-immigrants-1516656

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The topic is about the most loyal agency of a bigoted, Nativist regime going out and looking for like-minded civilian recruits, which is no way to truly meet the needs of a country that boasts of being a liberal democracy and immigrant nation.

Most here who hold to those ideals, including myself, would argue that the U.S. imposing real consequences on employers who hire undocumented immigrants is in no way at odds with that ideal. The same people would argue that creating a path to citizenship for undocumented and visa workers who’ve been exploited but made their contribution is also in line with those ideals.

But again, the topic at hand is this Blockwart Academy. These solutions, as important as they are, are only alternatives to it in the sense that it shouldn’t exist at all. It’s like coming to the dinner table to find a poop sandwich on the platter and saying “never mind that, should we be having steak or lobster?” Discussing them muddies the waters and derais the discussion at hand.

[Also, unless you’re 100% Native American, you have no business saying or implying that any immigrant to the U.S. – undocumented or not – is an “illegal person”.]

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e35

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It always flummoxes me that this is remotely controversial, and continues to be in the midst of a pandemic… These are institutions we built and they should serve us…

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Exactly. Society should work to make sure everyone has at least the first two tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You can profit off of luxury versions of that stuff, but the basics need to be available and affordable to everyone.

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If they are thinking of deputizing people as armed ICE agents, keep a watch to see if this circumvents state carry law restrictions.

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This will never happen. “Poor undocumented persons” will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be treated better than their employers. “Papers please” and scapegoating brown people is not and has never been a path to economic equality.

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That’s bullshit. Immigration policy and law is loaded with arbitrary and draconian measures and lacks the most basic due process. Taking it at face value is ignorant nonsense.

Immigration law is not criminal law. ICE do not go after criminals. They don’t follow their own laws and frequently are used in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion. They don’t deserve to be treated like real law enforcement

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Our nativist president stopped issuing a victim of exploitation visa, doesn’t take asylum claims seriously and abducts children to force parents to waive their rights. We are nowhere near a sane immigration policy here, nor will as long as the GOP leans into white supremacy as their policy platform.

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Clearly the way forward is to round everybody up and put them in GOVERNMENT SLAVE CAMPS /s

There are more than 48,000 people being held in immigrant detention in more than 200 facilities in the United States. More than two-thirds of them, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, are confined by private companies, working on contracts with the federal government. Those numbers have ballooned in the last two years under the Trump administration, drawing new attention to the terrible conditions detainees are living in.

One feature of privately run centers — the Voluntary Work Program — is the subject of six separate lawsuits, which say that privately run immigrant detention centers are coercing detainees into working for a dollar a day and punishing those who don’t. The lawsuits demand, among other things, that the practice stop and that detained workers be paid minimum wage.

nytimes.com/2019/01/29/opinion/forced-labor-immigrants.html

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