Regardless of what you think about legal or illegal immigration, the use of the drivers license data is seems like quite a violation. The states that do this to setup all people in the states with driver's licenses so that they are:
1. meeting the minimum bar for being a safe driver.
2. driving a registered and insured car that meets the laws of the state.
This is good for citizens, I've been hit by someone driving an unregistered, uninsured car who was undocumented and it was a nightmare to deal with. I had to eat the cost of fixing my bike, and luckily I was covered by the military health insurance for my injuries or that would have been exponentially worse.
Using this data for immigration enforcement pushes drivers back to the illegal, unregistered, uninsured situation that existed before. It puts a tax on regular citizens who are following the rules.
It has always been conspicuous to me how vocal most Americans are about wanting personal privacy AND about wanting “smaller” government but at the same time not doing much of anything when things like this, the Snowden leaks, and etc come out. We spend very, very large amounts of money on this and if you listen to pundits it’s not doing anything because the “crisis” of “illegal” immigration is always getting worse.
It reminds me very much of backscatter machines at the airport and the insistence that we don’t bring bottles larger than 3 or 4 oz on a flight.
In general, folks who are asking for a small government aren't actually asking for a small government. They are asking for the government to reallocate to the things they care about and away from the things they don't.
"Small government" is just a pleasing label that is more marketable for their priorities.
My in-laws all wear t-shirts that say things like "Get in, we're doing freedom and shit" with a picture of some founding fathers in sunglasses, or that simply say "FREEDOM" with a flag, or a 1776 in red white and blue etc. They also believe in the drug war (the smattering of drug problems among them is an irony I'll save for another comment I guess), they believe in walls, and a police force with near absolute power (because the good guys are the good guys, what could go wrong?). They're fine with protestors being arrested, and if they're roughed up a little bit in the process that's OK too. They're good with banning books in schools that might be "indecent."
Anyway, I agree. To them, and I would count them in the demo you describe, "Freedom" is just a logo and "small government" is just a meaningless slogan. It has more to do with their specific cultural and moral fears.
"Freedom" is one of those words that can mean just about whatever you want it to. From Orwell's Politics and the English Language:
> Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. *The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.*
I generally agree that the people you’re talking about are unique in how they obfuscate their intentions when they talk about this stuff. It’s always parsing slogans and decoding in-group concepts.
I think the truth is that the American political system is structured in such a way that substantive policy change is monumentally difficult and not correlated with how angry or how vocal the citizenry is about any particular topic. Virtually everyone I know was appalled by the Snowden leaks, yet I know of no one that actually changed their vote. Or, if any candidate ran on dismantling the surveillance state got elected in the aftermath.
I think this is best illustrated in the pathological US need for every level of the entire infrastructure stack to be revenue positive. The recent whinging about the post office is a great example. Further, people asking "whos going to pay" for trains demonstrates the lack of complex thinking. By way of counter example: the Japanese have figured out how to value the high speed train network by how much business it enables every year as opposed to simply looking at how much it costs vs ticket revenue. This isn't, of course, to imply that somehow Japan is magically better. Just that countries like France and China who have less decrepit, more complete public infrastructure didnt get there by accident.
Seems quite biased, considering they call for "Congress [to] significantly reduce the number of people subject to deportation by—for example—creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, dramatically [reduce] the grounds of removability that are based on criminal legal involvement, and [enact] a statute of limitations on deportations"
Some people might argue that we should be dedicating our scarce housing resources towards expanding the number of legal immigrants with high value skills, not uneducated illegal immigrants, and that illegal immigrants deserve to be deported for entering the country illegally.
You're ignoring the very next line which states "why" they make this particular recommendation, a recommendation that they're pretty consistent about making throughout the rest of the document:
> "While those reforms do not address surveillance itself, they are the most direct way to undercut ICE surveillance authority."
This website, https://americandragnet.org/ , seems dedicated to curtailing dragnet surveillance in the USA. The facts around that surveillance are so disturbing that I'm amazed we can sit around and talk about deportation when it's a just a side show compared to the surveillance. The facts that they're laying out:
- ICE is tracking your address, your home moves, and your driving habits (or at least, they're doing so for ~75% of people in the USA)
- ICE is hijacking government functions like our DMVs and our utility companies without oversight in order to find out who you are, where you live, who you live near, etc. in order to detain and deport... well, I'll leave the who up to you, but if you're not uneasy with the start of that sentence, I doubt any way of ending it will either.
It's not the deportations that are concerning; it's the paths we're taking to get there.
This is a false dichotomy, how we allocate housing is the wrong framing. The problem is that that housing is in any way a scarce resource. Solve that problem instead.
Those are two separate issues which both can be solved independently. We can simultaneously overturn SFH zoning and also aggressively deport illegal immigrants.
The amount of money made by owners off of the labor of those undocumented people is strong evidence that we're throwing out a very valuable resource if we aggressively deport people.
>" We could, or we could not deport humans and solve housing and probably be even better off... "
This feels good to say, but it assumes there are no downsides whatsoever with no longer having deportation as an option and that we can 'solve' housing.
I personally think we can make housing better but housing issues have existed in every civilization throughout recorded history. I can't help but think it's an emergent phenomenon when you get plenty of people living together in a world where land is limited and two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Not that we shouldn't try to help, but the issue will never truly go away. And, letting anyone who steps foot into your country stay for as long as they like seems like a recipe for creating housing demand that can never keep up with supply.
Those illegal immigrants are here at the cost of the wages of legal citizens. If no legal citizens wanted to work for farmers, two things would happen, wages would go up (a lot), and investment in automation would go up. Both of those things are positives for the US economy and average unskilled US citizen. Food prices will go up, but I don't think they'll go up as much as you think as labor has never been the biggest component of farming costs.
People don't have a right to live in the US just because they decided to walk across the border illegally.
> People don't have a right to live in the US just because they decided to walk across the border illegally.
This is invented nonsense. It would be just as reasonable to say "People don't have the right to live in the US just because they were lucky enough to be born there" or "People don't have the right to live in the US just because their parents were US citizens" or whatever.
"Walking across a border illegally" is an imaginary thing we made up because some people (probably xenophobic people) thought it was a good idea at some point in the past. I don't think unrestricted immigration is necessarily the answer either, but the system as it is clearly does not work.
Nearly all laws are purely inventions designed towards a particular outcome.
That doesn’t mean they’re nonsense, or that instituting the opposite of current laws would be “just as reasonable”.
The system as it is does work. Could it work better? Sure. Perhaps we could actually strictly enforce immigration laws, and the result would be ideal.
You can argue against the idea of community membership being predicated on more than just showing up, but simply calling it “xenophobia” isn’t an argument.
Furthermore, when one side is doing everything possible to undermine the established laws, it’s not convincing when they point out the resulting reduced efficacy as if it were an inherent flaw instead of their own doing.
Only if we let it. A workers coop doesn't engage in a labor market, it pays everyone an equal portion of the company's profit.
And I'm pretty sure we could absorb a lot more labor and have a stronger safety net for the folks who currently need to work three jobs to make ends meet.
Closing borders really only tackles a high level symptom. If we're not excited to have more help building society, we're doing something wrong.
I do not believe it's subject to supply and demand. For several reasons.
Labor is not fungible, even so called unskilled labor is actually quite skilled and requires significant training. (Put me in a strawberry field and I guarantee I'll be slower and worse then existing workers.)
Several sectors are struggling to hire workers, and have been for a long time. But until the pandemic, they really didn't see much increase in pay, despite demand.
We have regulated price minimums on labor.
Unions exist, and can ensure increased labor pool doesn't dilute pay.
The number of immigrants is small relative to the number of working Americans. And the rate of their arrival is slow. Also, we require working people to have work visas, further limiting the number of people who can impact labor pool.
Undocumented immigrants provide a significant and grossly disproportionate chunk of construction labor in the United States. If you kick them out, the housing shortage only gets worse.
Or to but it another way, wages would rise for Americans and legal immigrants in construction, especially those who have been involved with the justice system and have a record.
Or more likely, costs would rise for people in search of those services, and the extra profit would be pocketed by the management and shareholders of the construction companies.
In theory. I meant: specifically for the roles in construction that would become available. These are not high-paying jobs and they lack the benefits that we’ve come to appreciate, such as care or compensation upon loss of life or limb. Since the cost to the employer would increase, what would be the effect on wages?
Further, my understanding is that the employers of day-labor off-the-table construction work don’t much care about arrest records.
Please go physically visit Auschwitz, tour the grounds and museum exhibits illustrating the genuine horrors perpetuated there, and then see if your offensively ignorant misuse of the term "concentration camp" still seems appropriate to you.
I am a Jew and I have studied this and visited camps. I just visited the site of one in France. It is quite clear that needing to separate what has happened to children and families on the southern border from that which happened to, say, the Roma during the Reich is suspicious. No one will be held accountable.
History will eventually regard the imperialist behavior of the US quite negatively. This is no comparison to Hitler’s Germany but it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore that they designed the racial Nuremberg laws on Jim Crow America. Racism, segregation, and the like are an intrinsic part of American history and one of its exports.
We built concentration camps for Japanese during the war and nothing came of that either.
The border enforcement is not in and of itself imperialist. This is a bad faith engagement with what I think is a pretty clear argument.
Our border enforcement is a small piece of a much larger program of imperialism. We overthrow and destabilize central and South American governments which are not sufficiently pliant client states. Then we make a show of rejecting groups fleeing those conditions even though the vast majority of undocumented immigration does not happen via border crossing.
The current ubiquity of child abuse in the US ICE camps is shocking. However, if the bar is “not as bad as Hitler while he was losing the war”, then I agree there’s a long way to fall.
Heck, ICE doctors haven’t been caught performing forced hysterectomies for almost two years:
“Caught” is not a synonym for “unsupported anonymous allegations by immigration activists”.
It’s insulting, naive, and simply wrong to suggest an equivalence to our enforcement of immigration law on people voluntarily emigrating to the United States.
hardly anyone actually crosses a border illegally, almost all illegal immigrants came via legal means and stayed beyond the time limits. By almost all I mean literally almost all.
The real solution is to hit employers that employ them, as how many people are in this counry illegally has very little to do with actual border control(meaning watching the border).
This simple reality gets overlooked all the time. A large portion of labor in this country is undocumented. The employers, whos existence depends on this and related labor abuses, are rarely if ever held accountable and its the people DOING the work who get abused.
It's hard to measure as those stats are for those who are newly coming and most undocumented immigrants have been here more than 10+ years, also many go under the radar.
That said I did make a mistake, I had read somewhere it was above 90% but on searching again it was referring to "non-central america undocumenteds" not all as a whole. But that doesn't change that hardly anyone comes wandering through a desert and climbing over a wall/fence.
It’s true that we don’t enforce the law at the borders. ICE agents get caught engaging in illegal human rights abuses all the time, but nothing changes.
Also, most people that cross at the Mexican border have legitimate asylum claims, but the US has intentionally defunded the judicial system, leading to camps and long wait times. Disbanding / defunding the courts is pretty much the definition of not enforcing the law.
However, I’m not sure how ICE warrantlessly surveilling US citizens is related to any of this.
Unsolicited tip:
If you want to sneak into the US illegally (and don’t want to bother with getting a visa to overstay), then come in along the East Coast, West Coast, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Canada. Those places don’t have names that sound like “Mexican”, so conservative politicians don’t really bother funding border security for them. Thanks to tourism, this is particularly true of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
This is what the vast majority of illegal immigrants do. Most scenarios where coming in via Mexico makes sense involve intentionally being detained in order to apply for asylum.
Those are 2019 numbers. There has been a massive upsurge in illegal crossing starting in 2020. Many have attributed that surge to the Biden administration new catch and release policy. People who are caught at the border now are bussed to the closest major city and told to go to immigration court hearing -- which most just skip.
I'm sorry, but can you expand on this claim? Do you believe that laws are not enforced at the border? Do the agents let anyone in or what is your believe that is happening?
Just FYI I live close to the border and go often there and it's swarming with officers, all cars are being checked even when on the US side and crossing the border is quite an ordeal even if you are a citizen forget being an immigrant.
>>Do the agents let anyone in or what is your believe that is happening?
What happens is,
Immigrants will come to the border and claim asylum then once they're in the country skip the asylum court hearing. The judge issues a deportation order but by then there is no way to find them.
This is good for citizens, I've been hit by someone driving an unregistered, uninsured car who was undocumented and it was a nightmare to deal with. I had to eat the cost of fixing my bike, and luckily I was covered by the military health insurance for my injuries or that would have been exponentially worse.
Using this data for immigration enforcement pushes drivers back to the illegal, unregistered, uninsured situation that existed before. It puts a tax on regular citizens who are following the rules.