What with the “Iran cyber assault” - which has not been confirmed to my knowledge from within Iran - and this, Agent Orange’s propaganda team is in full active mode.
Mirages and deceipts. 1930, National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The most important thing is to get that horror fuckshow voted out.
It’s mind-boggling to see mass internment camps in the USA. Concentration Camps.
Strategically, at an international level, this is a bad bad move. China is a hegemonistic nation, and is salivating as its competing empire shoots itself again and again in the foot.
Which is why Nazi Germany is a bad example to follow: it was an apex regime in terms of the awfulness it was willing to perpetuate to come out on top. Trump’s USA is not.
We are most definitely in an era of show your colors, stand and be counted, and be ready to sacrifice more than you think.
BB introduced me some 10 years ago to “From Dictatorship to Democracy” by Gene Sharp.
It’s sadly, and mindfuckingly, time that the US population get highly familiar with that text. Here in the UK, I suspect that requirement is imminent. It’s no longer a radical outlier.
I’m a liberal who believes in strong, well-enforced borders – to prevent exploitation, to prevent damage to the working class, to prevent plutocrats from profiting by under-paying people who can’t take the concerns up with management because management will deport them.
If any Democrat came up with a smart immigration policy (mandatory e-verify with charges for companies and CEO’s that don’t comply, smart-card visas where you can’t overstay, taxes on remittances, a real guest-worker plan for crop season and crop season only), then they would win. It’s because Democrats can’t face the idea that, yes, some mean-bad-imperfect rules are required in a mean-bad-imperfect world that makes Democrats such a bunch of useless candidates, because they think they can’t support stronger borders without losing votes, when in fact the average voter would prefer to vote for a candidate that worked harder for citizens than for undocumented persons.
I know I want a candidate and a party that is not only imperfect but deliberately bad and mean 
Not what I meant at all.
Strong labor laws would accomplish all of this (and so much more!) without asking a single thing about country of origin…
Yes, but so would strong labor laws that DO ask about country-of-origin.
And poor people afraid to go to the police when you stiff them for services rendered.
Some poles I know are frustrated that so many conservative poles are Pro-Trump when he stiffed many Polish contractors in building Trump Tower Chicago. (Apparently there are a lot of illegal European immigrants around, but it gets very little airtime)
But then you would be targeting vulnerable people with no added benefit, so…
I had done years and years of research at the closed stacks at the library at U.C. Berkeley, and I had come across prime Gestapo documents. It was an incredible experience to pick up something that was a Gestapo document stamped ‘For The Eyes Of The Higher Police Only,’ which was the Gestapo, and I knew German well enough that I could read these things. This was not American propaganda about the Nazis, these were real Gestapo documents. There was one which was the diary of an S.S. man who was stationed in Poland, in Warsaw, and he’d even drawn pictures of Jews in the ghetto. He’d gone into the ghetto, the Jewish ghetto, and drawn pictures of what he described as these colorful people. That was in the late forties when I read that diary and I still remember the one line he had in there: ‘We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.’ I still remember that line, and that influenced me. I thought, there is amongst us something that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but which is not human. It is not human to complain in your diary that starving children are keeping you awake.
Uh, if you’re illegally trying to get work in a country you’re not a citizen of, your vulnerability is the result of your choices.
It’s generally from LACK of choices, actually, in the home country. Global remittances in 2018 were just south of US$700 billion dollars. The fact that people have to move for labor, and that remittances make up such a large portion of the global economy, especially in the global south, should tell you something about lack of opportunities, and how the global north is willing to look the other way when it economically benefits them by giving them a cheap supply of labor.
As long as we view human beings, looking for work, as just another line in the ledger books, or as foreign “invaders”, we will continue to have human rights atrocities such as concentration camps and mass deaths in the Mediterranean. This is the world that the US and Europe built. This is the one that the people in power wanted - cheap labor from desperate people and jingoistic nativists who will blame the working poor just trying to feed their families.
Ah yes, this massive groundswell of support for extreme anti-immigration policies explains why Trump’s stupid 40-foot-tall transparent black ladder-repelling wall has 30 – 40% approval, and why support for the DREAM act consistently polls between 60 and 87%.
Deportation fanatics are not the majority. They’re just really fucking loud.
Statistically, immigrants commit less crime than American-born citizens (I mean, this has to make sense on some level… if you’re here illegally, why would you commit a crime that would get you deported? Asylum is also a legal process that by law has to occur after the asylum-seeker has arrived in this country (and no, you are not required to seek asylum through a port of entry, and closing ports of entry does not “fix” the problem of people seeking asylum). The asylum process, as well as immigration in general, is a degrading and arduous process that can take years to go through. There’s no reason for that to be the case. It’s completely unnecessary to subject people willing to move to this country and contribute to our society to such ludicrous treatment. Our immigration laws are already insane.
While I’ve got you on the line, can you explain exactly what “sovereignty” the US stands to lose by letting people from other countries come here, where they will be subject to our laws and pay taxes and contribute to our economy? Because the idyllic picture of America that was always painted for me as a child was one of a melting pot where people from many places and cultures could come together in a harmonious whole that was greater than the sum of its parts (obviously this is kind of white-washy bullshit, but ideals are worth fighting for). That picture of America is fundamentally incompatible with the argument that immigrants somehow “threaten our sovereignty”. Immigrants make this country better, not worse.
News flash: before Trump was elected, Obama led the rankings for the number of deportations executed during his presidency, and apprehensions at the border dropped considerably. Republicans still insisted that he was doing nothing to “protect the border”. There is absolutely no immigration and border-crossing enforcement mechanism that will ever be strict enough for fascists and white nationalists.
It’s weird how immigration only became a problem once non-white people started doing it. There didn’t used to be any immigration quotas or restrictions when this country was founded (read: stolen from the native population), and restrictions have a long history of being just impossibly racist for no god damned reason whatsoever. Are white people just afraid that others will come in and do what we did to the Native Americans?
On that note (sort of), I’d recommend Moonlighting (1982).
A clueless MP inadvertently makes this protest video even more educational
That is amazingly powerful. And the calm defiance in the face of what clearly meant to be an intimidating show of force is remarkable. The MP clearly had no plan B and was left just huffing. Not so sure that will be the outcome next time, though.
The cruelty is the point.
To labor in exchange for compensation is not and should never be an illegal act, no matter what the location. You’re lumping in the fallacy that employers are not the true engineers of this scheme in order to avoid government regulation in favor of exploitative profit.
Oh, I think employers should face jail time and loss-of-business if they’re found to have hired undocumented persons; I think e-verify and SSN Checks should be mandatory.
We have to work this problem from both ends: Stop people from hiring the undocumented, and stop the undocumented from being here to hire.
