Tag: Immigration

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The big idea behind Trump and the Right’s anti-DEI stance is that race shouldn’t matter when making decision about who gets admitted into a university or gets a job. All that matters is quality.

The big idea behind Trump’s anti-immigrant stance is that the government should be able to stop any Brown person or anyone speaking Spanish to enquire about their immigration status because they might be here illegally. This strategy, just validated by the Supreme Court, doesn’t take into consideration that 19% of Americans are Latinos and 13% blacks. So over 30% of American citizens must live in fear of being stopped on the street and asked for their papers. Their papers. How American is that?

So while investigating the immigration status of a person the government can use race to stop any person they suspect as being here illegally but can’t use race when rewarding people for jobs or university placement, race is irrelevant.

Got it. But don’t tell me race doesn’t matter to you because obviously it does.

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I don’t like Trump — either the man or his chaotic policies — however I have to admit he is the master of confrontational politics. How this dimwitted asshole comes out on top is beyond me. The problem is he does.

Look at what he has mastered in the last few months. He maneuvered the Democrats into defending illegal immigrants, transexuals and criminals. All people worthy of defense but also marginalized people with tricky legal situations. More importantly, very few actual voters among them.

Think about Trump bringing troops into Washington. What the Democrats are saying is that there is no problem in Washington and that the crime rate is actually the lowest it has been in 30 years. True enough but it sounds rather lame in comparison to Trump’s sending in troops so you are safe to walk the streets of Washington. Instead of making a forceful anti-crime statement, the Democrats are saying you think crime is bad now, it was much worse 10 years ago. It reeks of passivity and inaction.

Immigrants are coming into the country illegally. Trump is taking an aggressive stand to prevent their entry and kicking out the ones he sees as criminal. What are the Democrats saying — we need immigrants and we can’t break up immigrant families if the children were born in USA. So the Democrats end up making a big falderal about the deportation of Kilmar Garcia — a legal immigrant whose wife has accused him of abuse. The Democrats reaction to Trump is this is a bureaucratic error, Trump’s response is that Garcia is a wife beating thug. How are the visuals on this?

Garcia deserves due process but the Democrats are missing the point — what are the Democrats going to do about illegal immigration. Yes, we need immigrants and yes we should not separate parents from their children — that isn’t, however, an answer to what are you going to do about illegal immigration. It sounds very much like you intend to do nothing and that becomes the problem. Worse still, it is hardly a rousing call to battle with the Republicans.

Then there are the drag queens. A target so big that it is impossible for the Republicans not to hit. The visuals on this are horrible. What the Democrats want the public to know is they are defending 13 year olds bullied in their schools and who need help with their gender identification. This is a complex problem and the country is beginning to suss it out. Unfortunately Trump has painted a much different picture. Instead of seeing the abused adolescent, they are seeing 6 foot 4 hunk with a blonde bouffant wig, costume jewelry, and an evening gown reading to kindergartners about how to get a sex change operation.

It’s not that I think the Democrats are wrong in any of this, its more that they are being suckered into defending unpopular positions over the bigger concerns of the average Americans. Trump pulls Democrats into debates that are nuanced and difficult to explain. Whenever they do try to explain it sounds like they are pro-criminal or pro-illegal immigration or pro-transexuals in the classroom. It doesn’t matter that this is untrue – perception is reality. At least, it is until someone changes the perception. This isn’t going to be done by Donald Trump. It has to be the Democrats.

Trump uses the media to dance to his tune. Talking only about the issues he wants to talk about while ignoring his weaknesses. Democrats should park themselves outside medical offices and ask people about their health insurance problems. A lot of people have good stories about shabby treatment from insurance companies — get it on the news. Every single day. Or go to grocery stores and ask customers about the higher prices they are paying. Connect to people with issues that everybody has. Widen the net of potential voters.

Or you can continue to talk about unpopular issues that the average voter cares very little about and, when you lose the election, you can stare confusedly into the abyss and wonder why this keeps happening.

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The past few weeks businesses involved in meat packing, farming, travel and leisure are complaining that they are losing workers due to ICE raids. This would cause me to break out the handkerchief and shed a tear if it weren’t for the fact that these businesses are breaking the law and they don’t seem terribly worried about talking about it. Farm AID believes that 40% of farm laborers are undocumented. This means an awful lot of farmers aren’t checking their worker’s documents.

If immigrants illegally crossing the borders is about getting law breakers, then the same strategy should be used with the businesses breaking the laws regarding hiring undocumented employees. Both parties are breaking the law, why focus on the person looking for work and not the person hiring them? ICE agents in baklavas should be taking away business owners who, apparently quite openly, are flouting the law. They should be afraid to come into work each day instead they are complaining that they no longer have access to cheap labor because ICE is taking their employees.

The problem here is cheap labor. American Businesses want employees that are willing to do backbreaking labor for pennies. Americans refused to break their backs for pennies. They also want benefits for their work — like vacation pay, health benefits, and sick pay. Immigrants are willing to risk death to come here to do backbreaking labor for pennies and no benefits because it is still better than what they get at home.

So, round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows. But I am pretty sure it won’t be higher wages.

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I can’t help myself. I try to ignore Donald Trump as much as I can but since he is now president it is impossible, so here goes.

Donald Trump wants to prioritize White South Africans as immigrants. Does this have anything to do with native South African Elon Musk? No, it couldn’t. Musk would never use his influence in the Trump Administration to ask for something so egregiously racist.

Immigration give priority to people who are in immediate danger. Trump’s focus is on South Africans of European descent. So this applies to mix raced South Africans as long as one of the two parents were of European descent. What if only one of the grand parents is of European descent? What percentage European descent is he talking about?

Then, why do White South Africans get priority? Are they in any more danger than women who want out of Iran? Or Sudanese rebels? Or just plain poor folk from Central America who want to escape drug lords?

The troubling aspect about Trump’s order is that it is so transparently racist. This order comes while he is trying to shut down the border from non-white immigrants. So Trump isn’t really opposed to immigrants, just non-white immigrants.

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Robin Hansen worries that the worldwide population decline is driving the human species to extinction. His concern is shared by growing number of conservative thinkers. You would think in a world with 7 billion plus people that this could be put on the back burner. Apparently, I am wrong. Hanse believes it requires immediate attention. There becomes a point, are so Hansen thinks, that declining population becomes irreversible and that this point could come soon unless we change our ways. Don’t be fooled by the expected growth of population continuing and is expected to reach somewhere in the region of 10 billion by 2100. This is an urgent problem.

Hansen views our population cutting ways as similar to an addiction. People live in big cities where there are more things to do. People want to have some adventures before they settle into family life. They need to educate themselves for the complex modern world which requires quite a bit of training expense which, then, entails a bit of time to repay the money borrowed to obtain that training and education. They want to live a well rounded life. They use birth control to ensure they can have these experiences. They see themselves as something more than breeders. These all seem like reasonable things to want but they also are stopping people from having children, hence the crisis.

Hansen, then, wonders what can we do to make child rearing more attractive so people will stop enjoying their childless lives and start repopulating the planet. This is where things get dicey. Having children is both expensive and time consuming. People have to be willing to make this sacrifice. How do you get people to trade in leisurely Saturday mornings for transporting three kids in three different directions? As Hansen even admits, there are no easily solutions to this problem. Hansen lamely tosses out paying couples to have babies. Who exactly does he think will pay for this? Certainly not the American taxpayer.

This leaves the unspoken hint of coercion. Women will have to subordinate their ambitions and desires to repopulate the planet. It is worrisome that this is being framed as an existential crisis because, then, more drastic measures become acceptable. If the world needs babies, then the world better make sure women are having babies. While Hansen avoids suggesting the subordination of women, other conservative thinkers are not so cautious. There are conservative thinkers who want to do away with votes for women, who want to create a Christian Nationalists state where men are in control, and who want to restrict a woman’s right to an abortion even if her health is at stake.

What makes this concern irksome is that Conservatives are also panicking about immigration which would be a solution to the declining population problem. Many western countries now are below replacement population fertility. These are the very countries that poor immigrants want to go so why not just welcome these immigrants as the solution to our problem. I mean there are hordes at the Mexican border. Those hordes are largely young and fertile. Win Win, right.

Not exactly. These immigrants are criminals and/or have different values than us. OK, criminals I get and I support keeping those immigrants out. But the vast majority of immigrants are just looking for an opportunity for a better life which seems in alignment to the American Dream. Additionally, the vast majority of them come from Central America where Christianity is the most popular religion. Since some form of Christianity is the religion most Americans practice, this seems another point where the values of the immigrants align with the American people. This, to me, suggests we have a lot in common with the immigrants at the border, so why all the fuss about immigration?

This is why I don’t buy that this is a crisis worthy of my attention. Particularly when Conservatives get all wanky when Environmental groups talk about Global Warming. If global warming is a hoax based on extrapolating present temperature data into the future even though I can actually see the problems of a warming world — with more extreme weather, more fires and a warming ocean then why should I believe in declining population problem while sitting in traffic jams and searching for open parking spaces at crowded shopping malls.

This is all about controlling women’s fertility and getting the right women (read white middle class here) to have children. It would be far more encouraging if conservatives genuinely supported an agenda that supported families, but they don’t. They don’t want to spend any money on helping anyone, so the only tool they have in their tool kit is coercion which will only work if they take power away from women. And I think Conservatives will have a difficult time, even from Conservative women, if they try to take this power.

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Well, it is certainly reassuring that Governor Abbott realizes that shooting migrants is against Federal Law. And, just as a helpful reminder for Abbot, it is also against God’s law. It is right there in the Ten Commandments. I thought it was against Texas Law too but, who knows, I am willing to risk being wrong here and say it is. I apologize if I am wrong.

I am sure in a week from now, after the media make a big media storm about this, rightfully in this instance, and Abbott’s political analysts assess the damage done, he might even apologize. But only if absolutely necessary. Honestly I don’t think that Abbott wants to shoot migrants. He is dealing with a difficult situation that nobody really has the answer to and he wants to make political hay. Abbott was careless. He was thinking about the problem and not that the vast majority of migrants are actual flesh and blood human beings.

So, he found himself thinking out loud and it popped into his head that the only way for this problem to end is for the migrants to disappear and an easy way to make that happen is shooting them. Then, knowing this sounded awkward, he tried to reassure his audience that, of course he can’t actually murder anyone because the Feds would arrest him. Which is not reassuring at all. It sounds very much like the only thing stopping him from mowing down migrants is the thought that he wouldn’t do well in prison and not his own strong moral values. Abbott’s tone is shockingly dehumanizing and that is worrisome.

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Andrew Sullivan, who I generally agree with, recently wrote in his blog about immigration. I think he explained the problem fairly well but provided very little in the way of solutions to this complex problem. His whole idea is better policing at the border which helps some but it isn’t really the problem. It may slow the stream. But how this will stop illegal immigration is a mystery.

Immigrants aren’t leaving their countries because it is a lark and they think it will be fun to illegally enter the United States. They are coming because they are poor, hungry and desperate. When a reader pointed this out to him, Sullivan responds, “It is not the job of American taxpayers or the American government to fix all the misgovernment on the planet, end climate change, prevent natural disasters globally … in order to have a stable nation-state with defensible borders.”

Well, then. I guess Sullivan told them. Better policing and support for bureaucracy to handle the policing is the answer. But we all know, it isn’t. These people have walked thousand of miles through jungles and deserts. They have risked their lives, and the lives of their children, in overcrowded ships which often send their passengers tumbling into the seas in the dark of night. These people, knowing that the people they are dealing with might just rip them off and sell them into slavery, are giving them what little money they have any way. These are the people who are going to back down because of more police. Really?

Sullivan rather blithely compares these immigrants to the invading Russian army in the Ukraine, “we have currently spent $75 billion defending another country’s borders; it seems to me we should be fiscally capable of defending our own.” The Russians invaded the Ukraine with bombs, tanks and soldiers trying to force the Ukrainian people to become a part of Russia. They have killed people and bombed cities into rubble. Their aggressiveness is a problem for all free countries and needs to be dealt with just as aggressively.

Immigrants, on the other hand, travel to Western countries because they want to be a part of an economically free country where they can work hard and succeed. They have bought into the Western ideal. These are, by and large, good people who are only looking for a chance. They know the history of the US and how immigrants were a large part of our success. Why wouldn’t immigrants continue to come? Isn’t that part of the American Dream? The statue of Liberty and all that. Instead Sullivan prefers give me your well rested, your well to do, your highly educated and after a highly selective vetting process we will let you in.

There is also the cost. Why spend billions of dollars on better policing? Better policing may be a part of the answer but only a small part and it is totally reactive. Stopping them at the border will cost billions in police, bureaucrats, walls and detention facilities but will do nothing whatsoever to stop what is driving immigration — which is poverty and hopelessness. But, by all means, let’s spend billions of dollars to not solve the problem. It is something we do well. The net result will be a much larger Federal bureaucracy costing a lot more money failing to stop the flow of people into the country. Some people will mistakenly believe that the government is actually doing something. There is that.

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I was surprised to see this article about teens illegally working for PSSI, a company that cleans up for meat plants. So here we are in 21st Century USA where companies hire underage labor to do their work. In this case, the work also is dangerous because it requires the use of toxic chemicals and machines capable of killing a person.

PSSI claims that it did a thorough check. It is not their fault if these precocious teens used false documents to get their jobs. This argument will probably get them off the hook. The company may have to pay a fine, an upper management person might have to fall on his sword but when all is said and done the country needs people willing to clean the dirty floors of meat plants.

The teens in question were immigrants which makes me curious about this company’s HR practices. Being immigrants, I would think the company would be particularly careful when a prospective employee provides this information. The Federal Government requires every employee to prove that they can work legally in the USA. This is the whole reason for law. But 31 underage teens got employed. I mean I can give PSSI one or two teens getting through a rigorous vetting of the documentation but 31 suggests something altogether different. HR was either not checking them at all or not caring that they were fake. Also forget the documents, I suspect that some of these teens actually looked like teenagers. There were 13 year olds working at the meat plants. That someone in charge wasn’t a bit startled to see all these fresh face youths working in the plant and not question their age is alarming.

This raises another question for me. If PSSI wasn’t checking documentation to ensure the age of their employees, how well were they checking the adults they hired for their immigration status. I suspect not very well at all. Which gets us closer to the real problem — PSSI can’t get many American citizens to do this dangerous job for the wage they are paying. I mean why else would they overlook the law regarding underage employees. The company was taking a risk. The fines are probably minimal and, mark my words, there is probably a tidy sum set aside for just such an exigency. So if a company needs to pay low wages with little risk of getting caught and minimal financial hardship or legal punishment if they get caught, what is a company to do? Hire the most vulnerable and desperate people and hope they don’t get caught.

Capitalists are pretty adamant that prices must follow the market. If there is less of a product and high demand, the prices go up. If there is a surplus of a product and low demand, the prices go down. The same, at least in theory, applies to wages. Except it doesn’t. Companies set the wages they want to pay and then find the people who will work at those wages — even if they have to act illegally to get those employees. They would rather illegally employ children in dangerous jobs at low wages than up their wages in order to attract a legal adults. This is not how market capitalism is supposed to operate.

It makes me curious as to why the Republican Party has not latched on this particular problem. They oppose immigration. They say they want Americans in good private industry jobs. Enforcing child labor laws and immigration laws would seem like a no brainer. Make it difficult for companies to employ illegal immigrants and children. Hurt companies with hefty fines and imprisonment of executives who break these laws. If there are no jobs for immigrants, a large wall on the border would be unnecessary. They wouldn’t come.

Of course a large wall on the border would involve all kinds of construction and money, money, money for everyone and the immigrants would keep coming. Business secretly wants these low wage immigrants because they can control them better than American citizens. If the Department of Labor started enforcing labor laws, it would get messy fast. The Federal Government might see how business actually operate, the government might even try strictly enforcing these laws which might force companies to pay higher wages.

This is why we have children in 21st Century America working with toxic chemicals at dangerous jobs.

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As someone who considers himself a part of Western Civilization, I ask this question because people are always carrying on about the success of the West but, it seems to me, that the basis of that success was the departure of millions of people from Europe to other parts of the world. These migrations were so large that the majority populations in three continents (North America, South America and Australia) have changed from a majority indigenous population to a majority immigrant population. The other 5 continents, at least until recently, didn’t find it necessary to send their excess population across the oceans in order for their people to make a decent living. The European world did. And why is this seen as a success?

Over 70% of the population of the United States has European ancestors. They left, by and large, because they were poor. They saw little chance for themselves or for their children in the old country. They left the world they knew to take a treacherous trip across the ocean, bringing precious little with them and landing in a new world. Many immigrants didn’t speak the language of the country they were going to or know anyone who could help them when they arrived or have any money to invest in their new country. They still left family, friends, and their known world. Imagine how bad it must have been for millions of people to take this risk.

Americans have a tendency to glorify this mass movement of people and, because it has been the driving economic philosophy of the time, capitalism as a success story. Poor people were given a chance to succeed in the new world, a chance they didn’t have in the old one. But it begs the question, if the western world and capitalism were so successful why did so many people have to leave Europe, the home of Western Civilization, in order to make it happen? Europe certainly had a problem sustaining the population it had. What would have happened in Europe if the New World had never been discovered? Also troubling is the way the immigrants took the land from the indigenous people. It was less a cash transfer from seller to owner and more outright theft of property. This certainly is the antithesis to how capitalist ideology is designed. How successful would the immigrants have been if they had to actually pay for the land they took?

What bothers me here is that there is this unquestioning assumption about the success of Western ideas in general and Capitalism specifically. It is highlights freedom, personal initiative and courage and forgets the despair the drove the emigrants and the elimination of indigenous cultures. Neither of which speaks well of capitalism, at least, capitalism as it is supposed to be practiced and hardly should be considered a smashing success for Western Civilization.