Here’s a really interesting look at the Bible, in Newsweek, of all places: The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.
It’s so interesting that it would make a nice separate topic, but I can’t figure out how to submit the link, so I’ll just leave it here.
Ahh those Essene terrorists. They were part of the ‘Occupy Jerusalem’ movement.
What’s an empire to do?
[reads article]
… Oh, it was about his parents. He was an anchor baby; no wonder he turned into a radical in later life!
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had such bad experiences with Christians. I simply wanted to say that people should welcome immigrants to America, and that no person is “illegal.”
So did you think about the dehumanizing language you used, or did you just repeat dehumanizing language you had heard?
[quote=“Joe999, post:26, topic:48821”]
Also, all you Democrats who want these immigrants to stay. Would you feel the same way if they were, say, Afrikaaners? Or Ukrainians? In other words, if these immigrants were white people who would never vote Democratic, would you want them to stay ?[/quote]
I can’t/won’t speak for all Democrats, but there are plenty of Ukrainians and other white people who might never vote Democratic in my area, and I’m ok with that. My sister did recently get ripped off in a used car deal with a Ukrainian-American, but that’s another story.
There are also plenty of Mexican/Central American people, many of them illegal, in my area, and I don’t think about their eventual voting habits. Come to think of it, I do think of them as less likely to rip me off in a used car deal.
No, I am saying you are using/repeating dehumanizing language which enables violence against those so dehumanized.
Is that a trick question? 'Cause the answer is: “Yes”. It’s kind of hard to engage with the rest of your post, since it’s basically recycled GOP talking points.
In any case, considering that the United States has economically exploited (as well as just blatantly stole from) a great many countries, it strikes me as odd to deny emigrants from these nations a share of the spoils
By the way, I’m a white Eastern European immigrant who votes Democrat. Dunno how that fits into your worldview.
Well, I’m against wars, borders, violence, and the nation-state. But you were using dehumanizing slurs. Such as “illegals.” Not as dehumanizing as “Untermenschen,” but foully dehumanizing still. Didn’t you notice that?
Because someone is not “an illegal”, they are a human in a country illegally. When you start using words like illegal as a noun, you are no longer describing them as human, ergo you are dehumanizing them.
Jesus was also a victim of torture. No?
As I mentioned earlier, I live in an area with lots of undocumented brown people. I have also traveled to Israel numerous times. I’ll try to address the issues you raise.
In my area, brown people do not compete with Americans for jobs. That’s our actual experience here, and claiming that they do is a popular GOP talking point – except among farmers.
I am not OK with Israel’s monster wall, or with what amounts to an apartheid system there. However, Israel has mainly advertised itself as pretty much the opposite of multicultural, and it’s not a place I enjoy visiting.
The documented and undocumented brown people I know miss their homes as much as any of us would in the same situation. Leaving home to come here was a heavy decision they had to make. For the ones who left for economic reasons, I don’t think it would have taken much to get them to stay in their country of origin. Some go back as soon as they are able.
How many people become legal residents of this country every year?
1967 = 360,000. 1987 = 600,00. 2007 = 1,100,000
In 2012 the USA granted over a million green cards and naturalized 750,000 Thousand people.
Does that sound like a country that’s making it harder fro people to come here?
High praise, indeed!
When we talk about drivers who break the law, we talk about unlicensed drivers, or uninsured drivers, or habitual speeders, or whatever, we never seem to call them “illegal drivers”: we say what they have done wrong. Same with buildings: they are “nonconforming” or “code-violating” or whatever. Why should immigrants and migrants get the label “illegals,” then? They are undocumented or improperly documented. “Illegal” is a word designed to evoke a specific emotion. It’s like “witch hunt,” in that most of the argument is hidden in the label.
“First World” is synonymous with conquest and floods of immigration. Without open borders, in every direction, the first world would never have been built.
Closing borders is the end game.
Perhaps not “synonymous”, then. I appreciate the effort you undertook to correct things.
Sweden never had colonies? What about Finland and New Sweden?
Of course! Deport the illegal immigrants, why didn’t anyone else think of that. That way the farmers couldn’t illegally employ illegal workers. And once they’re all gone they’ll finally pay a decent wage for people to pick apples. White folk will flock to the apple fields for their fair and honest pay.
But we definitely need to start by deporting the illegal migrants. I say we start by emptying out all those Irish, Spanish and English illegal immigrants first (chronological order seems fair), we can deal with the indigenous Americans (but not North Americans!) after that.
/Snark over
You could of course just improve your immigration process so that entering the country illegally isn’t the most appealing option, and offer fair rights for all of your citizens, irrelevant of what side of the border they were born on. Or would that involve too much empathy?
Illegal workers go where there’s work. If you regulate your working conditions so that workers receive a fair wage, you deincentivise the employment of illegal workers (who are only employed for their cost saving benefits). At which point your apples will be picked by legal Mexicans instead. Which is a good thing for everyone.
However I would ask you to shelve your assertion that it would have any impact on employment figures, which are far more complex from a sociopolitical perspective. Just ask all the white maids.
Holy American Exceptionalism, Batman, let’s unpack some of the underlying “givens” that allow for your bizarre, offensive GOP-soup of Socratic bullshit*, shall we? I’m replying to this first comment, but grabbing some of my faves from some of the others replies, as some stuff ramped up rather un-ignorably…
No. Just because you don’t see others here asking these “practical” questions, doesn’t mean they haven’t been considered. When someone has a different perspective, or a different set of priorities, that isn’t necessarily because they haven’t considered your perspective. These questions have been asked over and over again (hence the “talking points” label) and have answers. The answer in some cases is “who cares? Stop whining.”
I don’t know off-hand, you haven’t supplied a shred of evidence to back up what you claim here. And whose educational outcomes are you comparing them to? White, native-born isolated unskilled laborers ghettoized into underserved neighborhoods with underfunded schools? Other people with a three-headed beast of a language barrier, racism, and poverty to overcome? Other people who went into deep, illegal debt, and risked their health and lives to tear themselves away from their family and friends to give their children a better life? That would be approaching fair. So what, then is the cause of this “achievement gap?” Something innate? that would be the only justification for your claims here.
Yikes, so your vision of the world consists of walled gardens of North American/Western European countries, surrounded by violent,bloodthirsty, barbarian hordes pressing against the outer walls, trying to break in and rape and pillage? What proportion of immigrants crossing our borders do you think is bloodthirsty pirates? any more than the proportion of violent people who are born here? do you think there is something inherently violent about “foreigners?”
Is no one saying that? People who generally have liberal immigration beliefs don’t hold other countries to this standard? Citation needed. If you’re talking about the small (albeit influential) group of hard-line Israel single-issue-voters in the U.S., well, stop extrapolating.
Suffering? What are we suffering? Other human beings who were born somewhere else now living and working here? I fail to see how that means anyone in the U.S. is suffering. Maybe a loss of privilege, a loss of complete control, or an illusion of control of the shape of the cultural on this particular mass of land that we occupy, but complaining about a loss of privilege as “suffering” is a bit whiny…
Wow. Damn. Let’s get this straight. “We” didn’t produce shit. you didn’t produce shit. The founding fathers and mothers, a lot of freely available (if you’re up for some Injun killin’!), arable land, and a series of accidents and coincidences of geography and history created this “civilization.” You didn’t produce this place, It created you. All you had to do was be born here, and being born somewhere is something we all did, so you can stop patting yourself on the back. I don’t know how you can say this shit without hearing how inherently racist this statement is.
In sociology (what am I some kind of Frankfurt school nut!) there’s a concept called social reproduction that describes the process by which institutions and structures confer advantage across generations to those on the inside, to the exclusion of those on the outside. You actually seem to be proposing this as an active strategy, and as an explanation of our greatness. Your arguments suggest that being selective about entry of immigrants is what made this nation great, which is not only the opposite of the history of America, it would also be a pretty weak central principle. Social Reproduction also is what creates aristocracy, the force that is, by many, that is considered anathema to the American Dream. Preserving one’s own privilege by protecting the inheritance of resources is what defines an aristocracy. Your economic/political philosophy would make us global aristocrats.
Your hand waving to try to be rid of the problems of colonization ignore critical realities. Our “success” as a nation has depended on subjugating people from all over the world (slavery being only the most egregious example…) to say that we some kind of right to guard the fruits of this exploitation is just laughable on it’s face. We still benefit from cheap and abusive labor overseas and within our arbitrary national boundaries. To extend this to the idea that we shouldn’t have to compete for jobs with foreign labor is the same bullshit, different day. What has any native born American done to deserve first crack at a job here? And are you saying American’s wouldn’t be able to compete? Then maybe they don’t deserve them in the first place…
On a “practical level” if you think poor, unskilled people entering into richer countries is a problem, the more humane, permanent and effective solution is to support polices that elevate the economies of all nations. Push factors are far more powerful than pull factors when it comes to immigration. Even Barbarian hordes get homesick. Give people a reason to stay in their motherland, and they will, long before the playing field is anywhere near even. Part of supporting this equalization is allowing people to come here to blossom, send money back home, while working hard and paying taxes as part of the legitimate economy, lifting themselves, and those in their own country out of oppressive poverty.
*don’t tone argument me, you may have dressed your comments up in politeness, but their content is pretty heinous.
I don’t think you’re a bad person, and I hope @ohmyohmy and @HMSGoose don’t, either.
I do – with all due respect, and I mean that – think you’re a little naive, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t last very long as an apple picker at any price. (You could easily give it a try. PM me and I can get you set up for an apple-picking vacation next September-November.)
The entire economy depends on cheap items like apples and many other things. My state has the highest minimum wage in the country, and good apple pickers make considerably more than the minimum.
Apple growers tend to be Republicans, but you’ll find them, at a minimum, quiet about the immigration issue. More likely, you’ll find them in support of maintaining their supply of workers. They hatehatehate being saddled with the need to hire these workers, but they’d fight any plan to increase pay to pickers of any color or nationality as if their economic lives depended on it.
These situations are complicated, and they involve real people and families. As “a highly paid software developer,” you need to check your privilege. I’m serious about the offer to set you up with an apple picking job. You’ll find your co-workers to be generous and hardworking. You’ll find their kids to be adorable and exuberant. And they will out-pick you.
