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If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not fine businesses 5x salary for using the labor, for as long as it was used? There are a lot of systems in place to verify working status at this point. It eliminates any incentive to hire this cheaper labor willing to work for lower wages.

The people coming will be coming for a variety of reasons but it won't be to take the jobs of the uneducated Americans

Because this isn't about that. This is about having a perceived enemy that only you can fight. If it wasn't immigrants (legal or illegal), it would be a different group, within or outside of your borders.

It's fascism 101.

Yeah, the whole platform is about Othering. The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that the poor are the cause of all their problems.

This one isn't even about middle class vs. poor. The immigration crackdowns are very popular across the entire (R) electorate, regardless of their wealth. It's all about picking out-groups, making them into enemies, and inflicting cruelty on them. That's what that side really wants out of their government. They have a long list of perceived enemies who they are expecting to be able to deliver cruelty to once they're done with immigrants.

> The immigration crackdowns are very popular across the entire (R) electorate, regardless of their wealth.

Sure. The rich (R) electorate gladly watch how the non-rich (R) electorate has taken the bait and is happy chasing after the newly othered.

They won't be happy if the non-rich republicans start taking their aim at lobbying, unfair tax-breaks for the rich, or any form of taxation that prevents them from keeping their ill-gotten wealth.

This line of thinking seems out of touch with the situation in LA. I'm only watching from a distance, and I can certainly believe that the media has misrepresented the situation, but I think there must be genuine rioting there, because the mayor has declared a curfew.

https://lacity.gov/highlights/curfew-announced-downtown-los-...

While the two parties fight about specific measures (as they always do), and don't trust one another at all, they both agree that extreme measures are appropriate in LA right now.

This discussion is about the situation in LA, and not just a generic partisan dispute we could read on any political discussion, right?

The curfew is because the force escalation has inspired more protests. When they called out the national guard, it was at the level of sports fans. The subsequent provocations have caused an escalation, and the mayor’s curfew is an attempt to break that cycle - and it’s still far below the level where a military response would be justified.

Hi. I used to live in Downtown Los Angeles, and would regularly walk a dog to where the protests are. My friends are saying the protests are roughly two blocks in size, in front of the administrative buildings and in the neighboring city park. Outside of that area, life goes on as normal. Inside that area, when the crowd builds up after work, people are playing music and dancing. Yes, some people (visibly different crowd than the protesters) have used that cover for some looting and vandalism. But the pretense of this needing the military is just silly. The most aggressive behavior I've seen is cops throwing flash grenades and shooting rubber bullets directly at people's heads.

Before Trump intervened, LA has had worse Superbowl afterparties than the protest was at that time. This is all very much manufactured rage.

Consider that your news sources are really biased.

Here's a live feed, watch for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6S_OwCgKOU

Well, then we find ourselves finding each other out of touch!

I think your line of thinking might be either overly naïve, or maliciously turning a blind eye:

First, "both-sides"-ing, for lack of a better word, is — IMHO — a false equivalence that treats the current democratic transgressions of rights and freedoms from the alt-right government to, for example, democrat's normalizing that saying racist stuff is a faux-pas; i.e. some goons are actively harming humans and that isn't the same as racists being butt-hurt that they were banned from some site.

Second, in this particular case — where there is push back against fascists — trying to reduce the scope of the discussion is like trying to censor police-cam footage to just the split-second segments where the cops get scared and shoot, but that leaves out how the trigger-happy cop broke protocol, escalated the situation, and berated confusing orders at the victim. So, no... We need nuance and context.

I really hope people that find themselves what-abouting for fascists are able to escape whatever information bubble they find themselves in so that they may be able to stop willfully looking past other people's humanity before we all find each other on the wrong end of a power-tripping cop that won't even have to come up with a good lie to snuff our lives out.

if the cops are all rioting and playing murder-musical chairs with peaceful people living their lives freely, crimes of opportunity will happen.

it's the feds and the sheriffs and the police causing unrest, by intent and design.

Certainly the Trump regime are.

LAPD are trained and regularly used for crowd control and protest dispersal. The guard isn’t. And for sure the Marines have no clue about policing.

I think LAPD is choosing a 1st amendment violation as the lesser failure than permitting any escalation involving the National Guard. That would quickly turn out badly for the guard, become a pretext for ever more violent authoritarianism in response.

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[dead]

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket" - Lyndon Johnson

this is more like that gilded age robber barron saying: I can pay half the poor to kill the other half.

And power. Like their power over this young girl trying to go home:

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1l88mhj/lap...

Old dead link: https://www.reddit.com/r/chaoticgood/comments/1l8ax0z/protes...

Remember, less lethal does not mean non-lethal and doesn't mean it can't cause enough damage to impact someone's quality of life forever.

So... I come from a country where police are still mostly respected. They also don't use rubber bullets usually.

From my point of view, this person was disobeying orders from police, which gives them the right to use force. Is a rubber bullet an appropriate amount of force? Probably not, but I don't see this video as a completely one sided interaction with one party being wrong.

Please explain, because I was probably watching a different video than you.

Poignant video.

The cameraperson or another bystander should have called 911, asked for ambulance (and maybe fire dept) to attend. In addition to medical care, that would at least get some higher degree of paperwork going from an accountability perspective.

Definitely a disturbing abuse of power, but it's LAPD. Where's the connection to Republicans?

"Blue lives" flags are intensely fascist, unpatriotic symbology and an explicit desecration of the American flag, that might be a good place to start your research.

State-sanctioned organized crime by white supremacist terrorists, that's the connection with Republicans. They pardoned the insurrectionists that violently captured the capital building and pay off murderers whose crimes achieve their political goals. It's mostly happening out in the open, brazenly. We're not rational machines, we're easily manipulated and it takes less energy to settle into beliefs others want us to have. "Flood the zone" works but reality is still happening.

I'm confused. I don't recall anyone ever saying that we need to get rid of the poor, but rather that we should try to make conditions better for everyone such that fewer people are poor. Did I miss my scheduled indoctrination message?

I don't recall anyone ever saying...

Don't focus on words. Focus on actions. For example, the action of deploying the military on Americans does not make conditions better for us. Quite the contrary. The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us. That money could be going to education, school lunches, Medicaid, building bridges, etc. But it isn't. it is only going to stroke the president's ego. Most of his actions, EO's, deals, bills, etc., fall into this category.

[flagged]

It looks like the military being deployed on rioters

Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," the United States has robust Constitutional, common-law and statutory guardrails against the use of the military domestically. The US military cannot, absent an insurrection in which regular legal order cannot be maintained, be deployed against US residents. The use of the military in the past has been limited to what were deemed by federal and state officials full insurrections (e.g., the Whiskey Rebellion), or, in the civil rights era, in response to governors affirmatively refusing to enforce the law regarding an end to segregation and the integration of public institutions. In this case we have state and local officials explicitly stating that the factual predicates of an insurrection aren't being satisfied (the protests cover a few square blocks in a metropolitan area that by itself is larger than Lebanon or Kosovo, in a state larger than Japan or Sweden). While courts traditionally give deference to executive determinations of this sort, they aren't beyond judicial review, and this is (I would argue) clearly pretextual.

What we're seeing here, conversely, is an attempt to sidestep this clear principle through not-particularly-clever tricks and semantic gamesmanship; for example, mobilizing Marines to "protect federal property," but then DHS officially asking DOD to give active duty forces arrest power. This is clearly unconstitutional and illegal, but, as with much we've seen recently, the hope appears to be that if you change the facts on the ground quickly enough, the clear illegality of the actions can be ignored.

In addition, the federalization of a state National Guard against the will of the state is unprecedented; I don't know of any previous example of this happening. In the American system, even though the National Guard is a vestige of the old state militias, it's clear that the states are at least assumed to have plenary authority over their own forces absent an invasion or insurrection.

  > Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting,"

As is usually the case, did the car burning happen before or after it was declared a riot, and the law enforcement agencies involved started using force? Did the riot start and then the police started using CS gas, rubber bullets, etc, or did the police use force and protesters with little recourse started damaging property out of anger and frustration because they can’t use force back against law enforcement?

Yes. Some protests are riots, all riots are protests.

This is the lie. At every step, immigration agents and police have instigated the violence. There are no riots. People are protesting and blocking access to vulnerable people. LA is not on fire. These incidents are in very small geographic areas even though media would suggest it’s widespread.

People are pushing back when rubber bullets and tear gas are being used, illegally.

U.S. citizens have a right to protest. This is baked into our constitution.

Since you're not American, a brief overview of our military:

1. We have 5 or 6 branches of military. The important one here is the national guard, ones meant to aid Americans in emergency or crisis.

2. The other branches have huge limits on when the federal government can deploy them domestically The Posse Comitatus Act that came as a result of the US civil war covers this.so having marines being deployed is a huge overreach.

3. The vast majority of the time, the national guard is managed by the state Governor, and Gavin Newsom has explicitly opposed this decision. The federal government taking command of the national guard is an exploit of The Insurrection Act that's been going on for a while.

All thst context being given: Newsom is right. This isn't trying to establish order, this is a meticulous escalation on a conservative president in a liberal city to make a show of force. For reference, there's reportedly some 600 rioters and they sent out 2000 (now 4000) national guard and 709 marines. This is all without including the LAPD which is comprised of over 8000 officers.

The amount of money and resources spent on this is utter overkill. And part of the point. They want an excuse to call martial law so badly.

It is the other way around. The military is being deployed on Americans. Whether they are rioters or not doesn't matter for establishing an authoritarian state.

You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101!

GP said they don't live in the US, it's possible English isn't even their first language. If they are a non-native speaker and just made a translation/wording mistake, you might feel like a pretty big asshole twisting that to call them a fascist (which word btw, is pretty overloaded and has become essentially meaningless to a large number of people).

It's also quite possible they mean "Americans" in a general sense in that the Marines are not being turned loose on the American public. They are being focused on the rioters specifically.

Obligatory self-declaration since you and many others will probably jump to conclusions about my opinion (as for whatever reason, we seem incapable of nuance even to the point of understanding that not everything in life is completely black or white), even though I've said nothing of it until now: I think Trump's actions are grotesque, authoritarian, and fascist, and it really pisses me off.

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> You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101!

If they are non-citizens, they are not american. Pretty cut and dry distinction. Nothing fascist about this.

I have neither seen nor heard anything that would lead me to believe most of the protesters are non-citizens or non-resident. You are not providing any evidence, just conveniently excusing this overreach by the executive branch by ignoring the rights of the protesters with a facile lie.

Maybe you should read again what I said.

> If they are non-citizens, they are not american.

Tell me where I said "most" in that sentence.

I really don't have to. You're arguing your talking points, but not to any verifiable reality. You should have said "if they're all citizens, they are american" which is the same thing you're saying, but without the implication you're adding that those people protesting have no rights. So you should probably say what you mean instead of this mealy-mouthed weaseling you're doing.

Stop wasting your time and bandwidth engaging with fascists

I don't know it re-establishes order but rather teaches the populace to up the ante. While I don't condone repeating history, it is instructive to look at history. When this military-type response was done at Waco, Timothy McViegh looked at that (he was there) and took out 10x as many feds as they took out citizens. And it sparked a very long period of militia movements, etc.

Are Feds not citizens in the US?

You guys have a stark division between the government employees and the not-government-employees. Isn't the US government "for the people, by the people"? Serious question. I'm not disputing what you said, rather I'm trying to understand it.

No feds aren't citizens in the US in any conventional sense. They have qualified immunity and a special kind of sovereign immunity that even state and local police do not have. They can initiate violence whereas citizens cannot. They can shoot a fleeing person as a citizen cannot. They can lie to you freely but if you lie to them (their interpretation of a lie), a felony. They generally can't be held accountable unless they are dumb enough to say the quiet parts out loud, and even then usually not.

They are also effectively impossible to sue, so you'll probably never see any justice in the courts if they act unlawfully. Even if manage to get the lawsuit going they will play fuck-fuck games with jurisdiction until you lose (as I found out when trying to sue feds for stripping me naked, cavity searching me, and executing a fraudulent warrant on a fabricated dog alert -- no one would take my case because they had lost similar cases every time).

They weren't rioting until the crackdown on the peaceful protest started.

> I can understand having the military in the streets, when the news is full of people waving foreign flags while torching vehicles in the streets.

Yes but the news (in the US) is a fully for profit organizations most of which are owned by the right-wing folks. (i.e. Much of the newspapers, CNN, Fox News are run by boards that are right-leaning)

They are intentionally pushing a narrative that the family I have in the area believes is simply a very small number of incidents that are nowhere near as bad as what is presented.

> This does not look like the military being deployed on Americans, rather it looks like the military being deployed on rioters. Whether those rioters are Americans or illegal immigrants really doesn't matter for the purposes of reestablishing order.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poss...

I suggest you stop looking at this through the lens of an Israeli and do some research on the US system of laws :)

Deploying the military "on rioters" and whether they are "Americans or illegals" is actually quite important. Using the military as a police force is illegal and the only real open legal question is if using it against "invaders" who are not here legally is technically allowed.

You are acting like these people are Hamas, when in reality, they are nowhere close to even 5% as dangerous.

And the media and federal government citing the waving of foreign flags is another distraction.

As Americans, and people living in the USA, we are allowed to do this. It's a Constitutional protection.

Again, all of this is a distraction from what the prez is doing.

Correct. But for some reason "flags" and "not white/christian/jewish" somehow makes them the OTHER TRIBE and therefore the laws don't matter to conservatives.

I don't feel particularly safe in the US with the government making lists of people like me based on the medication we are taking.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-05-02/...

Its not new, but the centralization of these datasets isn't making me feel like anything other than a target.

White/Christian and jewish are absolutely not the same tribe.

I think what we're running into is an issue many empires have run into in the past: once you scale things internationally people just don't get along. For some reason we thought computers and secular science changed that aspect of human nature (the same way Rome thought democracy and military doctrine did) and we're finding out once again people don't work that way.

> White/Christian and jewish are absolutely not the same tribe.

They are similar enough that they are not actively being openly attacked even if hateful people exist.

See: The Israeli ITT agreeing with the American conservative position and making common cause. Etc.

That person would not have made those comments if he thought the American conservative position was jewish == other tribe == bad. Even if it is for a decent chunk of that population of conservatives which is why people I know are confused why they get asked if I'm jewish. Because they don't realize the person that they were talking to is a bigot going off my stereotypically jewish features.

> I think what we're running into is an issue many empires have run into in the past: once you scale things internationally people just don't get along. For some reason we thought computers and secular science changed that aspect of human nature (the same way Rome thought democracy and military doctrine did) and we're finding out once again people don't work that way.

No, that is buying into the framework the Conservatives use that globalism is the failure point.

This is not correct. The failure point is the number of gullible people who take things like waving foreign flags as reason enough to ignore the law.

*EDIT for the response below 'cause I'm lazy and don't feel like waiting and coming back*

No. You are arguing because 'everything fails eventually, failure is inevitable' but that isn't true in human lifetimes. Dozens of generations have existed in multiple empires without seeing the empire's end.

The fact gullible people eventually bring an Empire down just means, yes, thousand year empires do not exist but we've already had 3 generations live, grow old, and die entirely within the globalist period. So...for those people, it never ended.

You just want to be "right" without considering the other person's point of view as equally valid.

So, yes, technically just because something ends does not mean the end during a given lifetime is inevitable.

But yes, excluding misinformation and open deciet from the process of running a Democracy is theoretically the goal I would say. That requires none of the things you state because you seek to bait me into responding into "gotcha" extremist positions that have never been real or needed to achieve a goal.

Simply saying "You cannot intentionally lie and misrepresent a 1 square mile protest as a reason to break the law as the government who upholds the law" should not be a controversial position you feel the need to argue against, yet you do, like the Israeli above precisely because you've been lied to.

>It's not a problem with people, just these people that I happen to want/need to incorporate.

You're arguing my point for me. People are what people do and the fact that people do these things (and consistently do these things throughout history) means that these large scale international empires are impossible to maintain. The problem may very well be conservatives, so what do you do? Exclude them? Put them in concentration camps? Now you're back to agreeing with me again.

EDIT: (for your response)

They don't bring it down "eventually" this happens very quickly. It's been known since ancient times that this happens (ibn Khaldun wrote about these things for example.) The problem is that "conservatives" from different "tribes" look very different (this is obvious if you've spent time trying to understand politics in foreign countries) so once you deal with the majority conservative group you just end up with a new one from the plurality. It's not an eventually thing, it's a critical mass problem. The only way international states work is if there's a single majority that excludes outsiders (like the Arabs used to and sometimes still do for example.)

> They don't bring it down "eventually" this happens very quickly.

You are redefining terms to "win", m8.

Entire lifetimes within the safe confines of an empire is not anyone's definition of "very quickly" in English. Please educate yourself on what you are talking about and do better research.

There is no point in engaging in a one sided conversation with someone who is either being dishonest with himself or truly misunderstanding the topic in question to the point phrases are needed to be redefined to some absurd parameter measured in 60+ year spans as "very quickly".

Please understand you really should learn something on these topics rather than quoting stuff you clearly show a shallow understanding of that is unique to a certain political group and not even the intellectuals in that group would argue as you have.

*EDIT TO REPLY*

> I agree entire lifetimes would not be very quickly. I'm arguing once you have a plurality population these things tend to blow up within a generation.

?? but Americans were Christian white male conservatives as the majority during the generations in question and were arguably more conservative as even people like the Irish and Italian were "outside parties" like you view jews.

Are you arguing the American situation deteriorated multiple times in the 20th century (1900-2000) and somehow resurrected its Empire each time?

This is just a bizarre conversation at this point but I'm morbidly curious.

Btw, the official definition is 1890s to now for the American Empire as you are talking about. So...idk how you square it failing in the ??present day?? and later with multiple generations being born and dying during that time period.

I agree entire lifetimes would not be very quickly. I'm arguing once you have a plurality population (where the populous are all considered peers) these things tend to blow up within a generation.

> Keep calling normal things people like or need fascism and you'll find yourself surrounded by legitimate fascists.

M8, it is hilarious how easy conservatives trying to normalize that stuff in the wild is.

I was just curious since you were trying to play the "I am playing devil's advocate" card when you are clearly a card carrying conservative.

Look, idk how you are concluding this kind of craziness but it _is_ craziness from a fact based point of view. I'm only opposed to conservatives in the US for three reasons:

1) They are against my access to life saving medical care, potentially forcing me to flee the country to where I can afford it.

2) They are very comfortable courting anti-Jewish extremism in the US which is why I have to keep track of which bigoted asshole cares I'm jewish so I know who will try to knife me in the back professionally/personally.

3) They are less fiscally conservative (when it comes to the debt/deficit) than Democrats with their tax giveaways, guaranteeing the eventual failure of the United States financially. Similarly, their economic policies are sprinkling fairy dust and pray the long term consequences away.

As a supporter of Israel (the part that isn't hurting the cooperating palestianians anyway), a fiscal conservative, and so forth, it is bizarre to me I have no party in the United States but the Democratic Party to vote for.

>it is bizarre to me I have no party in the United States but the Democratic Party to vote for.

Once again you argue my point for me. A place for everyone is a place for no one.

> Once again you argue my point for me. A place for everyone is a place for no one.

And you agree people like me should be removed from the country (even thought we are citizens) based on the kind of solutions the Nazis used before they moved on to camps.

10/10 glad the guy berating people for calling people fascists openly admits he is one.

EDIT:

Just noting for posterity, the guy agrees the above is correct in his current response but "wants to know what solution I have" as his only critique.

I'm done, no point in arguing with an admitted fascist/nazi adjacent type.

> How do you propose the problem is solved? Ban every kind of conservative from all the tribes you'd like to incorporate?

> That would still include you by the way since you'd like to conserve Israel. That's not a moral failure on your part that's just how people work and it's why international states can't work.

I'm just amazed how easy he took the bait to confession pipeline.

How do you propose the problem is solved? Ban every kind of conservative from all the tribes you'd like to incorporate?

That would still include you by the way since you'd like to conserve Israel. That's not a moral failure on your part that's just how people work and it's why international states can't work.

EDIT: Regardless of how you feel about it your proposed policy has a clear contradiction. You can dislike it, you can call me a nazi for pointing it out, but if you don't have an answer to this then your idea simply isn't practical for everyone else to adopt.

> EDIT: Regardless of how you feel about it your proposed policy has a clear contradiction. You can dislike it, you can call me a nazi for pointing it out, but if you don't have an answer to this then your idea simply isn't practical for everyone else to adopt.

You feel I should be exiled from my home country for the same reasons nazis were killing people when that planned failed. That isn't calling you a nazi, that is you being a nazi.

The fact you are in denial isn't my problem, I'm just glad you are dense enough to admit it to people.

EDIT:

It is hilarious the guy who ignored the point repeatedly now freaks out and calls me "emotional" about how _but I'm not a nazi_ when he agreed with Nazi talking points multiple times. When you agree with Nazi talking points but don't like the label, yeah buddy, you are a Nazi.

The only "emotion" I'm feeling is hilarity and how oblivious you are to your own talking points.

Think about things like agreeing people should be forced out due to medical conditions, etc. and obvious basic eugenics shit you agreed with earlier. And ask yourself, why am I suddenly panicking about this when it was fine a few posts ago?

Hint: It is because you know you lost the argument on you being a nazi. Maybe facts will make you realize your feelings are not facts. Maybe not, but it was worth a shot to try to make you see the way the world sees you.

> I really hope you to acknowledge this at least for your sake: your own ideology is not self consistent and ultimately excludes you regardless of what it means for everyone else.

You feel my right to buy reasonably priced (on a national crowd based level for my age) insurance is an ideology and that I should be exiled from my country because of it.

So yeah, buddy, that alone makes you a nazi. I don't need to point out the other talking points so you can't hide later from the truth when you get called out again because you didn't realize how many times you repeated you were a nazi in coded language.

> EDIT: I know it's hard, but you really need to focus and think clearly here, think carefully about the ideas themselves. If you don't things are only going to get worse for both of us.

Huh?

My ability to not die is something I need to think about?

Nice edit but it still points to you being a nazi if you think that is a true statement because my medical conditions make me unprofitable in a for-profit healthcare system.

The hilarious part is you really are just tripling and quadrupuling down on eugenics as a key part of your position. Which makes you a nazi. Congratulations! You win all the prizes!

> EDIT2: I feel like, for your sake, I should add that I stopped caring about how "the world sees me" long ago. I've been called a nazi just for living normally and peacefully with people around me, the word has no meaning to me any more. I'd encourage you to stop getting hung up on it and focus on the practical realities of today not things that happened in another country with other people a hundred years ago.

Yeah but you aren't being truthful here or you'd have stopped responding and trying to deflect the clear pro-nazi/eugenics statements in a public forum.

You can lie to yourself if you want but the truth is when you go to bed, you know deep down, you care. Or you'd have stopped this shit show when it was 50/50 you were a nazi. Instead you kept insisting you weren't while insisting you were right on the basis of eugenics among other reasons.

You didn't even have the sense to claim I wasn't right in calling you out for being pro-eugenics and pro-denial-of-care-for-minorities-to-force-exile. Because it is your belief system and too integral for you to refute until its pointed out to you repeatedly.

> EDIT3: I did acknowledge that. The problem is that insisting on what you're arguing for degenerates rapidly and is not practical. I even tried to steel man your position for you with the idea that maybe you could exclude conservatives (both from the original majority population and the eventual plurality) and pointed out how that would ultimately result in the same mass exile problem you're upset about.

How did you steel man position exactly? How is the fact the majority of the EU can deliver what I say is a critical and life threatening problem or the fact the US currently works that way (but the GOP consistently attacks it and has repeatedly failed by very thin margins to force me out of the country due to medical costs)?

You can lie to yourself all you want but I'm already on 6+ month waiting lists for basic care with private for-profit health insurance. I am better off _today with insurance_ on flying to Mexico or Malaysia or whatever for healthcare. And you want to make it worse for me. When the rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Somehow its magic to you and you insist its not a viable philosophy to have medical care for people like me.

Once again, not being pro-eugenics, is proven to work in the real world. You are a nazi. I'm done because you can't seem to deviate or defend your position in any rational sense beyond "My feelings tell me this isn't true"

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> I don't think you're quite cut out for political discussions. You seem to be very hung up on rhetoric and emotion and unable to really think about how things scale. I don't know how to help you with that. Maybe read some philosophy books and spend more time around different people?

All you have is ad hominem m8. It is hilarious as it is sad.

> I actually know people in two countries with public health care: Colombia and Canada. I've watched both of them use it. It's far worse than anything in the US (the way Colombia in particular treats immigrants IMO is absolutely horrifying.) But if you think you'll get better care in a place like that you should go ahead and see for yourself what it's like.

I've gotten medical care in Malaysia, Portugal, England, Germany, and so forth.

I got into these places with something as simple as a broken nose faster than I'd get through the line at any American hospital. And got better and cheaper care.

You can lie to people who don't have real world experience but not me, buddy. Good luck out there but all you seem to do is lie or use fellow conservatives as sources. I'm not sure which is worse.

The sad fact is, I'd actually want to vote for conservatives but just not US ones that are against my access to health care out of self preservation.

You seem to be convinced I'm some ideological foil to conservatives by saying you shouldn't be able to lie and propagandize. You should probably look inward and ask yourself why you need to lie to people to get through the day.

The sad fact is, outside of local ambulance service in places like Malaysia or Colombia, most of these places have private hospitals for a Westerner that is quite affordable. Yet somehow, just allow them to exist adjacent to public care never seems to cross a cosnervative's mind to admit such things exist. (Hint: They benefit from the same economy of scale as country-wide buying of medication and so forth. Combined with lower labor costs for similar nation-wide markets with guaranteed demand, it actually has been shown to lower costs but you wouldn't ever have researched real information to figure that out)

> That's a little wild to hear from someone who's called me a nazi half a dozen times and seemed to think that changed the validity of his argument.

You agree with Nazi talking points. There, does that make you happy?

>Malaysia They do, its called a golden visa buddy.

>England > No. They do not have a functioning public health service. I don't know much about the other two states but if you put England in that list it makes me question the validity of the rest of it.

Yeah, buddy, please unplug from conservative outlets.

>The sad fact is, outside of local ambulance service in places like Malaysia or Colombia, most of these places have private hospitals for a Westerner that is quite affordable.

> So you're in favor of private health care? I'm still not even sure why you've even brought all this up. Furthermore if you can afford private health care than why is public health care "a matter of self preservation?"

Are you not understanding I basically have to leave to have affordable access to emergency care if Project 2025 (or even the proposals that failed in 2016) gets their way?

Idk what hole you hide in but that has to contain some amazing powers of self-deception.

Good luck, I'm just done man. You can't be this oblivious without hiding in some conservative bubble that bans all dissent.

>All you have is ad hominem m8. It is hilarious as it is sad.

That's a little wild to hear from someone who's called me a nazi half a dozen times and seemed to think that changed the validity of his argument.

>Malaysia

I forgot Malaysia just lets anyone immigrate and call themselves Malaysian. It's crazy how accepting Asian countries are. They're all such a great example of how you can simultaneously have public health care and open borders.

>England

No. They do not have a functioning public health service. I don't know much about the other two states but if you put England in that list it makes me question the validity of the rest of it.

>The sad fact is, outside of local ambulance service in places like Malaysia or Colombia, most of these places have private hospitals for a Westerner that is quite affordable.

So you're in favor of private health care? I'm still not even sure why you've even brought all this up. Furthermore if you can afford private health care than why is public health care "a matter of self preservation?"

Yes, if we focus on actions, the action of causing public disorder is a glaring example of things we do not want in civil society. We also do not want tanks in our streets. Both seem like bad things, honestly, so I'm wondering how we got here.

Do not split.

It's fine if you personally don't support more extreme actions. Time has shown again and again the most important thing civilians can do is to refuse to condemn other civilians who are acting in the same goals as you. We must focus on why everyone is acting in those goals: we have armed, masked men invading communities, who have made attempts at trafficking children, stolen away elderly women, detained citizens accused of no crime, and are being incredibly disruptive throughout the country.

> who have made attempts at trafficking children

I'm going to have to see a source for that one.

Removed children? Sure. Trafficked them? Prove it.

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That article says is that one kid has been trafficked, since the 1980s. That's the most you can use it to demonstrate. It certainly does not support KittenInABox's claim.

[flagged]

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You are missing the point: those kids are illegal aliens. They have zero rights to be in the country. ICE is arresting them to be deported.

Stop trying to make it look like what it is not.

Those are children. All children in this country have rights.

These events are not the opposites you're implying. Both are being directly caused by the same person! Trump is needlessly escalating the situation, to create a divisive crisis, for which he will force his "solution" of even more chaos and destruction. This guy turns everything he touches to shit, which should have been strongly apparent to everyone based on his first administration. Too many people were unwilling to put aside their gripes with the government and listen to their fellow citizens telling them this is exactly what would happen.

I dunno. Trump is a proximal cause, but is it the root cause?

"dunno" what? There are many causes for why people wrote off their country and turned to Trump. I understand, sympathize, and even agree with many of the frustrations! But the fact remains that people listened to the siren song of a hollow con man instead of their fellow citizens telling them what a disaster his first term was, and his second term would surely be. There are root causes for that too, and they are endlessly debated in threads about social media polarization and the like. But in the context of this topic where American troops are now pointing guns at Americans, it is important to keep the focus on Trump and the need for him to be deposed.

I'm concerned that if you follow root causes enough, you get to statements like

> it is important to keep the focus on Trump and the need for him to be deposed.

being causal for more Trumps to be elected.

What alternative do you see to the current events? The only one I see is remaining quiet and tacitly supporting fascism.

This guy is not going to stop on his own. He's attuned to operating in a business context where there is some other singular entity who might back down when the damage from the chaos gets too high (or he backs down when the pain is too high for him, like with tariffs). But in a society based on individual liberty, backing down is not on the table until the whole society has been subjugated.

Longer term, if we actually manage to get through this to meaningful elections, one would hope that the abject failure of Trumpism would make enough of the electorate wary of more "strong" man fascists promising easy answers. This should have happened after his first term, but Trump's main skill is deflecting blame and Covid was one heck of an excuse.

And as far as underlying issues driving polarization and disconnect from reality, those are going to be there regardless of my statements.

The top level comment was me wondering how we got here. This has nothing to do with what we should do now. You decide that for yourself, but I see wisdom in looking at how we got here and trying to not do more of that.

There are many directions to come at that from, discussing most of them will end up insanely political and polarized, and they have been discussed quite often in other threads. So it's a bit weird to be throwing that open-ended question out in the discussion of a specific alarming escalation - as if we have just been missing some simple answers that could have been done to pull up from this, or avoid it in the future.

I'd say we are at the point where the people who enabled the fascists just have to accept they were wrong and take their licks for the damage they've caused to our country. Similar to the bits of soul-searching that are going on amongst Democrats about the overbearing DEI groupthink. Will some small reconciliation grow into a trend and create a lasting deescalation, or do we have to continue working to actively reject the extremism? Let's worry about that when the mad king no longer has the reigns of power, lest good-faith attempts hold us back from getting to that state where any of this might matter.

Trump is a symptom.

I'm wondering how we got here.

Among other reasons, we got here because the government only seems to respond to big business and the oligarch class, but not the rest of us.

This is a well-understood and popular problem. I've tried the five-whys on this, and always end up at unnecessary escalation and righteous idealism (not by any particular party or person, just kind of by everyone). But the book Righteous Mind does a better job on this issue than I ever will.

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> Clearly if these people torching the cars are waving foreign flags, they are a foreign enemy and thus the military is appropriate, no?

No. Torching cars is already a crime and the city and state were already restoring order. The kind of flag waved while a car is torched does not change the calculus. Critically, a US citizen does not cease to be a US citizen because they waved a foreign flag; we have free speech in the United States, and flag-waving is protected by the first amendment.

Also worth noting that none of this would have happened if the regime didn't deliberately provoke it in the first place.

Honest question: how does this calculus change when the person waiving a foreign flag on a burned out vehicle is actually not a citizen and armed with a weapon.

Liberty or death. If sometimes in this country a non-citizen gets away with burning a car, and the only way to prevent is is drag-net mass gestapo enforcement actions by federal police, then, I choose the country with no gestapo enforcement actions and occasionally burnt cars.

Apparently LA agrees with this fundamentally American idea.

Reposting this everywhere doesn’t make it truthful.

Where have I reposted this?

As for not being true, are the newspapers lying? Are those photographs fakes?

For the most part, the protestors are peaceful, not rioters, and there are plenty of scenes of police and national guard being marshaled against them. In one clip, a couple dozen police officers opened fire on a kid with a skateboard. In another, they open fire on a journalist giving a live report. In another, they're beating back protestors holding signs.

And "reestablishing order" is an obvious farce, because the Trump administration was deliberately provoking this conflict by sending in masked agents to abduct people and at least in one instance, running over a protestor. The administration has been consistently escalating the conflict, which is not something you do to "reestablish order", but it is absolutely a tactic of 20th century authoritarians to acquire emergency powers which they then use to prevent elections, jail political opponents, etc.

Military is being deployed to protect federal buildings like what was done during the king riots.

The marines deployed in 92 marched with the national guard and LAPD. The marines shot up houses in Compton.

Yes, that’s the famous case where the marines were shot at multiple times with shotguns and returned fire.

> The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us.

The funds for the "United States Army 250th Anniversary Parade" were allocated before President Trump was elected, during the Biden debacle. The fact that it falls on June 14th is what is called a "coincidence".

Be careful about blindly accepting propaganda as fact.

> The funds for the "United States Army 250th Anniversary Parade" were allocated before President Trump was elected, during the Biden debacle.

Um: "The Army’s 250th birthday celebration has been in the works for two years, Army officials said. But adding a parade was the Trump White House’s idea, so planning for that began only two months ago." (Emphasis added.)

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/politics/trump-military-parad...

I would agree with your "coincidence" explanation if it weren't for the consistent pattern of "coincidences" in which Trump does something dictator-like and right-wingers rush to his defense with "coincidence". It's just a coincidence that all of these foreign diplomats invest in his meme coin or some family business and then suddenly are granted meetings with the president! It's just a coincidence that Qatar sends him a luxury airliner and his rhetoric about Qatar does a 180 degree flip! It's just a coincidence that he tried to interfere in a presidential election! It's just a coincidence that he consistently claims Article I and Article III powers for himself! It's just a coincidence that he's rounding up people and sending them to foreign prisons!

I've never met someone so unlucky /s

Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence?

That must take some crazy mental gymnastics...

As to your other points, most aren't coincidences, though some aren't real either.

> Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence? That must take some crazy mental gymnastics...

You should read the post you're responding to. It clearly addresses this very question.

> though some aren't real either

I think you mean, "though I'm not familiar with some of those cases"--otherwise a citation is needed.

The date is entirely unimportant. I suppose it's just a coincidence that Trump is following project 2025, step by step, since day one¹. And also a coincidence that many of the people who wrote project 2025 are in the Trump administration²³. It's just a coincidence, but of course trump didn't and doesn't know anything about it. Stop playing stupid.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-project-2025-first-100-da... 2. https://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/juan-williams/5120168... 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cnyv9qNQSI

> The date is entirely unimportant.

The date is exactly what was being discussed. I was responding to the mischaracterization of "a military parade for the president's birthday", which is factually inaccurate. Plus, the plan was made during Biden's term.

> I suppose it's just a coincidence that Trump is following project 2025, step by step, since day one

He's following Agenda 47, which was published on his campaign website. He stated he agreed with some of Project 2025, but not all of it.

It's unsurprising that some involved in writing Project 2025 are working for the Trump admin.

> He stated he agreed with some of Project 2025, but not all of it.

He's stated every stance you can on 2025. Heard of it, never heard of it, love it, hate it, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+never+heard+of+2025&oq...

"They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats."

That was the president lying on a nationally televised debate, the purpose of which was to lay the groundwork for exporting poor people who were here legally.

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Vance admitted it on camera that he made it up to get a national conversation started

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

The term "create stories" in this context does not mean made up the story it means create a story out of the report the way journalists create a story out of a news event

Oh I got it, I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes

as POTUS, maybe not repeating unconfirmed information as fact would be the better move.

He represents the people. And he wasn't POTUS, he was a presidential candidate, relaying what his potential constituents were concerned about.

Even if Trump was just relaying local racist rumors (he wasn't, it was entirely fabricated), would he be justified in it? There was absolutely zero evidence of it, and there still isn't.

It's just a lie in service of fueling hatred toward the most poorest people in this country. Fascism 101.

The mayor of the town (a Republican) came out and straight up said Trump was lying about his town. The only people reporting it could barely point to the town on a map.

No local reported that. It was all a lie.

Should Trump also relay blood libels against Jews?

Maybe not "get rid of" but plenty of other fingers are pointed at them. They get "free housing" (which they fill with drugs and kids), they get "free food" (which they use instead to buy alcohol), they get "free cellphones" (which they use to run drug rings), etc.

It's usually about how the poor get Foo for free, which everyone else has to pay for, and also about how they misuse Foo for nefarious reasons. The commons then get riled up, either because "Hey, why do they get free housing when I have to spend tons of money?" or because of all the nefarious things they supposedly do.

If people say the "free Foo" being offered, I wage many would choose to keep buying better quality Foo. These people are not offered luxury. It can barely be considered essentials.

Also: Food stamps can't buy alcohol (let alone drugs).

I agree with your point, but food stamps can be used to buy drugs and alcohol... Buyer generally pays ~50% cash value. Very common for addicts to hand the EBT card over to dealer on the 3rd, but the vast majority receiving assistance use it honestly.

When you say "they" are you talking about the local US citizens doing these things, because "they" are doing it too. Comments like yours that word it so that it sounds like all crimes are being committed non-citizens which is such a fallacy it's laughable.

I used the word "they" on purpose, because the target seems to change often. It might be lower class, it might be immigrants (illegal and even legal), it might be $racial_minority, political faction, etc,. As long as it's a group that people can blame, it works.

> we should try to make conditions better for everyone such that fewer people are poor

Explain how work requirements to qualify for Medicaid makes conditions better to ensure there are fewer poor people. Doesn't this just harm people who can't work due to disability, and practically ensure they will never get better enough to work and contribute to society?

Sure saves a lot of money for wealthy people though.

The work requirements only apply to the able-bodied. Coddling people like this isn't doing them any favors.

But isn’t Medicaid just healthcare. Being able to go to a doctor when you are sick or injured doesn’t really sound like coddling someone, “able-bodied” or not. Maybe I am misunderstanding and Medicaid is actually some new fancy handbag.

The able-bodied should be working before they receive any kind of government assistance on the basis of being low-income.

Anyone working shouldn't require government assistance on the basis of being low-income.

Why not?

The government shouldn't be subsidizing businesses that refuse to pay sufficient wages.

The government isn't subsidizing businesses when it gives low-wage workers welfare. Those workers would be working just as hard without the welfare, if not harder.

If finding work is this hard maybe we should be slowing down immigration.

Most here aren't arguing it's exceptionally difficult to find some kind of a job or education opportunity to meet the requirements. We're mostly arguing about adding all the additional bureaucracy to add additional requirements that will need to be documented and validated. And arguing that many who should be eligible for exceptions will end up not eligible because of some paperwork or bureaucratic oversight.

There is about the same amount of money allotted to help states stand up new programs to validate these requirements as the federal cost of Trump's birthday party.

The obvious answer is education and vocational training programs to help people develop skills that are needed today. Unfortunately, the people most affected by the changing demands of the modern economy are also people who have been negatively polarized against education.

We're on a tech forum and Trump approved of more H1b's to be hired this year. What does that say about his policies to create American jobs?

Ahh, so you fell for the spin. What about the "able bodied" laid off in the economy and no one wants to hire? What about the "able bodied" who just graduated and can't even get an interview because everyone wants 5 years of experience? What about the "able bodied" who can do basic math and realize that $8/hour can no in fact pay for rent that sky rocketed to $1200 a month?

Business and removing jobs and being rewarded with tax breaks while American workers can't find anything. Whose fault is that?

What you just described isn’t spin. The requirement clearly applies only to the able-bodied. You’re saying being able-bodied doesn’t guarantee you can get a job—so you're arguing the requirement is unfair. I completely disagree. In this economy, anyone can get a job. Welfare—whether it’s taxpayer-funded medical care, cash payments, or food stamps—should never be unconditional. It’s funded by people who are compelled under threat of imprisonment to pay taxes. No one is entitled to it.

Putting a burden on people who aren't able bodied is harmful to them, because it means you accept some threshold of fasle negatives -- people who aren't able bodied but who will not qualify for the support. What will they do? They can't work because they aren't able bodied, but they can't qualify for assistance because the government doesn't think they're broken enough. That person will become homeless, and then their existence is essentially criminalized in many places.

For the pragmatic- and not -empathetic-minded, means testing still creates a huge bureaucracy, making useless government jobs and costing money to chase down people whose lives already suck

The work requirements only apply to the able-bodied.

How does the government know whether any specific person is "able-bodied"?

  > How does the government know whether any specific person is "able-bodied"?

Costs that will be borne by the state and become unavailable to actually assist and help people.

Bonus points: we'll be able to remove people that should have had eligibility but failed to get the right paperwork in place. And we all know those who are severely disabled and unable to work are always excellent on filing their paperwork correctly and on-time and always make required meetings.

Don't you love all this government efficiency this year?

The same way they determined it for the draft.

> Coddling people like this isn't doing them any favors.

Yes. Yes it is.

Pray you never find yourself in a situation where you can't work anymore or rely on anyone. Because under Trump's, this means guaranteed death. In the richest country ever.

Trump, speaking to his nephew about their disabled son [1]: "Maybe you should just let him die"

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/24/trump-...

Go ask the same people railing about immigrants, what their thoughts on homeless people might be.

I look for the message of helping the poor, but it’s frustrating that politicians can evade it and their self-attained devotion to Christianity go unchallenged.

The phrases to look for are “infested” and “purge”. Some politicians consider low-income to be a character of a person or a group (all the way up to a nation). Those same politicians laud language from Hitler about infestations and metaphors of racial purity.

Jesus didn't believe in IRS prisons. Don't look to politicians to impose Christian beliefs on people.

You should try telling that to Ohio as of late.

Huh? "Render unto Caesar" and all that. IRS falls under Caesar, caring for the health of others falls under God I.E. a requirement to be a Christian.

That was an answer to a trick question. The inquisitor was trying to get him to admit to defying Roman rules so he could get him imprisoned. And he gave an answer that the coins that have Roman emperor faces on them belong to the emperor, implying people could stop using those coins.

Even the most generous pro-government take on that passage would have him believing that the state should be separate from the church, so church doctrine should not be imposed through state decree.

Did the historical Jesus really say that? He wasn't one of the religious authorities who had a deal with Rome. Many Jews didn't like Roman occupation as seen by the revolts. If Jesus had issues with the Jewish authorities, he probably did with the Roman ones as well. Apocalyptic Jews would have believed God was coming soon to overthrow the kingdoms of the world, which were controlled by evil spirts.

You willfully ignore the 'Big Beautiful Bill' which will make the poor poorer, taking Medicaid from millions of people and making the richest of the rich richer with tax breaks.

not "the poor". immigrants

here's the correct indoctrination message

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-fox-int...

> Former President Donald J. Trump, in an interview broadcast Sunday, doubled down on his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, language that echoes Hitler.

> “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” Howard Kurtz, the media critic and interviewer, asked on Fox News. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’”

> “Because our country is being poisoned,” Mr. Trump responded.

"we should try to make conditions better for everyone such that fewer people are poor" and similar arguments is how the government scams you and everyone else into their racket. You always had the option to give to the poor, you didn't need a mob going in your pockets to do that.

"But muh roads and hospitals and police." Lol, that is covered by the ~0.5% of my salary I pay in property taxes and a little extra in use taxes and county and state sales tax. The federal portion, what do I get? Massive subsidies for people who stick their boot down my throat, military provocations that make us all far less safer, the worlds largest prison population (and near the top per capita). None of it makes sense -- the stuff that matters was achieved with the feds spending 2% of the gdp (and I might add, pretty much open immigration).

"Helping the poor" is one of the worst mistakes the USA ever undertook.

> You always had the option to give to the poor

History shows we've historically been pretty shitty at doing that at an individual level.

> The federal portion, what do I get?

Ignoring FICA, a large chunk is debt servicing, public health, earned income tax credits, food assistance, SSI, science programs, global trade security, and more. Most isn't "people who stick their boot down [your] throat", unless you're someone looking to abuse workers or food production or happens to be outside in LA these days.

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In the context of finding an enemy, the admin literally tried to recreate the premise of the Michael Moore film Canadian Bacon before realizing it just wasn't sticking. I'll bet they took it as a challenge.

> It's fascism 101.

It is absolutely not. It is politics 101: you are the only one who can solve a problem.

War on Drugs, War on Terror.

That's disingenuous - all policy is inherently political. Reducing the tactics of fascism to politics is no different than the claim that all politicians are the same.

It's no mistake that the War on Drugs and the War on Terror were both radical increases in authoritarian power, both of which were implemented by Republicans as part of right-wing approaches to addressing both perceived and real threats.

Yes, those are political objectives, but the entire point of calling them out as fascist is to distinguish them from other anti-fascist political objectives which seek to reduce or constrain the power of the state, or to strengthen human rights guaranteed by the state.

Voted for overwhelmingly by both parties. Obama also started wars in new countries. Clinton expanded war on drugs despite criticizing it. And all dem presidents failed to deschedule cannabis and other relatively harmless drugs.

> both of which were implemented by Republicans as part of right-wing approaches to addressing both perceived and real threats.

In between republican presidents there were also Democrat presidents and they did zero to put a stop to any of them. Zero. Using your logic above, both types of presidents are fascist in nature since they followed the same policies.

What I am saying is that when the state takes power from the people, it (almost) never gives it back. Just like with laws, repealing them is a gargantuan task and again, almost no will to do it. Taxes, they go up more then they ever go down.

Even Ronald Reagan wasn't as cruel as the current regime and implemented an Amnesty for millions instead of doing what Trump/ICE are currently doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...

Reagan's amnesty, like the others, was a bait and switch. The DC/corporate establishment said, "Let us amnesty the ones that are here, and we'll get control of the border and stop the flow." After getting their amnesty, the second part never happens.

That's led directly to the current mess because it taught people that the most important thing is to get into the country, regardless of legality, so you could be in place when the next amnesty came along.

Except that Covid showed us that the immigrants quit coming and even go home if there is no job.

We know how to stop illegal immigration--you put CEOs in jail for employing illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration stops dead.

"Illegal immigration" is simply a dogwhistle.

True. Maybe the worst act of Trump's first term was commuting the sentence of a kosher meatpacking company executive. He was in prison for bank fraud, but he should have been there because he got busted for having hundreds of illegals working in Postville, Iowa. We should be going hard after the corporations and their executives who hire illegals and deporting the illegals.

Commuting the sentences of wealthy offenders was and continues to be a tactical decision. It aligns the interests of the wealthy behind Trump, especially folks who are wealthy and willing to break the law to gain or grow their wealth.

Commutation and Pardons under the current regime are signal about what behaviour will be forgiven, ignored, or even outright rewarded.

It’s not simple of you have been to the border. Punishing businesses works in a few cases, but it’s way more expensive than enforcing borders.

LOL. When ICE detained 900 employees from Tyson Foods who were undocumented, many provided them with written instructions from the company on how to fill out onboarding, payroll, and tax paperwork if they were undocumented immigrants, i.e., the company was perfectly aware and actively facilitating.

When they had their big press conference to announce the 900 arrests, reporters asked about plans to investigate the company based on the documentation found.

"That's not in the scope of our investigation. We do not have plans to do that at this time."

To no one's shock, they've never found time to do it since, either.

It would require an organization 4 times larger than the IRS to deal with all the court cases. If that’s cheaper than stone, count us in :)

How about starting with getting the largest republican border state to require private business to run a free simple check of the persons work status?[0] The federal gov has had a free system for that for years. But they won't and they wont create an enforcement agency to check that state government offices comply. I am sure they can find it in the 11B immigration budget to audit some businesses. They won't.

Undocumented immigrants are too important to the economy, to the tune of over 17.7 billion worth in 2005. (in Texas)

Instead they do things that look great (and check the most important box): border wall (that the US gov pays us for), security forces (that the US gov pays us for), mandating that the sheriffs work with fed agencies (that the US will reimburse them for). But passing a law that requires businesses use a free quick government service to check documents and a small agency to do random audits -- that's to too burdensome on the state's bottom line. Any one that thinks states like Texas actually wants to eliminate undocumented immigration at this point, has simply been hoodwinked.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...

No, it was an honest understanding that rounding up and shipping off millions of people can not be done in a way consistent with what conservative (against a federal paper checking sweep of the nation), Christian (love thy fellow man) America was at the time. Sadly we are a much different country now and put our desire to punish 'the scary other' above checks on government power or any pretence of following Christ's teachings.

People wouldn't have continued to come if Conservatives hadn't continued to employ and build business models around undocumented labor. Not addressing the root cause of the problem, employers willing to reward people for coming to the US, is the problem with the Reagan amnesty. Nothing else would have stopped immigration like stopping the reward for immigration would have. But conservatives are addicted to their bottom lines/business special interests and couldn't bring themselves to do what needed doing to stop what they term a 'foreign invasion'. At least the dems do it out of compassion and don't see it as an invasion. The conservatives just allowed the financing of what they see as a 'foreign invasion' for a small share of business special interest dollars.

It's honestly mind boggling that some third of the country is convinced about immigrants "coming for their jobs". Meanwhile we choose to punish the immigrants coming in instead of the companies for hiring illegal immigrants for sub minumum wages.

Really shows the priority of some people here. It's clearly not getting a job.

> it taught people that the most important thing is to get into the country, regardless of legality, so you could be in place when the next amnesty came along.

That is a strange thing to think is to blame. I'll take a guess that you do not live in a (south) border state.

People were taught they could come into the country and (1) find work that (2) paid more than not having work -- when they got paid at all [0] and still less than US workers [1] and the state not only allows it but encourages it. Why? There continues to be a chronic shortage of construction workers to fill jobs. Our housing situation would be far worse if the GOP immigration stance was anything more than a dog and pony show. [2]

The state with the longest south border has refused to require businesses use the fed e-verify system to check work id's, everyone knows they use fake ids. It's not some scandal that Reagan or the "Dems" recently caused. It's simply just the way it always has been. Makes for great rage bait though.

But, we do appreciate all your federal tax dollars paying us to "get tough on immigration"!

Texas, again, failed to pass a bill aimed at conducting a "study of the economic, environmental and financial effects of illegal immigration on the state" -- just the cost mind you. The last study in 2006 found that they contributed more than they cost. Deporting the "estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005 would have cost the state about $17.7 billion in GPD." [3] They have since refused to do another study. They know mass deporting immigrants would devastate the economy and growth.

For the undocumented that's been here awhile, it's just another day. Maybe they get unlucky and it's their turn to play a part in the "tough on immigration" hoax. They'll be back in a few days because the state and their employer needs them and no one will bat an eye when the cameras are off. Which is why we should be taking note of the extremes Trump is going to, there is something else to it; else his buddies in Texas would have passed those bills last month.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/16/undocumented-workers...

[1] https://www.fosterglobal.com/news/report_half_of_tx_construc... [pdf]

[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...

[3] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/06/texas-undocumented-i...

Exactly right.

This is the reason the GOP lost California forever. Don't expect the GOP to make the same mistake again.

Trump would not have won if Dems had not escalated illegal immigration 2020-24. It was such an unforced error on Biden's part

That was never a real issue, it was just something pushed by Fox.

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No, it's not an error at all, but you're showing the real problem in your reply.

I'd suggest doing some light reading on the reliability and integrity of the sources you prefer to get your 'news' from.

The error is that you're ignoring the actual statistics in lieu of what Fox told you. I can't make a horse drink, but feel free to look up the immigration statistics in Biden's term vs trump's first term.

> Trump would not have won if Dems had not escalated illegal immigration 2020-24.

Do you actually have any source to support your claim? I mean, MAGA nuts have been swearing for over a decade that there was a torrent of illegal immigrants arriving each day into the country, and that somehow democrats were to blame, but even after Trump's fascist push with it's forced deportations of everyone including US citizens without due process the numbers barely reached 100k. And now we're seeing Trump's ICE thugs mobilizing a small army of agents to assault Home Depot parking lots?

Where are all those illegal immigrants?

The Congressional Budget Office estimated [1] about 10.4m immigrants during 2020-2024, more than 3 times more than under Trump's first term, and of which most was illegal immigration.

The numbers cited by Republican scaremongers like Stephen Miller were probably inflated and derived from CBP border encounters, rather than on how many people were entering the country. But there does seem to have been a significant surge, partly thanks to new immigration programs that made it easier to entering the country while seeking asylum. Deportations seems to have remained high under Biden.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...

Probably had more to do with the “weekend at Biden‘s” situation.

Ah yes, you're doing the meme: if ANYTHING happens it means "fuck the Democrats"

Sure, it couldn't possibly be anything else like inflation after COVID (which happened globally) that caused incumbents to lose around the world. No, Dems just needed to get this one thing right and they're to blame for Trump. Sure.

EDIT: https://imgur.com/uPJAxEl

You're mistaken.

I'm pro Trump and have been for many years. I just don't think we would have won if the Dems hadn't handed us the victory. Thank you Democrats!

The meme is still applicable to MAGA voters. For example, Trump could start a riot at the Capitol and it would be Dems' fault for not doing enough to stop it.

"But why didn't Nancy Pelosi deploy the National Guard?"

I already told you I’m pro Trump. What is your point here?

Why do you couch your belief in this "us vs them" system?

You are happy to agree with nonsensical statements, as long as they imply your side is winning, why?

Out of interest:

How has Trump improved our lives and country in his first term?

And how is he improving our lives now?

Trying to understand how you as an HNer, who I’m assuming applies logical / critical thinking, considers facts and evidence as important, can vote for someone who a) is a convicted criminal b) absolutely not interested in improving our lives.

What’s the appeal?

Do you think Elon was telling the truth about the Epstein files?

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His supporters tried to overthrow the government.

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Which countries are using the military to enforce laws? Which countries are denying due process? In which countries is the executive branch ignoring court orders? In which countries is the executive branch claiming the powers of the legislative and judicial branches?

I have no doubt these countries exist, but I'm deeply skeptical that they are imitable.

Spain used the National Police Corps and the Civil Guard during the 2019 riots.

Not technically military, closer to National Guard.

350 thousand people were protesting in Barcelona at the time. How many people are protesting in LA? 1000?

I don't know.

> Which countries are using the military to enforce laws?

Cuba, the PRC, North Korea, Russia...

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> And no country gives whatever it is you're calling due process to illegal immigrants.

Virtually every European country gives due process, even in illegal immigration cases. And probably more importantly, the US Constitution requires due process even for cases of illegal immigration.

> Obama deported hundreds of thousands without any legal hearings

But they had due process. He didn't round people up in the streets without the ability to contest government claims of illegal immigration.

How do you know they're illegal immigrants if not by means of due process?

I'm not from America, so just a casual observer. Isn't it possible to do a simple database check with some kind of ID? Or biometric? Where I'm from both are registered for ~everyone so it's fairly simple to do a check. The point being that if the database does not have the record they must have been an illegal?

No, the US does not have a database of citizens or a national ID. There's been long-standing resistance to such a thing, as part of the general American distrust of centralized government and what a tyrannical government could do with that information. That resistance has even been bipartisan, coming more from the left or right depending on who is in power. So there's no quick database check.

However, in practice, if you're a citizen, it's pretty easy to prove it. You'll be carrying forms of state-issued ID and you'll have a paper trail that makes it obvious. There's rarely much ambiguity over whether a particular person is here legally or illegally, as much as some might like to pretend there is.

Hmm. Makes sense. Then couldn't the government have tapped into one of those processes, making it clear to everyone that the people that are being deported are illegal (or not) and saved themselves all the court cases?

Yes if their goal was to deport people who immigrated illegally. No because the goal is to remove due process. The next step is to deport citizens convicted of crimes.[1] Then prosecute political opponents.[2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-ja...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/nx-s1-5134924/trump-election-...

Didn't ICE jail a legal student just the other day and refused to release him? I forget where but even the state's governor got involved.

Marcelo Gomes da Silva? His visa expired apparently.[1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/marcelo-gomes-ice-massachusetts-a...

The US doesn't keep biometric data on every citizen or lawful resident, and the government can trivially lie or make a mistake about whether they did the database/ID check. This isn't a hypothetical, many legal residents and some citizens have been swept up, and without due process they have no ability to say, "I'm a legal resident" or "I'm a US citizen". They can just be shipped off to an El Salvadoran prison camp where the president can claim, "oops, I can't get them back because they're not in our jurisdiction any more".

> And no country gives whatever it is you're calling due process to illegal immigrants.

The UK certainly does.

As does everyone else. That's how they determine whether they're illegal or not in the first place.

The military force is to gin up a conflict. Nothing about this current riot was not handleable by local police or the national guard.

The immigrants deported under Obama had due process.

You are just blatantly lying

> Which countries are using the military to enforce laws?

A number of European countries have military or paramilitary forces used for law enforcement when it comes to things such as quelling riots. Here is an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie

That’s an organisation with a planned and legislated role. Sorting it out after the event is rather different.

So again then, why is the government not going after employers? Does the government only go after street level drug dealers but never anyone higher?

Uh, no. This is about illegal detainment of people (some of whom are citizens) by federal law enforcement. The overwhelming majority of citizens want a functioning immigration system (and a functioning criminal justice system). What I and others won't abide is law enforcement violating their oath and illegally detaining and deporting people.

Obeying illegal orders to attack American citizens on American soil is certainly something, but it isn't law enforcement.

If this were actually about law enforcement, we would have passed the bipartisan border protection / immigration bill that has been on the table for eons.

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That's because of racism for two hundred years that made it so there was only one gym for the kids in that area.

If it's a true story. Your comment history reads like conservative talking points fabricated by someone pretending to be black or pretending to care about black people. Specifically not like a black conservative.

Op is describing very real cost shifting that happens. Certain corporations get large benefits from migrant workers but they are human and have to live somewhere so the cost of housing and feeding them gets shifted to adjacent communities. These adjacent communities get hit twice because migrant labor also decreases salaries for locals. People who are in the high earning buckets benefit from the cheaper wages and abundant work force for construction, landscaping maid services.

Op should blame the people in the high earning bucket. It is ridiculous to blame the poor migrant workers in this situation - its not like they are living high on the hog. They are, by your description, victims as well, employed only because they can be treated more poorly than local people.

Op is in fact criticizing the policy those people benefit from. Just because the migrants are used as human pawns doesn't mean the policy critique is invalid.

In this context, of violent enforcement against the pawns, the above bears emphasis.

Funny, I stayed at a hotel in a small town in Texas recently that was across the street from a construction site. The hotel owner said that since Trump was elected that occupancy was way down. Lots of the workers at the construction site were undocumented and stayed at the hotel. Since Trump's election, nothing had happened at the construction site and the hotel's future was in question.

> These adjacent communities get hit twice because migrant labor also decreases salaries for locals.

If the migrant labor is filling in labor gaps, then no, this is not true. Seems the evidence also disagrees: "Consistently, economists have found that an increase in immigration rates does not cause a drop in wages for U.S.-born workers" [1]

Please provide evidence that your statement is true even in any instance, let alone generally true. The economic impact of migrant labor is quite real, and positive, in terms of taxes and money spent back in the community.

[1]https://immigrationimpact.com/2024/07/09/immigrants-do-not-t...

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I think this is an example of different branches of government working against each other. The feds want them here working as invisible slaves hence the crackdown. The local government has to appease the vocal activists so they put them up in public spaces to the detriment of other uses.

Sorry, but this is both hyperbolic and so low on details it's hard to understand the problem. Migrants, so you mean basically homeless people? Low income, so a big chunk of the problem is that minimum wage is not enough to survive without help? (That applies to everyone, not migrants) What does being black have to do with that? What do you mean the kids have nowhere else to go? There are so many kids with no after school programs or any kind.

Is there actually more real context missing here?

In California?

Perceived enemy? Even the most liberal of cities touting themselves as “sanctuary cities” had to pivot and declare they simply cannot handle the influx.

12million immigrants came into the country during the Biden administration. This type of load on the system does not go unnoticed. NYC for example was drastically transformed.

Why do you think it’s just a “perceived” problem?

> declare they simply cannot handle the influx

They cannot handle it with the resources being given. This is true for the red states like Texas and what not, the social services we do have struggle to handle the load. But we're choosing to let these systems struggle. We could solve it if we chose to do so.

In 2020 our population was ~330 million people. Even if 12 million people immigrated to the United States, that's an influx of 3.6%. In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million, so really more like 1.2%. We're supposedly the wealthiest country on the planet with so much opportunity and freedom and yet we can't handle adding far less than 5% of the population as migrants in five years? If that's the case, we're probably the poorest country on the planet, not the wealthiest.

And that's a population of millions admittedly including many minors and major barriers to thriving, but overall far fewer elderly or disabled people than the general population. Boosting immigration is only an economic drag if you structure the asylum/immigration process to prevent people from working, which we do now seemingly to punish communities that accept immigrants.

Yes, basically this. Americans have to hustle all day in the war against "line go down". Our agency is not allowed to be put to caring for other people but the illusion the 1% alone prop up society.

So sick of Americans empty-analysis and ignorance of externalities their society puts on others; overseas colleagues see it as white Taliban. They don't see people in streets over tariffs screwing up their lives, so they've started to tell their politicians Americans (as in the public) are not reliable actors. They don't realize it, but the American publics own credibility is shot, not just their politicians.

I have taken to cutting off friends and family and shit talking anyone in public that wants to socialize; do the politic work to put me on the hook for their healthcare, otherwise I refuse to bother with their existence. Withdrawing from people's lives is a forcing function for self reflection.

You all keep me off the hook caring you exist. I just have to help make line go up. Anything to do with you all as individuals is not my responsibility. That's the choice of the American people. I'm here to profit, not give a fuck you exist.

That's what my fellow Americans taught me through their feckless political effort. Illusory idea some invisible hand gives a shit based upon the gibberish from history they read by people who were wanking their literacy rather than inventing indoor plumbing.

My government owes everything to the people inside the borders and nothing to the people outside

They are concentrated in major cities not evenly distributed across all of the US.

This does nothing to change the facts of my statement.

And even then, we could choose to do something about that. We could do more to help people settle all across the US and be well supported to succeed. But we don't. So instead, we have people crowd the areas where we turn a blind eye to hiring illegal labor and have the social impacts concentrated there and then refuse to actually do anything to help those social costs.

But these are all things we choose to do. We could choose to do something else.

You make it sound so simple, they don't want to live in a small town where they will stand out; with no social support or services.

How do you decide who goes where? What stops them from moving back to the bigger cities? How to you limit demographic displacement?

The UK is doing this, and the US under Biden was trying at a smaller scale with Haitians in smaller towns. It doesn't work, and isn't so simple.

There's many towns & small cities that have been revitalized by immigrants communities. Lewiston Maine, Charleroi Pennsylvania.

America is really struggling to support & enable a people, to create a social safety net. Opportunity is low. But often when immigrants come in from other places, they will put in enormous energy, that can bring some very sad towns back to life.

> with no social support or services

Once again, we're choosing to not have these social supports or social services. It's a choice. We could do it if we wanted, after all we're allegedly the wealthiest country on the planet but somehow can't seem to afford anything.

> How do you decide who goes where?

I'm not suggesting we force it to be a top-down forced decision. I'm often a pretty free-market and empowering people to make their own decisions kind of guy, when it makes sense. And sure, people will tend to cluster more in large cities, that happens even for non-migrants. But in the end, we're doing practically nothing to encourage people to spread out that social cost (or worse, encouraging for forcing the clustering), and that doing nothing is a choice. And then we're doing very little to support these places experiencing such large social costs, which is once again a decision.

All of this is stuff we could do differently, we just choose the status quo (or now choosing violence!) that doesn't work well for a lot of us. Sure seems to be making some people exceptionally wealthy though.

Huh? Have you driven through Iowa lately? Southern Idaho?

We could’ve done something but we ran out of money, the previous generation built up too much debt and sold off the future so now we ran out of the resources.

Guess what is also true of the US population in general...

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Yes, I probably would have made the same argument about the Irish, Italians, Germans, etc. Did they not demographically replace the English, Natives, Blacks? Would the percentage of the US that is English, Native, Black not be higher if there had not been mass immigration of Irish, Italians, Germans, etc. last century and before?

> Did they not demographically replace the English, Natives, Blacks?

In the 1800s? No. You realize how much happened with the great expansion and all that? The population squeeze that happened from the civil war? I find it laughable you'd be arguing for the Native American tribes in the early 1800s. Once again, showing your racist ideology. Thanks for further confirming such a thing. America is for white Protestants only. Got it.

Thanks for confirming to you, me, a white Christian American is not welcome here and shouldn't have been here in the first place. Because I'm not really the right kind of white Christian.

This is why I laugh whenever anyone lauds Singapore for stuff like public housing.

They literally have an immigration schema, if you want permanent resident to citizen track, that requires immigrants to match the ethnic makeup of the country's citizens.

So you have all these white public housing advocates, talking about how great public housing is in Singapore, but they leave out that you have to have PR or citizenship to get it, and they've accomplished making all that possible by having like half their population non-citizens who pay taxes for housing they're ineligible to get and then the people living in the public houses are ethnically guaranteed non-replacement.

> So you have all these white public housing advocates, talking about how great public housing is in Singapore, but they leave out that you have to have PR or citizenship to get it

I find such things to be incredibly backwards and abhorrent. To think if you lucked out in some genomic lottery to be allowed to have extreme privilege in society, this sounds like a fucking nightmare

There are a lot of cool and neat things about Singapore but damn do a lot of things feel like the kind of things that keep me up at night.

But honestly, the modern GOP is closer to enforcing such requirements than any opposing party.

> There are a lot of cool and neat things about Singapore but damn do a lot of things feel like the kind of things that keep me up at night.

It's the happiest little police state in the world ;)

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I definitely don't know enough about the history of such issues to make a deep and reasoned take and thus will mostly shut up until I read more about it. I only vaguely know what big news sources have said about such things in passing.

But as a quick take I think the land pressures of native Hawaiians is radically different than the land issues of white Christians in Texas. And it's not like there's any deeply historic religious connections to Arlington Texas to white Christians for a quick example is there? The worry if cultural elimination is probably radically different at a quick glance wouldn't you agree?

Cultural elimination though real is largely a fraudulent right IMO, it is imposing 'positive' rights like the right to not have your culture eliminated. That's not how rights work, you have the right to practice your culture but not force other people to be practicing yours.

I'm generally for open or at least non-discriminatory immigration. A few sticking points

1) Discriminatory settling patterns are well established as imposed law in the US, i.e. 'hawaiian home lands', American Samoa, Saipan, etc. The first step here is to make ALL US nationals and citizens equal, before we can really even hope to start making immigrants equal. Given limited political capital this would be my #1 priority to burn that capital on.

2) Welfare is essentially incompatible with open immigration and pushes the populace heavily towards favoring middle age wealth foreigners -- that is basically europeans and white English speaking countries. We could probably make it a little less 'racist' if immigrants were forced to permanently disclaim any access to public funds.

3) Immigration is justified under human and properties rights, freedom to go wherever one is invited or has ownership, and basic human liberties. Immigration in practice in the US heavily relies on use of public facilities, which are paid for by the tax payers -- as property owners you would be violating their rights if US persons cannot control foreign access to the public properties they are forced to pay taxes for. i.e. there should be zero immigration controls whatsoever crossing from one ranch to the other on adjacent parts of the Mexican border, but when you use public resources you are now becoming a trespasser if the property owners don't consent.

> Cultural elimination though real is largely a fraudulent right

You start off by declaring it's a fraudulent right but then spend hundreds of words arguing for a framework for your own fraudulent right

> Welfare is essentially incompatible with open immigration

One might then question the rest of their ideals about their morals and what Christ has charged us to do and wonder if racial stability is the standard or helping people is the standard. But I guess you've already decided on such a thing.

> Discriminatory settling patterns are well established as imposed law in the US, i.e. 'hawaiian home lands', American Samoa, Saipan, etc.

I'd say laws in island territories have vastly different concerns than laws on the mainland especially when considering land and cultural concerns. They have vastly different pressures, don't you agree? Like what were going to argue only white Protestants can own land in Montana? Pretty different circumstances here than a tiny island with religious circumstances.

I'll address the third point since it is the only one I don't see as a fundamentally irreconcilable difference in subjective opinion that cannot be proven factually.

The ethnic discrimination laws in America Samoa, and to a lesser extent Saipan (I think for them more about control, they have no problem with Chinese running roughshod operating all kinds of shady and illegal business, it is probably the most corrupt place in the US) are aimed towards stopping cultural elimination. The case is compelling for Samoa, the others are just naked racial discrimination as the local populace seems to have settled on the fact their culture has pretty much been eliminated as anything beyond a footnote and they're going to cash grab all they can out of the remains which I guess is just the usual American dream.

(Hawaii used to go even further, and racially discriminate in voting, but racial discrimination in voting was struck circa 2000 with dissent written by the now deceased racist Ruth Ginsburg in Rice v Cayetano. Not long after that 'non-'Hawaiians also finally got the right to equally run for office).

American Samoa is particularly aggressive about it, their government and IIRC even the feds strongly imply or command you can enter for 30 days as a tourist without further authorization, despite the fact that established case law and the American Samoa Bar training to internal lawyers teach that US citizens have the right to permanently settle and work in American Samoa. I did some research and could not find any case of a US citizen being 'deported' from the territory unless they were wanted for crimes elsewhere but they do their damnedest to make it sound like you can be.

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Amazing how fast you backtracked. Point to actual cases of parts of the USA going hard on racist policy preventing demographic replacement which based on your rhetoric is something you pretend to be against, and your response is more or less lol actually it doesn't matter, it's just some rocks.

No matter that previously you were pointing to places as small as Arlington Texas.

You don't actually care about eliminating these discriminatory policies. You just have your racist motives to apply it inequally.

I've been highly consistent in my statements. I'm in no position to pass judgement on whatever is happening in American Samoa or Hawaii as I'm definitely ignorant to the issues. I'm only speaking from a high level comparison of the issues, which is they're vastly more land constrained than the mainland US. So to me, an ignorant person not read into the debate, it seems we can't really make hard rules and comparisons. It's comparing to extremely different situations, easy to see even without me having a lot of deep knowledge on the topic.

And it really shows your ignorance too, acting like Arlington is some small place. There's tons of land around here in North Texas, ample for whoever to make a new story and new life. The people making up most of the population have only been here for like a hundred years, tops. Any kind of long historic claim to the land outside of Native American populations are a farce. This isn't true for small islands in the Pacific which probably have a vastly more complicated history.

But it sure shows your character that you bother to deeply look up such a legal basis for racist ideology. Good work broadcasting your hard work.

And yeah, I'm the racist for arguing anyone should have the ability to partake in American prosperity. Meanwhile you're the non-racist advocating for enforcing racial land rights across all the US. Got it.

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I posted this comment [1] in reply to the other participant in this subthread but it applies equally to you. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines when participating on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44243768

True or not you had to wade through at least two flagged comments to get to mine. You really have yourself to blame if you didn't want to continue reading. You were warned twice but sought this, you wanted it.

So how about this: go fuck yourself, and your nauseating appeal to your ivory tower techie faux-academic attempt at guidelines. Nothing about me is 'equal' to this self righteous racist piece of human garbage, although I admit his behavior is the very best argument as to why his culture should rapidly be overshadowed in Texas.

The guidelines apply to everyone equally. We don't care what topic you're arguing about or what side you're supporting, but still we get accused of being biased in favour of something or another every day.

This is only a place where people want to come to discuss things because we and others put effort into keeping it that way. If you're going to participate here, and if you're going to expect others to be held to a high standard, we need you to hold yourself to a high standard too.

Fair enough. You have my respect.

Many thanks!

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Both commenters have broken the guidelines in this flamey back-and-forth, which is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid on HN. In particular you've both made swipes at each other, and engaged in ideological battle. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just wanted to say, I agree with your warning and regret I seem to have misread some of the other commenter's statements. Sorry.

> In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million

your calcuation needs to account for ppl coming in on non immigrant visas too.

usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas.

If they were approved visa, they aren't exactly an illegal immigrant, no? That's a different issue entirely.

Also, Trump approved for. Ore H1B Visas this year.

> they aren't exactly an illegal immigrant, no?

parent and gp comments are talking about "immigrants" . where do you see illegal immigrants ?

Up the chain mentions "perceived enemy". ICE is supposedly cracking down on illegal immigration.

Are we instead saying that anyone not born in the US but comes in is an enemy?

but context was set to just 'immigrants' . Why would i go up the chain if the context was reset ?

Are you saying 'immigrants' anywhere in this thread automatically implies 'illegal immigrant' . Thats really confusing to me.

> Are we instead saying that anyone not born in the US but comes in is an enemy?

this is ridiculous twisting of my comment. I was just correcting record about population increase from immigration. population increase doesn't happen just from immigrant visas, ppl on non-immigrant visas stay in the country often for decades.

Then let me clarify, I was intending to talk mostly about illegal immigration and asylum seekers, the kinds of immigrants person I was replying to was probably mostly talking about. These are the immigrants people seem most concerned about, as they typically have a higher rate of relying on social services and welfare at least in the short term. It is these kinds of immigrants which impose the largest initial cost on society to allow in.

But sure, somewhere around 4-5 million illegal/undocumented immigrants, add another 10 million or so non-immigrant visas (which I agree, tend to have people end up staying for lots of other reasons), we're still somewhere around 15 million or so migrants with most of those having some kind of stable job lined up before they arrive. It's still less than 5% of the overall population increase with these migrants, but now a lot of these in this addition are largely economically self-sufficient from the get-go (those with work visas). You're not really changing my point at all.

In the end we're just too poor to deal with a generally pretty minor increase in population over several years while simultaneously seemingly being the wealthiest nation on the planet? How does that make sense?

Also, your claim of:

> usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas

is factually incorrect. The US issued around 11.5 million non-immigrant visas, of which 8.5 million were visitor visas. So not a total of 15 million visas and excluding the tourism its really about 3 million non-immigrant not-tourist visas.

> in 2024, in Fiscal Year 2024, we issued 11.5 million visas, and that’s a world record for us, breaking all previous records. Of these 8.5 million were visitor visas.

https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-s...

lets look at data for 2023. ( I mistyped 2024 instead of 2023.)

https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...

There were 10,438,327 non immigrant visas. Out of which there were 5,902,426 b1/b2 and 29,286 B1.

looks like i din't count ppl with BCC in visitor visas.

> In the end we're just too poor to deal with a generally pretty minor increase in population over several years while simultaneously seemingly being the wealthiest nation on the planet? How does that make sense?

again, i didn't say this. i was just trying to correct the record. I honestly have no say in "how many is too many" . i have no idea how to even think about that to come up with a framewrok to answer that question

That’s a lie. The actual number was closer to 4 million. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

The New York Times put it at about 2.4m/year, or around 10m total: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s....

That's gross immigration, not net. People leave, too. The government's numbers show the net being approximately +1M/year.

Did you actually read the article?

> Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

Why try to minimize it or be defensive about the figure? The Biden administration is proud the number is high. Do you want the number high or low?

From ChatGPT:

> So, while 10–11 million CBP encounters is the most solid official figure, when you add gotaways, overstays, and parole entries, the total number of people likely entering without full authorization could reasonably be around 15–17 million during the Biden presidency.

That page is a joke. Ignoring reality does not manufacture a new reality. Four million might be the legal migration count, hard to say.

We had caravans of tens of thousands of people constantly streaming into the US for four years. The video evidence is out there for everyone to see. News outlets that did not engage in hiding reality and promoting falsehoods had crews at the border every day for four years collecting video evidence of what was going on.

If you care about understanding the truth, go to the US Customs and Border Protection website and look around. You can also cross check with Homeland Security and other official sources. And, yes, you will find data that predates the Trump administration...so you can't blame bias. For example, if I remember correctly, there were over THREE MILLION unauthorized entries in 2024.

Imagine how long a caravan with an extra 8 million people would be. I mean, I’ve been to a Huskers football game and seen what the exit looked like, and this would be 100x more.

If such a thing were being reported by multiple reputable sources, I’d be less inclined to roll my eyes at the preposterous idea.

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A DHS post from 2025 is not reliable information, just reading the headline should be enough to notice that. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. has been more or less stable for the last 20 years: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...

> A DHS post from 2025 is not reliable information, just reading the headline should be enough to notice that.

You are living in an incomprehensible fantasy my friend. Good luck.

When the President is a known liar, and has hand-picked the secretary of the department, why should people trust the department's self-reports?

I don't need luck, just time. This administration always fails and is proven wrong at the end.

What percentage of the 10 million recovered jobs were taken by incoming immigrants?

People died and permanently retired during the pandemic. It's possible the 10 million number represents a restored workforce; it's also possible it represents a changed workforce.

If the latter, that illegal immigration allowed the US to recover faster than it would have otherwise and the lesson from history is we're a stronger nation for easing immigration restrictions.

> illegal immigration allowed the US to recover faster than it would have otherwise and the lesson from history is we're a stronger nation for easing immigration restrictions.

There is no question whatsoever that immigration, legal and done correctly, is a force for good. As a legal immigrant, it understand this very well.

In fact, I understand the entire process very well, including the illegal immigration part. You see, when I was six years old, my parents overstayed their tourist visa in the US. They were then told to leave and my entire family left. Two years later, after going through proper channels, we obtained permission to come to the US legally.

I truly do not understand how people twist themselves into a pretzel to justify illegal entry into a country. Actually, it is worse than that, the only country where they seem to think this is OK is the US. Every single person who is for illegal immigration in the US understands why you cannot just move to New Zealand, for example, to stay and work there without permission. They also understand New Zealand's points system for the selection of who is granted permanent residency. Not in the US. Of course not.

Proponents also say that not enough people are let in legally or that it is too slow. Two points to be made here. The entire planet wants to come to the US, so, yeah, it will take a couple of years (as it did for my family). Second, when millions of people enter illegally, the annual quota for legal immigration cannot be increased. Doing so would exacerbate the problem. So, illegal immigration actually hinders changes and growth of the legal immigration system.

Finally, proponents of illegal immigrants are of the same ilk as those who propose raising tax rates for everyone except themselves. And, when they do include themselves, they don't lead by example and simply send more money than they owe to the government. Same with immigration. How?

I break into your home with my entire family while you are on vacation. I start paying the bills; power, water, insurance, heck, I even pay the mortgage.

Can we all stay in your home forever? You are welcome to come back from your vacation and share the home with us?

Of course not. Nobody of sound mind would accept such a situation.

How is breaking and entering into a country --any country-- justified and elevated to almost be a virtue?

While not a perfect analogy, of course, this does illustrate a fundamental idea: You don't get to grab things (your iPhone, car, home, residency, benefits, etc.) by force and keep them just because you did. If the world worked that way we would all be walking around with a firearm strapped to our leg and blood would run down every street in the nation. Violating these fundamental rights is nothing less than destructive to society.

> Every single person who is for illegal immigration in the US understands why you cannot just move to New Zealand, for example, to stay and work there without permission

Yes, of course, and this is not contradictory. "American Exceptionalism" means different things to different people, but broadly speaking: as a nation built of immigrants, there's no particular "right" time to pull up the ladder and say "That's enough immigrants now." Most people who support this position (not all, but enough to be concerning), when you peel back the veneer, support it because they want America to be "A nation of X" and America facing the reality of more people with different world experiences threatens that goal. There's a reason the protests in Charlottesville turned from being about the history of the South to chants of "Blood and Soil."

Regardless of what the law says: the reality on the ground is the American economy is relying on the labor provided by the undocumented, and they are our friends and neighbors for years running. Sometimes, when a law bends too hard against what the people actually want, you ditch the law. A government fails to grasp that to its peril; hopefully, it only results in tea wasted in the harbor.

> when millions of people enter illegally, the annual quota for legal immigration cannot be increased

Untrue; these are rules we make up for ourselves. Congress could set the number to zero tomorrow. Or infinity. It's entirely up to us.

> Finally, proponents of illegal immigrants are of the same ilk as those who propose raising tax rates for everyone except themselves

I think we'd have to agree to disagree. I, for instance, am in favor of raising taxes on myself and people in my tax bracket, as well as basically everyone above my tax bracket. No strong opinion on lower brackets. And I do send more than I owe to the government. And buy bonds.

Your meta-argument is "These people don't see the problems;" I think you are mistaken. People see the problems, they just think they're better handled with community service than with truncheons and planes to some other country.

> I break into your home with my entire family while you are on vacation. I start paying the bills; power, water, insurance, heck, I even pay the mortgage.

> Can we all stay in your home forever?

I mean, that's an argument about "squatter's rights," not immigration, but for what it's worth... yes? The law in many states does recognize your right to keep using the land if you develop it and it's de-facto abandoned. If I own so much land I can't use all of it and you find a better use for it, that's on me.

The nature of immigration is so divorced from this analogy as to make it worthless. Try this one instead: You come here, build a house, raise a family. Five years later, I come along and try to kick you out because you didn't cross an 'i' on some paperwork in 2019. Is this just, or should I leave you the heck alone because you're not hurting anyone?

> You don't get to grab things (your iPhone, car, home, residency, benefits, etc.) by force and keep them just because you did

I'm sure you're not arguing "America should be returned to the Native Americans..." But that is the argument you are making here. Are you sure you mean it?

... FWIW, I'm sorry your parents were forced out. In an ideal world, that shouldn't have happened. That would have been, what, roundabouts the Reagan presidency? Reagan's administration set us on the path to where we are today by deciding a lot of laws on the books suddenly needed enforcement where little had happened. To all our detriment.

Ha! 1969. Massachusetts.

Well, time to exit this thread. The problem with HN having become a monoculture forum is that it is impossible to have conversations. I never downvote or flag anyone, particularly those who disagree with me. The same is not true on the other side, if you don't tow the line you get attacked, downvoted and flagged mercilessly until you shut your mouth. So, yeah, you win. Have a good day.

Oh, my mistake. They got got by Nixon. Nixon set up the playbook that Reagan ran with on immigration. He needed to make your parents the enemy to sew up Southern votes. To be honest, it probably would have worked for another four years had he not been so paranoid that he spied on his political opposition and got caught out for it (back when that sort of thing mattered in American Presidential politics).

I appreciate seeing your vantage point on this topic. While we do not agree, It is helpful to see other people's takes.

I'll add another point and I am done.

Just in case you misinterpreted my story, I think it was 100% correct and proper for the US to ask my family to leave, apply for permission to come back legally and finally do so. My parents did not do the right thing by overstaying their visa and working. In other words, I do not agree that they should have been allowed to stay.

When they did obtain authorization they had to agree to not be a burden to US taxpayers for five years. I also agree with this.

Legal and orderly immigration is essential for societies to function. This is true everywhere on this planet.

The people chucking cinder blocks and protestors are unaffiliated. That is guilt by association, a logical fallacy.

Seeing immigrants and perceiving an increased in crime, and citing that they are related is post facto rationalization fallacy.

Let's see... what other logical fallacies are in here. Oh.. people emigrate and die, so the accumulation of numbers is not valid nor does that handle double counting.

AFAIK a strong US economy generates around 250k jobs per month. Further, there were more jobs created under Biden than were lost during the pandemic.

I'd also suggest if this all were a big deal, illegal entry ought to be elevated from a civil infraction. It is more severe in the eyes of the law to drive 25 hour than it is to overstay a visa.

> The people chucking cinder blocks and protestors are unaffiliated.

I didn't say they were and you have no clue if they are or are not. Even if you were personally there to demonstrate peacefully, no have no clue what forces are operating behind they scenes. And we know that part is true. One way to put it is that aspects of this is organized crime. They will eventually be discovered and held to pay for what they have done in a court of law.

> Let's see... what other logical fallacies are in here

Not a logical fallacy, but the most incomprehensible development over the years is that somehow large numbers of people think it is OK for people to just pour into the US as they wish, no controls, no admission criteria, nothing. And yet, the same people understand that this is not acceptable anywhere else in the world.

Clearly there's nothing I can say to help people who are firmly chained inside the cave looking at shadows. The indoctrination is way too powerful. Some of us try, but, sadly, the only way this insanity will pass is for people to gain clarity on their own. Not sure what it will take. Time will tell.

Perhaps this is your idea of what this country needs to become?

https://i.imgur.com/JcjpHKe.png

Not going to happen. No way.

> Not a logical fallacy, but the most incomprehensible development over the years is that somehow large numbers of people think it is OK for people to just pour into the US as they wish, no controls, no admission criteria, nothing

Actually, it's the other way around.

The US southern border was very porous for most of its history. Around 1986, a combination of moral panic about Latino influence on the culture and concerns about drug trade enabled the Reagan administration and Congress to tighten immigration law into something approximating the structure we have today in terms of enforcement (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5049707/).

This backfired spectacularly. Let people bop back and forth to Tijuana, and they bop back and forth to Tijuana. Force them to struggle to cross the border, to declare nationality, start evicting them if they over-stay... And now they have reason to choose and to fight for the choice. The result of closing the border is undocumented immigration went up (secondary statistics strongly suggesting that this was actual immigration, not enforcement resulting from more tracking of undocumented immigrants).

Regardless of the law on paper, under-enforcement was the behavior of the land for nearly a century, and this new regime is an experiment that has strongly suggested the law was sourly anti-human to begin with.

(As a meta-comment on law: you're talking to a generation that watched the War on Drugs happen. Don't be surprised Americans have soured on the notion, in general, that law and morality are closely interlocked).

Why then bring up the cinder block issue if it's unaffiliated?

> Some of us try, but, sadly, the only way this insanity will pass is for people to gain clarity on their own. Not sure what it will take. Time will tell.

I'd say it would take sound arguments. Meanwhile, your arguments are not sound. You did not address what I wrote. To rebut a 'guilt-by-association' criticism, you said "I didn't say they were [affiliated]". That confirms the criticism.

You did not address the post-facto rationalization criticism at all.

I also saw a person in a pokemon costume too. Until we can have some sound arguments and facts, it's very much a choose-your-own-adventure situation. Are we here to just yell at each other? I personally do think the country needs to maintain rule-of-law (with notable mention of the 1st amendment), and the full rule-of-law goes for everyone, police, protestors, and opportunists.

I understand your position. There is nothing I can say that will change it. Only time and life experience will, maybe.

Not here to yell at you or anyone. Having lived in multiple cultures and countries across the world, I bring to the table a perspective that most Americans simply do not have. I have no clue if you are American, BTW. I have had the experience of being in fear for my life while detained by military thugs as a teenager. I have seen and lived the pain and misery leftist ideologies bring to populations first hand.

Any immigrant who has actually lived these realities cannot comprehend how it is that the US does not simply laugh these people off the stage. And, to be sure, the extreme right is just as destructive, yet that is not a reality in the US at all (despite the media pushing that narrative into people's brains day after day).

So, like I said, nothing I can say to you or anyone else, that much is obvious. There are things you learn about society and ideology that can only be learned from experience. Maybe the US needs to live through a leftist utopia for a period of time for everyone to come out smarter. That would be tragic, of course, but it might also be necessary. If California does not scare the shit out of the rest of the nation I don't know what will.

Have a good one.

California is scaring the shit out of people, but not for the reasons you seem to suggest.

Rolling in the National Guard and Marines on a peaceful protest is, quite frankly, un-American. It's massive federal overreach that has led to violence in the past. Would be nice if the current administration knew its own history.

Peaceful protest? C'mon.

They were throwing molotov cocktails, rocks, scooters, mortar-like fireworks, bottles with urine and chemicals and who knows what else. They were destroying and looting stores and vandalizing everything in sight. I don't know how many Waymo cars they destroyed (it looked like five). Far from peaceful.

The moderate or peaceful majority is never the reason for enforcement actions. These are triggered by a militant and violent minority, some of whom are actually paid to cause disruption. So, you have a couple of choices. The first is to do nothing and just let it burn. We have seen that happen before. The second is to bring forward an overwhelming show of force to dissipate that violent element (and bring them to justice). That's what happened.

This is no different from control system theory. The ideal critically-damped feedback loop does not exist when dealing with mobs. Either you crank up the dampening early or you pay the consequences of doing it too late. We can't have entire business districts destroyed by thugs. You have to stop them as soon as possible. As it stands, these animals caused a massive amount of damage in just a couple of days.

Yesterday showed the contrast very well, there was a peaceful (truly, not the fake "peaceful" pushed by the media while shit is burning) protest that seemed to number in the thousands of people. Perfect. No problems. That only happened because thugs (the minority) learned within a day or two that they would suffer severe consequences for their actions.

The third option is proportionate response, which the administration danced right over. Why? Why roll in the federal forces when the governor says it's not needed? They didn't show up to protect those shops or Waymo cars anyway, so that's irrelevant; as per the Secretary of Defense's own testimony today (https://youtu.be/10itk-W8DV4?feature=shared&t=128), they were dispatched to protect law enforcement attempting to enforce immigration law against a city that does not want their citizens kidnapped off the street by an unaccountable government.

Violence happened, but not to any scale that makes a military deployment on American soil in peacetime make sense.

Does this look like a riot justifying soldiers to you? https://kolektiva.social/@jonahgibberish/114663170166350434

> This is no different from control system theory.

Rolling out the Marines is turning the `I` knob, not the `D` knob. It's teaching protestors "if you're gonna show up, come armed to deal with soldiers." Incredibly dangerous in a country where that firepower is in so many private hands.

I don't know when we became a nation so cowardly that we have to point military firepower at our own citizens. When strangers are turning out into the streets to thwart federal enforcement, maybe the problem is the law not the criminals?

The sources you consider "reputable" lie all the time...by cherry-picking, obsfucating, mis-direction, distorting, half-truths etc. They of course, flat-out lie too quite regularly too.

This is a bad argument because it could very easily go either way. Post any source of yours for the 12 million number and I'll just as easily say it's fake too.

Exactly but pretending unreliable sources are reliable is a bad argument too.

We are left in a very, very bad place when the media can't be relied on to tell the truth. But here we are..

> Ignoring reality does not manufacture a new reality.

I wish we could tell that to Trump.

>We had caravans of tens of thousands of people constantly streaming into the US for four years. T

Okay, and Biden deported more people than Trump's first term. Is that fact a joke too?

>go to the US Customs and Border Protection website and look around.

Okay, what am I looking for? The most recent news update was June 5th about building a wall in Arizona. I thought that 2016 narrative was over?

>if I remember correctly, there were over THREE MILLION unauthorized entries in 2024.

And

>In Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, there were 271,484 individuals removed from the US by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). This number represents an increase of nearly 90% compared to the previous fiscal year. This data includes removals by ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).

Why are we acting like Biden did nothing?

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And your talking points thrown out like some kind of analysis-ending gotcha have shielded you from seeing the truth. It matters much less that Biden was mentally unfit because responsibilities were delegated to advisors and a professional bureaucracy. That was the group project dynamic of our system of government that we took for granted.

Now that bureaucracy has been smashed in favor of autocracy, and we're suffering the other demented guy - not merely as a figurehead, but getting straight raw dogged by his rotting brain as he destroys what's left of our distributed economy with a national sales tax, orders the American military to attack American cities, and preps for a uuuuge North Korean style parade.

As Americans, we have a right to protest. That right does not go away when other people damage property, government property especially. Remember January 6, where there weren't even real ideals at stake but just a crowd riled up on fake news campaign propaganda that turned out to be utterly false?

When things do get out of hand, which is far beyond a few destroyed government vehicles, it is up to the local police forces to set the balance between restoring order and that still existing first amendment right to protest. Despite LAPD having been doing this just fine, Trump is illegally escalating the situation to look strong for the useful idiots still following him, to distract from his hissy fit with Musk, and most importantly to take the focus off his Big Ugly Deficit Spending Inflation Bill poised to bankrupt our country.

It seems like you need to have the realization that just because you've caught one tribe's media lying does not mean that you've found pure truth.

> your talking points thrown out like some kind of analysis-ending gotcha have shielded you from seeing the truth.

Typical. Diminish the other person by claiming that everything they say are talking points. In other words, they are mindless drones simply repeating what they are told. The minute you take that perspective the only thing you can believe is your own bullshit, because everything else is dismissed as talking points. Brilliant.

> It seems like you need to have the realization that just because you've caught one tribe's media lying does not mean that you've found pure truth.

I'll repeat what I said in another comment:

Having lived in multiple cultures and countries across the world, I bring to the table a perspective that most Americans simply do not have. I have had the experience of being in fear for my life while detained by military thugs as a teenager. I have seen and lived the economic and cultural destruction the left loves to use to control societies. They love the poor so much they multiply them. I have seen and lived the pain and misery leftist ideologies bring to populations first hand. No leftist society in history, anywhere, has elevated their population. Before you say China, that was done by the CCP grabbing onto external capitalist forces, without which they would still be an agrarian society.

To be sure, the extreme right is just as destructive, yet that is not a reality in the US at all (despite the media pushing that narrative into people's brains day after day).

Any immigrant who has actually lived these realities cannot comprehend how it is that the US does not simply laugh these people off the stage. Or, how it is that Americans are so easily duped by these professional manipulators.

There's nothing I can say to you or anyone else to have you see the reality that has been playing out, that much is obvious. There are things you learn about society and ideology that can only be learned from experience.

Maybe the US needs to live through a leftist utopia for a period of time for everyone to come out smarter. That would be tragic, of course, but it might also be necessary. If California does not scare the shit out of the rest of the nation I don't know what will.

Have a good one.

> Typical. Diminish the other person by claiming that everything they say are talking points.

Your comment was better before you edited it to have this. The criticism isn't of you personally, it's of using a cookie-cutter argument that sidesteps talking about the actual topic. Do you not see how it's a non-sequitur to talk about now-out-of-office Biden's mental incapacity as a response to Biden being mentioned as the nominal figurehead for a set of policies?

> I have had the experience of being in fear for my life while detained by military thugs as a teenager

Is the problem here not the military thugs and the lack of individual rights and freedoms, not whatever political narratives are being professed by the people ruling with the thugs?

> I have seen and lived the economic and cultural destruction the left loves to use to control societies

Why is it just "the left" ? Why not all authoritarians ? It seems to me that authoritarians will use any ideology as a backbone for driving hypocritical "do as I say" power.

> To be sure, the extreme right is just as destructive, yet that is not a reality in the US at all

This is the crux of your bait and switch, where you've heavily focused on how bad the power-descendant "leftists" could be, but now give a pass to the different flavor authoritarians that are currently attacking our society. By my own analysis of seemingly undisputed facts, we have or have had:

- Tariffs further destroying our economy, implemented and dialed back with seemingly no actual rationale or goals besides shaking down other countries for personal enrichment.

- Significant destruction of the US bureaucracy which had been somewhat constraining authoritarian power. The problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism wasn't the bureaucracy but rather the authoritarianism.

- Destruction of US scientific research capacity because the communities doing the research had the wrong politics. And for what remains, the implementation of a right-flavored Lysenkoism.

- American soldiers in an American city pointing guns at American citizens exercising their first amendment constitutional rights, against the express authority of that state's government.

- International isolation through alienation of our long-term allies by telling them we might side with their adversaries instead, or even outright attack them ourselves.

- A weaker Dollar based on political instability

- A massive deficit spending bill on the table, continuing the long trend of Republicans complaining about monetary inflation while actually being the worst offenders.

If and when "leftists" get back into power, all of these liberty-destroying trends will be gleefully embraced and expanded under the banner of leftism "fixing" what rightism did, just as they're currently being justified as rightism "fixing" what leftism did. In reality it's all just individual-liberty-destroying authoritarianism. What has changed is that you are now gleefully supporting it.

> If California does not scare the shit out of the rest of the nation

How is this not just another cliche talking point? I've spent some time in LA a while ago. It wasn't for me - self absorbed, entitled, group-performative politics as a coping mechanism for societal problems. Affluenza where all the white people don't even know which end of a screwdriver to hold because they pay an immigrant underclass to do anything beyond changing a GU24. Oh, and you actually find yourself getting sick of sunny days because there is no damn weather. I could go on!

But "scare the shit" ? If you don't want to live in that culture and environment, don't go there? Despite my distaste, individual choice seems fine to me.

Apart from statements of Mayor Adams, could you list maybe 3 examples?

Trying to research this, I see examples like Denver and Chicago that have had struggles, anx did things like limit shelter stats to 72 hours. I found no examples though that were point blank: "we cannot handle this." Again, excluding mayor Adam's, perhaps you can help fill in the gaps with concrete examples and hopefully some verbatim quotes of "we cannot handle this?"

Chicago had taken measures to restrict migrant buses from dropping off migrants within the city limits so they were dropping them off in the burbs. under the guise of some nonsensical rules "we want orderly drop-offs with 24 hr advance notice and only 2 migrant busses total in 24 hrs"

I appreciate the specifics.

When you wrote "so they", I want to be sure that the 'they' refers to bus operators that were payed to drop off migrants in Chicago:

"The city says buses can arrive only during daytime hours so volunteers can be available to help, but bus drivers are responding by dropping migrants off in Chicago suburbs at night." [1]

The '2 buses per day' needs context. That could very well be a simple ask to not send them all at once. Further, the buses we are talking about were meant to overload the target the cities. They were sent with no notice, no coordination, just dumping a couple hundred or more people off into a random place in a random city. The ask therefore of "don't send all buses just on the same day", instead spread it out so that the volunteer resources are not overwhelmed and have a chance to work with and place everyone. I don't want to belabor this too much further, but I strongly suspect the desire for 2 buses max was a lot more about load balancing than it was rate limiting.

My impression, Chicago was more like "do this orderly, we can handle it, just don't drop off a couple hundred people all at once in some random place without telling us."

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/06/1223287116/chicago-is-tighten...

> I strongly suspect the desire for 2 buses max was a lot more about load balancing than it was rate limiting.

load balance with what exactly ? there is only one server thats rate limiting. oh you mean other servers being border states that aren't allowed to do similar rate limiting?

you asked "examples and hopefully some verbatim quotes of "we cannot handle this?""

I gave you an example of exactly that but you say you "suspect" its not that. Chicago doesn't need "volunteers" to handle intake. City spent 700M dollars to migrant housing, employing thousands of people in all sorts of roles. You think they are dependent on volunteers to man a bus intake point? That was all clearly a ruse. Migrant shelters were very unpopular with mayor's core constituency[1].

> do this orderly, we can handle it

It was not like that it was "we can only take 2 buses total per day any" It was clearly stated in city ordinance. Why are you twisting it into something else. Demand doesn't just drop off just because city decided to rate limit.

I think you are being higly disingenuous here.

Edit: ok i see why from your other comments. You were making a statement not asking a question about cities not wanting migrants.

Anyways, I don't have dog in this fight. I am telling you what the mood was here in south chicago at that time.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/05/11/south-shore-neighbor...

> I gave you an example of exactly that but you say you "suspect" its not that

Sorry, I should have been more direct. I do not see your example is a verbatim, "we cannot handle this." Your example strikes me as a: "please don't dump everyone on us all at once without telling us first. Spread it out some, give us notice, and don't do it in the middle of the night so that the people who would help are available."

> Chicago doesn't need "volunteers" to handle intake.

I'm just quoting the source, from the previously referenced [1]: "The city says buses can arrive only during daytime hours so volunteers can be available to help."

> Demand doesn't just drop off just because city decided to rate limit.

We agree there was a limit put in place. We have not yet established the intent was to rate limit vs any other plausible explanation. Even if load balancing were not the intent, that does not prove the intent was rate limiting.

OTOH, if we did know the total number of buses, then we could infer rate limiting. Notably if there are more than 14 buses/wk, then the 2 buses per day limit would be a rate limit. If it's 10 busses/wk, then a 2 bus/day max is not a rate limit beyond the 24 hour threshold, which is exactly load balancing.

> Anyways, I don't have dog in this fight. I am telling you what the mood was here in south chicago at that time.

I appreciate that. I can understand that there would have been a tense mood. The way people were 'shipped' to Chicago seemed intended to put high stress on the community receiving them.

> strikes me as

> I strongly suspect

> My impression

so i guess its just your interpretation against mine. prbly not productive to discuss this anymore.

anyways kind of boring done to death on internet a million times before :)

Fair enough. I asked for 3 examples and we have differing impressions over just the one example you were able to provide. No other examples were provided. If you care to list other examples, I'll be willing to allow it as an exercise for future readers for whether they consider those other examples as valid as well and would leave the last word with you.

We had no problem in NY handling the influx. In fact we handled it so well that it angered the Republicans even more because they still gave immigration money to Texas AND had to give more money to the sanctuary cities. A problem they created and reaped the effects.

There were not 12 million immigrants entering during the Biden administration. Please provide balanced proof.

The only people in NY that claimed we couldn’t handle it were the Mayor who was trying to get out of his blatant corruption by appealing to Trump.

Same with Chicago. They handled it from what I heard, why did Texas struggle so even with the extra federal dollars they get?

Texas didn’t struggle. They just created the appearance that it was an influx by immediately putting people on buses and shipped across the country then covering it in the media as if a bunch of buses driving somewhere means the border is under surge.

Funny how that seems to have ended magically as soon as Trump was elected.

As a resident of Texas, yes we are struggling with migration. I'm not trying to paint migration in a negative light, but we do need to do more in terms of ESL programs and better funding schooling and similar programs in migrant-heavy areas. It's hard to have well performing schools in areas where it's hard to hire a teacher that speaks the language of the children, our Medicaid programs are struggling to provide healthcare, etc.

We all point to Texas's education department as a laughing stock of results. But we expect Texas to bear a massive part of the burden of low income non-English migrants while using the same measuring stick to compare. And we act like this is fair. And don't get me wrong, Texas' legislature is complicit for the failure! We should all do more to support these communities.

I do agree, it's largely a self inflicted problem. But things need to change to properly deal with the increase in those relying on public programs. They're underfunded, understaffed, and under supplied. We're not setting people up for success, and it shows.

> It's hard to have well performing schools in areas where it's hard to hire a teacher that speaks the language of the children,

It can't possibly be that hard to find Spanish speaking teachers in Texas.

As someone who knows many people who were high-quality Spanish speaking elementary teachers in Texas, it's hard to find skilled and qualified people willing to work at that level working for the wages being offered when the cost of living is what it is and other jobs are offering considerably more.

When you can have 80% of the take home apay but have fewer parents issuing death threats while filling tacos at Taco Bell (and they pay for your community college to go elsewhere) it's no surprise teachers choose to go elsewhere.

Practically every school district in Texas is facing a qualified teacher shortage.

There is an issue around a general teacher shortage, mostly due to poor pay and treatment. It's hard to find teachers in general. It's been exacerbated recently in states like Texas, with proposed book bans and bans on teaching history. No one wants to get punished for assigning Brave New World or teaching about slavery (and teachers don't want to lie to kids about history, either).

Of course, the Trump admin has responded to this by deciding not to fund the TQP grant program, which in part trains and places teachers in high-need areas like STEM, special ed, and bilingual ed. This struggle is mostly a self-inflicted policy choice.

I can’t tell what kind of change you’re asking for. Your state refuses to raise wages and fund education. So instead inciting a fictional immigration crises is the acceptable change? Rounding people up and locking them up won’t solve the other self inflicted problems. It will just make money for the prisons.

> Your state refuses to raise wages and fund education

I'm saying we need to change our funding for education and protect workers rights. We need to crack down on those hiring illegal labor. I agree things need to change. I think the federal government should acknowledge we're being more impacted by immigration than many other states and help more with education and other social programs. I think it was a bad choice for us to not expand Medicaid back in the day and I think its bad we're talking about restricting it more. I'm probably not the person you're picturing in your mind, I'm going to go ride a bicycle to pick up my kids from school today and I've talked a few friends of mine out of buying a pickup truck.

> And don't get me wrong, Texas' legislature is complicit for the failure!

I'm fully agreeing at least half the problem is within.

> Rounding people up and locking them up won’t solve the other self inflicted problems

I agree! I don't think a lot of what Texas is doing is good!

I try not to make judgements based on where people are from. I was just seeking clarity in your statement. You don’t sound like a drooling troll interested in spreading national politicking. You sound like a concerned citizen of Texas and promoting education and expanding healthcare is how we get out of this mess for sure.

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12 million is equivalent to the average population of 2 states.

The Democrats, who love to lecture everybody about "protecting democracy", are attempting to sway voter demographics in their favor through illegal immigration. California used to be a Republican state till it was turned deep blue through immigration.

And one-party states produce the worst, most incompetent politicians, who rise to the top not through the battle of ideas, ability and accountability but through political favors and backroom deals.

Gavin Newsom is the perfect example of this.

California continues to be the largest economy in the United States (and 4th largest in the world).

If they're failing, they're failing extremely well. I wonder how we get some of that failure in my part of the country?

They have Silicon Valley and the largest population of any US state. Gavin Newsom gets zero credit for either of these things. You only have to look at how incredibly badly prepared for and managed the palisade fires were to see the level of incompetence under Gavin Newsom.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-haul-california/

So you're saying a large population is correlated to a very healthy economy?

Remind me again why we want to kick immigrants out?

No I'm not remotely saying that and I thought we were talking about Gavin Newsom? And I'm not wasting any more time with you, it's pointless.

The topic is "Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests." The protests are about ICE rounding up people on suspicion of being undocumented immigrants. Whether a place being full of undocumented immigrants is actually a bad thing is extremely salient to the topic, especially when the President has decided it's worth pointing the military's guns at our own citzenry over.

No the topic within this particular sub-thread had diverted to the competency of Gavin Newsom.

This is what Canada mostly does and it’s super effective, the problem is that the people who employ illegal immigrants: farmers, construction contractors, hotel owners, etc…belong to the same party pushing against illegal immigration, they would basically be punishing themselves, so it isn’t going to happen.

Exactly The aggressive raids aren't in Florida or Texas, or even California farm county, they're targeting urban areas, and getting the intended headlines.

Not true.. they are doing the raids elsewhere including Texas. Florida cracked down on the state level on businessrs a year ago so not as much of a problem as far as I understand.

Florida has not cracked down. The E-Verify mandate is limited to companies of 25 or more employees and is not enforced. DeSantis will never oppose the criminal businesses profiting from illegal labor.

E verify is the real crackdown. Everything else is just show

When they mandate E-Verify universally and enforce it, we will know that they are serious. Until then, it is just a sham to keep Democrats and Trumpers distracted.

Immigration is a federal government problem. Why would a start “crack” down on something not in its jurisdiction?

The Tenth Amendment and Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting give states the power to enforce work eligibility laws.

“Largest joint immigration operation in Florida history leads to 1,120 criminal alien arrests during weeklong operation” — May 1, 2025

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/largest-joint-immigration-...

And no employers will be penalized.

Most certainly not Donald Trump, god forbid.

If I was a betting man, I'd handicap the number of paper-less workers he employs at his 3 golf clubs in Florida at 100. If we were to take into account the amount of work-permit-less laborers working on his golf courses nationwide, I'd say the number is over 200.

And even then, I'd bet my life on the over. Having played golf once at his club in Doral (shitty course, would never play again, even if my round was covered), I can safely assume ain't nobody mowing that course that can speak English passably, let alone are in this country working legally.

>Having played golf once at his club in Doral (shitty course, would never play again, even if my round was covered), I can safely assume ain't nobody mowing that course that can speak English passably, let alone are in this country working legally.

How proletarian of him to hire "normal" help. Lol.

Based on my limited experience with comparable clubs in the northeast I would have expected the properties to be run by (subcontracted) crews of "you pay extra because we speak english and have no face tats or felonies" type service personnel because that's what the old money wasp clientele expect.

I'm from the Northeast and have played tennis and golf at a few of the comparable high end places - the subcontractors don't usually speak english either, usually the head groundskeeper is white and speaks it well enough to communicate to the staff who know not to speak to members. Alternatively, the groundskeeper is someone that's been in the US long enough to speak English well enough that nobody would think about his immigration status. In some of the wealthiest places, it's usually a kid whose parents are illegal but he was born and raised in the US, was blessed with intelligence and won a scholarship to a great NEASC school where a member of the club is on the alumni board.

I can also attest that some of the multigenerational "my great grandkids won't have to work a day in their lives" wealth types are some of the cheapest and stingiest people I've ever met, and most certainly don't care that the groundskeepers at their too-cool-for-school clubs in Westchester or The Hamptons or Greenwich speak zero english and aren't here legally. In fact, that's the expectation, because god forbid their club dues go up by a few hundred dollars a year (while they spend that same amount on a single dinner at the clubhouse).

I don't golf so my only experience is incidental and limited to a few clubs that I have a business relationship with a vendors for but it seems to me that the waspy country clubs are mostly staffed with townies and a lower representation of immigrants than comparable occupations for different employers in the same towns.

Now, I get that "a few" isn't a trend but the effect is pretty observable. IDK if it's the customers really driving things or if the townies are simply more capable of excelling in such roles.

> the waspy country clubs are mostly staffed with townies and a lower representation of immigrants than comparable occupations for different employers in the same towns

I've played tennis and golf all over Westchester County, all over Fairfield County, and in Long Island. On the golf side, yeah, it's townies. Same goes for pro shop, tennis assistants, pool staff, and sometimes, kitchen/snack bar staff. But the folks who mow the lawns, clean the locker rooms and toilets, water the greens? Hell no those aren't locals.

A core group of Texas Republicans have for years blocked attempts to require employees to verify worker status because some key donors in that state own construction or agriculture businesses which depend on cheap labor. Having a few raids is good for them politically because it gives them free campaign advertising but it doesn’t cost businesses much since it’s infrequent and the penalties are lower than the amount they save in wages (not to mention indirect benefits like keeping workers from saying anything about unsafe conditions).

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...

However, I'd be willing to bet my life that if one was to go to the Trump golf clubs in WPB, Doral and Jupiter, you'd find that some of the folks, say, watering the course, raking the bunkers, or cutting the lawns definitely do not speak English, do not have work permits, are not getting paid standard legal wages, and most definitely are NOT here legally.

Remember folks, with this administration, hypocrisy is the point.

> Florida cracked down on the state level on businessrs a year ago so not as much of a problem as far as I understand.

Omg, I’m in tears.

It’s an open “secret” in some industries that it’s trivially easy to hire illegal immigrants en masse through Florida-based “recruiters”.

If this somehow changes, some big R donors are going to be very upset.

> The aggressive raids aren't in Florida or Texas, or even California farm county, they're targeting urban areas, and getting the intended headlines.

I don’t know that that is true:

Florida: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/100-undocumented-immigrant...

Texas: https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2025-06-05/ice-raids-...

California farm country: https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...

Didn’t read them all but that last one in Kern was under Biden,

“This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency.”

It strains credulity somewhat to act as though ICE, whose purpose has always been immigration enforcement, only started enforcing immigration under Trump. I remember hearing about ICE/immigration raids for many decades now in California.

In any event I think the prior’s point was that the current admins’ zealous focus on immigration is mostly optics. The idea is to get California activists to juxtapose themselves on the evening news throwing bricks and Molotovs against clean cut patriotic young servicemen. The American electorate prefer marines to brick throwers, so it’s just easy politics. It’s been the go to gambit of the Trump team for most of his two terms. Immigration is a very popular issue with voters, but not with educated journalists who know most GOP donors like the Koch brothers are free market libertarians who want totally open boarders and therefore despite the voter concern, nothing meaningful will ever happen because immigration enforcement and reform will remain in essence a tool to whip up hysteria in the non-sophisticated. Immigration and deportation numbers don’t lie, and tell most of the story.

Or Wisconsin:

> President Trump spent much of his campaign vowing "mass deportations" of undocumented immigrants, and the first weeks of his term have been marked by public displays of immigration enforcement. It could pose a blow to multiple parts of the country's food supply chain, including the dairy industry, where more than half of the national workforce is undocumented.

* https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-undocumented-workers-suppo...

You clearly posted false statements. Are you able to retract or delete your comment?

OK agreed as others have pointed out there if enforcement in other places. I get the sense, but can't quantity the push seems different by state and city. Perhaps the reaction is different as well.

I would honestly hope that comments don't get deleted as it makes following discussion threads harder. If someone already posted a rebuttle, you can already see it.

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They do in Texas. Is just that Texas dont buy into the santuary cities bullshit, and raids always happaned there.

They may not be called sanctuary cities officially, but if that idea didn't exist there, Texas Senate Bill 4 wouldn't exist in the first place. And it wouldn't be on hold and disputed today.

Texas raids the employers and deports the undocumented, but the employers are never penalized. They are performative raids, intended to intimidate undocumented workers and prevent them from organizing or pushing for better pay and working conditions. Texas has been doing this for a century, and even during the Braceros era Mexico often refused to work with Texas because of how they treat chicanos.

Doesn't post-pandemic Canada have the highest rate of legal immigration in years since government gives out immigration visas like candy? I can't see how this is good in a country that already has a stagnating economy and a housing crisis. You're eroding the bargaining power of local labor and increasing competition for housing in an already tight market.

>I can't see how this is good in a country that already has a stagnating economy and a housing crisis

Increasing immigration is a good way to revitalize a stagnant economy. This is the great chasm between people's intuition of how national economies work and economists' understanding of how they work.

>Increasing immigration is a good way to revitalize a stagnant economy.

Then why is Canada's economy stagnating with all that emigration? When is that supposed economic boom coming?

The second issue is, if that economic boom is gonna trickle down to the Canadian working class or only to the top 1% of Canadian business and asset owning class while everyone else is left holding the bag?

Because we've been duped for decades with this uncontrolled immigration trickle down economic fallacy.

Your ancestors were likely "uncontrolled" immigrants and so were mine. That's the way the Western hemisphere was settled. If it's so bad, how did the US and Canada get so rich?

Optimal policy is much different for a post industrial economy than an agrarian/frontier economy, I would rather have better standard of living than consistent ethics

That's possibly true. Is there any evidence? Because there is a thread of racism and fear of the other built into our immigration policies since the beginning, and I don't see that's changed.

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This is true if you build enough houses to help the new arrivals, but the government failed to do this and has recently admitted as such. Because they didn’t, the housing crisis is about four times worse in Canada than in America, and that has completely defeated young Canadians and pressured them to not start families.

Well, it doesn't seem to be working.

It's working at making Canadian landlords rich. That's economic growth too.

They were slow to let off the gas pedal after the labour shortages during COVID. There's been a massive swing in the other direction now.

There were no labor shortages during COVID... Low-wage employers just panicked because they were suddenly competing with generous temporary government benefits.

No wonder Canada's productivity is stagnant and on track for the lowest growth in the G7. Why invest in technology or productivity when you can just cry to the government for cheap, indentured labor?

There has been a massive swing? They announced a small reduction and called it a day.

https://archive.is/awVp8#selection-2637.0-2640.0

Quarter with the slowest population growth since at least 2018, excepting one quarter in 2020.

The tightening of international student visas has actually been quite significant. Its effects on colleges and universities has been very drastic. And it has effects in the labour market as well.

What kind of labor shortages are we talking about? Isn't "muh labor shortage" just corporate propaganda for importing more cheap labor to drive down wages and increase rents?

Also, isn't it completely reckless to import a lot more people in a short timespan, without the necessary housing and infrastructure (doctors, nurses, teachers, etc) to support them in the first place?

Small businesses were having a hard time staffing stores and the like. For a short period 2021 to maybe early 2023.

It's definitely not the case now. Unemployment is way up. Which I suspect is a combination of factors (slowing economy & tariffs) not just immigration.

But yes, Canadian governments work for employers, not workers. Just like any other advanced capitalist country. There is an expectation that there's a "natural" unemployment rate in this country around 6%, and they freak out if it goes much lower than that.

In general, when regular people are complaining about inflation they're complaining about their groceries. When you hear businesses and governments concerned about inflation .. they mean they're stressed out because minimum wage employees are demanding some basic respect that employers feel they shouldn't have to provide...

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I think the real reason is that Trump feels that the illegal immigration issue generates votes for him so actually solving it is the last thing he wants to do.

I'm not sure it even matters if there is an actual problem, as long as there is a perception of a problem in his voters.

This has been true of every major policy ‘lock in’ topic for both parties for at least a decade, if not more.

Gun control, abortion, immigration (legal and illegal), taxation/gov’t spending, affirmative action (aka DEI), etc.

Trump is really good at pushing buttons and generating outrage though. Not unexpected for a reality TV show star.

It’s sad how addicted people are to his button pushing. I’ve got an elderly family member with dementia who can’t go more than 2 hours without watching a outrage video about Trump. You know the ones on YouTube, still doing hourly updates on russiagate and other “legal analysis” around Trump prosecutions, still. She lost much of her life savings because these YouTube “experts” explained how Trump would crash the market when in actuality, from 2016 to today, the market has actually gone up. A lot. Thanks medias touch or whoever it is for destroying the sanity and financial security of so many American seniors. What a business model.

> She lost much of her life savings because these YouTube “experts” explained how Trump would crash the market when in actuality, from 2016 to today, the market has actually gone up. A lot.

How did the market going up lose her money?

The loss of potential gains?

If you read the comment carefully, it sounds like she sold early and put into things like CDs which lost money to inflation.

> If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not fine businesses 5x salary for using the labor, for as long as it was used?

Why do you assume that that doesn’t happen?

- Chicago (2014) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/chicago-area-company-fined...

- Texas (2012) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/2-companies-admit-hiring-i...

- Colorado (2025) https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...

etc.

These actions are rare. And the fines are more slaps on the wrist instead of any real action.

ACSI fined $2M for the same amount paid as wages to illegal labor. How much profit did they make from that? Sounds more like the cost of doing business than any real crushing fine.

Put the management of these companies in prison for ~~knowingly~~ recklessly hiring illegal labor. Make it likely they will be audited and caught. Make it easier to get a work permit That will solve a lot of illegal migration.

> Make it easier to get a work permit

Also for tech jobs like software engineering? Or only for manual labor?

With the rise of remote work I think US software devs need to adapt to the global cost of software development sooner than later.

This current structure of immigration status being tied and sponsored to your current employer is pretty messed up though. It does a lot to artificially drive down wages even more, these people aren't free to choose where they work.

> Why do you assume that that doesn’t happen?

You just provide proof of why it doesn't happen in the very first link. 300k fine for 604 illegal for a repeat offender. That's essentially saying: The cost to hire illegals is too small not to do it.

>Chicago (2014)

They were fined less than $400 per undocumented person they hired, or about a week and a half pay at minimum wage. That just sounds like a reasonable fee to hire someone without having to pay minimum wage, healthcare, payroll taxes, etc. If you put aside ethics, that sounds like the smart business move.

The business and employee still pay many taxes, even if undocumented - so payroll taxes are still payed, "The IRS estimates that undocumented immigrants pay over $9 billion in withheld payroll taxes annually." [1]

[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/how-do-undocumented-immigr...

Because they don’t really care. It’s just about creating divisions in society to keep people voting for people that do everything against their interests.

Or maybe they just got tired of millions of immigrants flaunting the law and overburdening the system? We had unprecedented levels of illegal immigration over the last four years. Do you think it went unnoticed and didn’t adversely affect anyone?

Why jump to these conspiracy notions about division and blatantly ignore the simplest and most obvious explanation.

Can you tell me how all those immigrants "flaunting the law" were affording food and rent, if not for a U.S. citizen paying them for their labor? Why are we not going after those who pay first? Nip the problem in the bud.

Because their actions belie that narrative? If they went after employers, people wouldn't be coming here looking for jobs.

Honest question, because I don't see it here in Colorado: Who has it adversely affected? Crime rates among illegal immigrants are lower than the rest of the population [1] [2] [3] and illegal immigrants are the backbone of our agricultural system [4]

So ... who is hurt and how badly are they hurt? Because when I see the amount of perfectly legal murder, robbery and torture happening in the U.S. [5] [6] [7] [8] I just don't understand what the big deal is. I guess it's whataboutism, but when we have limited resources, why are we using them for this specific problem? How bad is it compared to this other stuff?

[1] https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o... (the feds took it down -- gee I wonder why -- but the facts are in the permalink)

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/white-houses-misleading-error-ridd...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7768760/

[4] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#lega...

[5] https://www.techtarget.com/revcyclemanagement/feature/Breaki...

[6] https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...

[7] https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/27/whistleblower-e...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#United_States

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-migrants-shelter-time-li...

https://nhjournal.com/as-illegal-immigrants-swamp-mas-emerge...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/migrant-arrested-broad-daylight-r...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/migrant-custody-person-interest-ra...

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/salvadoran-illegal-immig...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/haitian-migrant-accused...

This answers my question very well:

> So ... who is hurt and how badly are they hurt?

Your answer: not many people, not nearly as many as our prisons-for-profit our healthcare-for-profit systems. Plenty of legals rape 13 year olds, hell a legal here in my home town cut open a mom to be and tried to kidnap her fetus.

So yeah your anecdata proves my suspicion. This illegal immigration crackdown is a false flag for racism and xenophobia. As long as people have feet they're going to move, and as long as people have brains, they're going to resent and fear that.

As an American minority who has emigrated to an Asian country known for strict immigration enforcement and ethnocentrism, this is just a bizarre take to me. On HN, where there are regular posts about cybersecurity and vulnerabilities, for some reason people fail to grasp the concept of national-level Physical Access Control. For a country with a trillion-dollar security budget and an all-too-cozy relationship with the jailers of the world's largest open-air prison (Palestine), we should not have millions slipping through the cracks. We should not have repeated offenders committing high-profile violent crimes.

"Our domestic systems are broken and ruin more lives so anyone who opposes foreign criminals preying on our citizens is a racist." No. Some of us minorities appreciate law & order too.

Immigration enforcement is low-hanging fruit from a policy perspective IMO, with real, tangible positive impacts on the quality of life of the citizenry. Going after the monied class that benefits from the prisons-for-profit is a MUCH harder objective (but also absolutely necessary and SHOULD be done in conjunction with the street enforcement). I find nobody hates criminal immigrants quite like law-abiding immigrants; we end up stereotyped due to the actions of the high-profile idiots.

All that said, I find that many actions which would be "government doing its job" in other countries bring out the worst low-IQ racists in the US in support.

Yeah I totally fail to grasp the concept of national-level Physical Access Control. In the richest country in the world, with a population approaching 400,000,000 people and 7,458 of land borders (not even counting our sea borders), the phrase sounds quixotic without a lot of bounds set on it. We consume over a third of the world's resources with just 5% of the world's population. Simple laws of diffusion operate against any kind of long-term enforced border control.

What makes the violent crimes high profile? I don't see anything done by illegal immigrants that isn't done at a higher rate by citizens, be it rape, murder, gang activity, you name it. It's a well documented fact (you can look it up yourself) that illegal immigrants in the U.S. have a lower crime rate than legal immigrants or citizens.

As far as tying cybersecurity to this, sure. The only safe network is one that its unplugged from the rest of the world. Problem is it's also a pretty useless network.

What is a low hanging fruit policy wise is clearly not so low-hanging from an execution perspective.

I oppose anybody preying on our citizens, not just foreigners. While there might be a political need to control immigration it ignores basic human nature, which has been around far longer than any political system.

> millions of immigrants flaunting the law and overburdening the system?

Except these raids aren’t targeting that population. They’re going after the ones paying taxes. To the extent we have folks overburdening the system, it’s largely our native born (and refugees).

Are they? Do we have any statistical information on who is being apprehended and their characteristics?

> Do we have any statistical information on who is being apprehended and their characteristics?

As of Saturday, it was about 118 arrests, 20 of which appeared to have been targeted towards dangerous people [1]. Otherwise, the locations of the raids have been employers, e.g. the garment warehouse [2] and Italian restaurant. I am assuming they aren’t working for free. (To my knowledge, no refugee centres have been raided as part of these actions in LA.)

[1] https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/officials-name-12-ic...

[2] https://abc7.com/post/who-is-ice-arresting-in-socal-raids-7-...

It’s not a conspiracy theory to say the powerful’s modus operandi is ‘divide and rule’. It’s been this way for thousands of years.

We gotta stop calling people working hard manual jobs 7 days a week the scroungers and start calling the people working 0 days a week and collecting rent and passive income the scroungers - they are the real drain on society.

Both can be true

> Do you think it went unnoticed and didn’t adversely affect anyone?

Coming as someone living in Texas - yes, it affects no one. It's always been an hallucination. We just attribute random things to "the illegals" when, in reality, they're not hurting anyone.

In fact, if you've ever been in Texas, you'd know this state is run by illegals. I drive around and I see homes being built out the wazoo and who's on the roof? Huh? Who is it? It's not white people.

I drive down 114 and they got 2 lanes closed for construction and I look over and what is working on the concrete? It's not white people. I stop by 7/11 to buy a coke and who checks me out?

People just don't like "illegals" because they're racist. That's the hard truth, the pill a lot of y'all don't want to swallow.

I guess you didn't see what happened in NYC? Do articles like this sound like, "No one noticed they were here"?

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-migrants-shelter-time-li...

Absolutely. Our country is built on the work of immigrants as much as anyone else. We should celebrate every hard worker that contributes with a path to citizenship.

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Most of the recent illegal immigrants literally walked 1000+ miles to get here. They are not slaves. Ive talked to quite a few and theyve been incredibly happy to be here.

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not by choice

> Ive talked to quite a few and theyve been incredibly happy to be here.

No you havent. 0/10 weak effort

They are trafficked in.

>No you havent.

Neither have you. 0/10 weak effort.

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The Republican party is incentivized both to have illegal immigration, and to fight against illegal immigration.

They act accordingly to those incentives.

Cheap workers that are also under constant threat of getting deported (and have no real legal recourse because of it) are awfully convenient for many business models.

I guess the Democratic party is only incentivize to have illegal immigration? Although there might be incentive to fight against it at least for votes next time around, this issue lost the election (a non-dementia version of Biden would’ve recognized this, but his family loved the power so they kept him in)

The Democrats have similar incentives (see Biden’s admin’s actions, esp. deportation numbers), but they don’t use the anti immigrant rhetoric and don’t do the ICE raids for show because they also have the progressive, moderate and educated voters, and possibly also have scruples.

They sometimes say that they want less illegal and more legal immigration.

Biden’s dementia isn’t an explanation here, that’s really mostly just political ammo.

Lets separate headlines from reality here: Yes this is an unnecessary provocation with loads of emotionally charged elements (and federalizing California's National Guard in this context is certainly concerning for multiple reasons -considering the scale of the protests and violence ) BUT there is no sign that Active Duty military personnel are being deployed to engage civilians (yet).

It would seem most likely that the Marines were called strictly to protect federal buildings, facilities and agents. The problem I see is the latter category. I am personally fine with National Guard being used to protect people and infrastructure when appropriate and when confined to federal facilities, and I'm even fine with the use of military to protect federal facilities... however, the second active duty military engages civilians 'on the streets' we have martial law and that's a whole new can o worms with explosive possibilities for escalation.

> BUT there is no sign that Active Duty military personnel are being deployed to engage civilians (yet).

Yes, there is.

> It would seem most likely that the Marines were called strictly to protect federal buildings, facilities and agents.

So, to engage civilians deemed a threat to federal buildings, facilities, and agents.

The distinction you are trying to draw does not exist, and is simply a very weak attempt to craft a mission that can be argued not to be using the military as a posse comitatus (even though it clearly is exactly that) for the sole purpose of reserving invoking the Insurrection Act until the aggressive use of federal forces has been successful in provoking a suitably dramatic incident.

The e-verify system has been in place since 1996, and does exactly that: verify legal status of workers. It's required for federal contractors, but only about half of states require its use (it used to be more but some states like CA have actually passed laws banning its use).

I worked for a company that verified I9’s and provided an eVerify integration for employers. I can’t explain what problem it solved.

It was a multi-million dollar if-statement that copied the expertise of the relevant law into a permanently legacy expert system.

Doing anything besides that would be illegal. But that also means there is no cross-referencing or vendor enforcement of fraud.

It did things like check if some tax-related status code was valid for the indicated home country of emigration. It didn’t do things like check against a national database for an SSN.

It basically punished people for filling out forms incorrectly or not being able to scan a document.

We didn’t get new regulations every quarter or ever. I dunno what the point was.

Edit: the everify step technically used personally identifiable information to contact a national database.

I guess my gripe is that I didn’t see how it could prevent fraud in any way a normal HR person wouldn’t have caught if it were to be caught. It’s a duplication of a process everyone was already doing.

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as a non-American reading this, only reaction can be... "WTF?!"

can you elaborate on that?

centralized systems for identity are used all over the f world, and de-facto you have them in the US too (hello credit cards, hello driver licenses, hello... SIM card?)... they can be used as _tools_ by regimes with fascist tendencies, but their existence alone is quite neutral

ALL countries with functional governments NEED centralized identity systems to function (hello... IRS?), and they all get them even if you like to pretend they don't exist.

...why not just accept they are there, and focus on properly securing them from attacks, making them unalterable by corrupt officials (from simple checksumming and write-only permanent archives to full-on blockchain solutions), and preventing unrestricted access to them, all technically doable.

If you PRETEND you don't have a centralized identity system, don't you just leave all these problems unfixed and just go on with a broken system forever?

a centralized system is by definition not present locally, so it cannot verify the person itself, hence it cannot be used for identity verification.

You need a local actor for all the things you mention.

Credit card? there's a bit that designate that the card was physically present on the transaction place. And nothing that identify the person (even the signature on the back is joke)

Drivers license? you pay the salary of hundreds of thousands of cops.

IRS? you actually proved my point even further: remember california urging everyone to claim they account/password asap because criminals were rushing and filling fake returns to collect checks instead? clear sign of a system that have no clue how to verify identity.

So, Who is pretending? Stop daydreaming that the technofascist lie of everyone being a verifiable number is real.

It verifies the legal status of the documents submitted. Does little beyond encouraging identity theft of USCs that end up with unexpected tax liabilities.

But the estimated number of "illegal" workers is so much larger than the number of people whose identity is stolen on tax returns each year I'd suggest that the issue isn't so much with the tools already available, so much at people aren't using those tools.

Even if we had a perfect e-verify system that magically guaranteed the result was accurate, it probably wouldn't make a difference. Not while it's use is "optional" in states like Texas.

The fact Republicans in Texas harp on about illegal migration but don't do the most basic thing to reduce illegal labor supporting illegal migration really shows its more about having someone to hate than actually working to solve the problem.

Making illegal immigrants commit another crime gives an excuse to try them and deport them

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Because this is more about a display of force than actually solving a problem.

The problem with that solution is that it would work too well, making it unattractive to lawmakers who need the issue to maintain their careers.

Because the system is designed to allow these people in a gray zone, so they do not have access to the same rights as citizens and therefore can be exploited. The problem is not illegal immigration. It's just a political football. Our economy would fily collapse without this cheap labor to exploit.

The US refuses to admit it has always had an addiction to cheap labor so it entices desperate people to come over with the implicit assumption that if they keep their head down and are otherwise law-abiding it'll "look the other way." Some of them, after years of living on the outskirts of town, commuting 1.5 hours each day to back-breaking minimum wage jobs, and years without seeing their families, are able to scrounge up enough money to pay a lawyer thousands to help them get normalized. Only now they're being spawn-camped at court hearings too.

If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."

The only reason we don't reform our work visa programs for cheap labor is because business owners do NOT want to have to pay these people minimum wage, pay taxes on them, or pay to insure them (workman's comp and similar). That's it. That's all there is to it.

As soon as you institute such a program businesses could get sued for illegal labor conditions, abuses of employees, sexual abuse of employees, violations of contract law, and more. Their expenses for imported labor would probably triple.

Would such businesses close as a result? Maybe a handful would but the real impact would be a huge drop in profits—also known as a greater share of profits going to workers.

> Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."

FWIW, I bet the part of the population saying that is also the part opposed to the current immigration enforcement, namely liberals.

I can't even tell who I've offended with this comment.

It would not collapase. But it would shift some purchaing power from the middle class to the working class if all of them would leave, as working class salaries would go up even faster than the inflatino it would cause.

The middle class and the working class are the same thing. If you have to work to live, you are working class, it doesn't matter how much income you make or how many investment properties you own.

The whole working class/middle class divide was made up by the rich to get you to vote against your interests, and propped up by pick-mes who want to feel like they're better than someone.

Our economy absolutely would collapse. Our entire farming industry exists because of heavily abused immigrant labor, and is a job that Americans refuse to take. We've made multiple swings and attempts at getting Americans to do this work [1] but it's low pay, low benefits and grueling work. Farmers literally could not afford the actual salary needed to attract people to do said labor, and it would cause food prices across the US to skyrocket.

The only way this would stabilize is if the government came in and subsidized and socialized farm work heavily and that would also never happen.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...

Of all illegals disappeared Thanos-style, the end result would be massively expensive certain crops, and a greater dependency on machine-farmable crops, like corn.

And some weird severe-but-short-term economic volatility.

Something along the lines of:

Now nobody is picking fruits, all the fruits die on the tree/vine, so there's none of that in the supermarket and those farms go bankrupt. Also, most of those who were paid to butcher the cattle are gone, but the cows are still there, costing the farmers money, so those farms go bankrupt. And then so do the feed suppliers for cattle farmers that don't ranch (or do but need extra feed besides the grass). But everyone still needs to eat, which means there's correspondingly more demand for the stuff which is heavily mechanised, so prices for that go way up, but because this is an instant supply shock the average person is still hungry no matter what the prices are, unless the humans start eating alfalfa en-masse.

Not only that, most of the construction and home services companies are usually the white American folks that come and give you a very inflated price and then send you the immigrants to do the actual hard work. It's crazy when you speak to the people doing the work how much they are getting paid vs how much you are paying.

Why would it not happen? It would be yet another opportunity for the God King to give handouts to his subjects.

> inflatino

please tell me that's not a typo /g

> working class salaries would go up even faster than the inflatino it would cause.

Good, working class salaries need to be high! We can't function as a society without all the people who dispose of our garbage, maintain our plumbing and water supply, grow our food, provide our electricity, and support our IT infrastructure.

Only one clarification: there is no difference between lower class, middle class and working class. White collar or blue collar, we are all collared.

The middle class construct is artificially invented so the owning class (people who don't have to work for their money) have something for the workers to aspire to. A software engineer with $300k/y is far closer wealth wise to a minimum wage worker in Mickey-D than they are to your Tim Cooks, Jeff Bezos and Adolf, pardon, Elon Musk.

In a Tesla, Prius or in a old Dodge, you are still stuck in traffic while they are flying with private jets.

We are all closer to being millionaires than Jeff Bezos.

Exactly. It would rebalance the value provided by blue collar work. They could finally demand a higher wage without being undercut by illegal workers.

I find it super funny that the average Joe will condemn an "illegal" worker for undercutting another, but never ask themselves the question who employed that "illegal" worker.

How come the blame is not solely on the businesses willingly employing thousands of "illegal workers", not paying tax on them nor health benefits, and not even minimum wage, and in that way undercutting the value of blue collar labor?

> If illegal immigration is such a problem,

It isn't remotely the problem or even in the same galaxy as needing this type of response.

The cause for the actions is racism. The protests are due to calling out racism and removing due process.

Anything else is denial or sophistry, that's the simple truth.

So all counties with strong border policies are racist? That’s preposterous. Australia has some of the strictest border policies (drastically more strict than us). Do you believe they’re just racist policies too?

Australian here, I would absolutely characterize the support for and rationale behind our policies as having a significant component of racism (and in the case of our detention centers, a violation of international human rights agreements that we have signed).

You're talking about the same country that had the "White Australia Policy" within living memory. "Are Australian immigration policies motivated by racism?" is unfortunately not a preposterous question at all.

Australia, a white settler colony in the southern hemisphere, racist? Yeah, I dont find that hard to believe at all. Why would you use that as an example?

What makes you think that racism isn’t a major reason for Australia’s strict policies? It doesn’t seem like a “preposterous” hypothesis to me.

>So all counties with strong border policies are racist?

Please inform me how the US under democrats has NOT had "strong border policy"? Do you know what Obama did more than any president before him? He rounded up immigrants, placed them in front of judges to give them due process, and shipped them out of the country if they did not have a legal right to be here.

Sure is funny how that is "weak border policy"

The Biden administration proudly reversed course from Obama's stance on immigration. I never said anything about democrats vs republicans. Each administration seems to take immigration differently with no connection to party lines (best I can tell).

I believe that those who justify cruelty with rhetoric and spread hate will one day look into the mirror and be horrified at what they see.

I wish I shared your optimism.

Yeah Australian immigration and border policy is super racist. It's not even up for debate.

> So all counties with strong border policies are racist?

I never said that, but that's quite the strawman.

It would have been possible to reform the system, without deporting anyone the wrong color to a damn megaprison in a foreign country, or arresting people right at their court hearings, most who are here legally.

The way things are going, the protests are more than warranted, more than justified. As far as I'm concerned, anyone still defending a clear authoritarian is a traitor.

> So all counties with strong border policies are racist? That’s preposterous.

Your response is a straw man. Be better.

FWIW I don’t agree with OP in that there isn’t a single cause, but racism definitely plays a role.

Doesn't seem like a straw man to me. It's an extension of the unsupported claim that the cause for the action is racism. False equivalence perhaps. But I think the problem is that "The cause for the action is racism" doesn't actually contain an argument at all. It's just an unfounded opinion.

And then "Anything else is denial" shows a myopic, closed minded viewpoint, suggesting any further discussion would be pointless. As is most internet chatter on this type of matter.

I think we have a different interpretation of what a straw man fallacy is.

The person I was replying to refuted an argument that GP did not make. And one that was arguably weaker and more difficult to defend.

That’s my understanding of what the strawman fallacy is. What’s yours?

> But I think the problem is that "The cause for the action is racism" doesn't actually contain an argument at all.

Yeah this is an oversimplification and not really an actionable one. But there’s an argument buried in there and it’s not wrong. The current administration plays on existing racist and xenophobic undertones to drum up support. It’s all fear based rhetoric.

Not necessarily racist in the strictest sense, but xenophobic, usually yes.

Looking at Sweden and the issue of human trafficking in construction, cleaning and farming, the general problem is that the fine businesses are employing independent contractors from multiple layers of hiring firms, and no one seems very interesting to hold the people who is benefiting from the labor responsible.

It is a well know open secret that not only do practically every large construction site employ illegal immigrants, but there is also a tier system for who do what job. The highest risk and longest hours are given to illegal immigrants. The next tier are those that work off the books, and then last we got those that operate legit as there need to be at least a few of those. This setup seemingly works, until there is an accident or the hiring firm suddenly refuse paying the illegal workers and the miserable details of the human slavery becomes news for a day.

they’re also rounding up legal asylum seekers.

Because a certain party in this country must always have a scapegoat, it isn’t any more complicated than that.

Back in 2019 during Trump 1.0, ICE raided 7 chicken processing plants in Mississippi and arrested 100s of workers.

They charges 4 low level managers with aiding illegal immigrants.

But I don't think the companies had to pay any fines or any owners face charges.

Yeah, there are systems. The problem is they are only as good as how we establish identity. And so long as identity theft is a widespread problem it's not going to work. Back in the 80s my mother was the victim of what I presume was this. The IRS was determined that she should either pay the taxes "owed" or get "her employer" to amend the W-2. What employer? She hadn't worked for *anybody* and couldn't find the supposed employer.

In hindsight I suspect the answer was to file that form to amend the W-2, but this was before the internet so it would have been much harder to get answers.

There are consequences for business owners, but because of complicity of govermnet in this states, it still worth the risk to run big operation on the back of illegal imigrants in semi servitude status.

Why would I fine honest law-abiding willing to work people, who only want to raise our GDP and pay taxes?

I saw them, worked with them, so don't tell me they all criminals or lazy. "Legal" or "illegal" is just a label we put on the same person, but person doesn't change.

It's non-working lazy criminals we want to push against. Oftentimes those who could get their *ss off the couch and emigrate are the most active.

Because that would require Congress to do something useful

Even a fine is absurd. There are straightforward technological solutions that might even generally decrease costs of employing people. For example, imagine that there was a special kind of money transfer called “payment for labor”: the payer would send the payee $X (via their bank), and the bank would automatically verify the immigration status of the payee, generate the correct tax records, and withhold the correct amount of money and send the withheld money to the IRS. With some sensible regulation on top, this could automatically handle unemployment, etc.

Then businesses or even individuals could hire someone for an hour, a day or a year and pay them with no friction. And the check for eligibility would be automatic. Fees could be driven to very low levels by the fact that there is no creativity whatsoever in actually implementing the transfer.

But there’s a showstopping problem here: the US economy, especially agriculture, is highly dependent on employing people illegally. So a real solution to controlling illegal employment would also require the kind of immigration reform that actually allows useful immigration, and it would require a competently run nation database of employment eligibility, and good luck getting bipartisan consensus on that.

The H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa is uncapped.

It is entirely possible to hire all the migrant agricultural workers one needs using it, but most farms just don't want to pay visa fees, transportation or housing on top of a prevailing wage.

Seems like the H-2A program is too restrictive, then.

> If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not fine businesses 5x salary for using the labor, for as long as it was used?

The Nazis leveraged hatred towards minorities as a wedge to force their totalitarian control over Germany's state and society. They built up a ficticious enemy within, they inflamed society against that enemy, and proceeded to promise they would eliminate that enemy if the were granted total control over everyone and everything.

It's no coincidence that Trump is targeting California to fabricate a crisis and rapidly escalate the issue he created himself, specially how he forced the unjustified and illegal deployment of national guard and the armed forces. The goal is clearly not illegal aliens standing next to Home Depots. The goal is to force a scenario where loyalists in the armed forces target any opposition. It's no coincidence Trump has been threatening the governor of California with prison for the crime of "running for elections" at the time he's announcing deploying armed forces in California without authorization or legal standing and against the will of the governor of California.

> they inflamed society against that enemy

They blamed them for pre-existing social problems. I feel the important context was that the government had to be significantly dysfunctional for the Nazi party to even exist.

Would you describe the US government as functional?

So far, comparisons with routine life in Weimar Germany are a contortion.

There is an enemy, there are raids on civilians and due process has been abandoned.

The military are now being used for police work, and the police are behaving like the military.

This mob are creeping towards KristallMethNacht.

As bad as Trump is, Hitler was packing his political opponents in a concentration camp within month of taking power. It really isn't comparable yet.

But also, he doesn't need to be literally Hitler to be bad.

I know that CECOT is not nearly as bad as concentration camps, but at the same time it's not like Trump refrains from sending people off to camps, based on loose accusations.

What I'm trying to say, or I guess repeat after you, is that fascism doesn't have to be Hitlerian to be fascism. Or in other words, at this point it's too late anyways.

We absolutely should start comparing and measuring now, because at the point where the comparisons match 100%, too much damage will have been done.

If I was religious I'd probably pray for the US, as I'm not I'm just shaking my head in astonishment.

Trump isn't sending his political opponents to camps (yet), is my point. If you're a citizen currently in US, you can, to paraphrase the old Soviet joke, stand next to the White House and shout "Trump is an asshole", and you won't find yourself on a deportation flight tomorrow. OTOH Nazis started creating concentration camps specifically for communists and dissident journalists less than a month after their electoral victory.

I think that focusing on broad comparisons is not the best idea precisely because it's way too easy to deconstruct, and "X is literally Hitler" is such an overused political trope that most people stop listening right away regardless of how much truth there is to it. It's better to focus on the specific negative actions.

They also blamed them for non existent problems and for problems Nazi intentionally and consciously created.

Hitler was elected as a dictator, at least in spirit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator

The Nazis had strong support. But Hitler was appointed.

> The Nazis had strong support. But Hitler was appointed.

Well, yeah, PM’s (and the Chancellor in the German system at the time, and now, is a PM) are almost invariably appointed by the head of state after either a general election—or sometimes between them if an incumbent resigns or a vacancy occurs by other means—as the leader of the majority party (if any), the leader of the majority coalition (if there's no majority party but there is a majority coalition), or sometimes (and whether this is allowed and whether it makes a sooner next election than would otherwise be required varies) some minority party leader based on some combination of size of minority, support and opposition from other parties, and discretion of the head of state.

And, yes, Hitler was first appointed as the last and weakest kind, but that's still effectively winning the tiebreaker set out for an ambiguous electoral result, since it could only happen because no other party or coalition could form a legislative majority.

> They blamed them for pre-existing social problems.

Is immigration a new hot topic in the US?

I mean, a few years ago the US government started wasting money building a wall on the US-Mexico border whose only purpose was propaganda and dog whistling.

And is it really necessary to point out the obvious parallels between the Nazi's "vital state" propaganda and Trump's "Canada as 51st state" and "Greenland is ours" rhetoric?

If they talk like Nazis and they goose-step like Nazis, what are they? I would ask if you'd start being concerned when they started rounding up random people off the streets, but apparently that's still not enough.

Also why are they chasing down chefs in restaurants and people on Home Depot parking lots.

Conspicuously nobody is checking agricultural businesses in red states.

Coincidence? Definitely not.

They want a reason to remove the current Californian government, as well as manufacturing a reason to enact emergency powers which can 'help' Trump push for a third term. They have been discussing this since before the election.

Trump is hardly a bastion of health, you think he'll still be around when he's 82?

A better question is, does he think he'll still be around?

I mean, this is a guy who put out a press release about his own health where everyone could tell he was lying because it included his own height and they just found pictures of him standing next to other people who were supposed to be the same height or shorter.

Well, let's not forget writing his own "medical assessment" for his doctor to sign off. With gems like "I can confidently state that Donald Trump will be the most healthy and strong man to ever take the Presidency"... not to mention "positive findings on every test" (uhhh, a positive finding on any medical test is an abnormality, Donnie).

Seeing how the online MAGA meme squads love WH40K so much, I'd imagine there's always the Golden Throne option. ~

There would be turbo-inflation

Why?

Because cheap immigrant labor is the backbone of this country in many ways, especially when it comes to harvesting and processing our food supply. They could stop immigration tomorrow if they wanted to. $10,000 per person per day fine to agriculture companies. They don't want to. They are hate-filled people who want the poorest most vulnerable people to suffer. Just like Jesus would have wanted.

I find it interesting how the same political crowd that pushes hardest for workers’ rights and higher minimum wages will also turn around and seriously argue that illegal immigrants are needed (to be paid under the table below minimum wage), otherwise food prices would spike.

I'm stating the reality of the world. I would be happy if the lowest paid workers in our country got paid a living wage. However, you know this, you're just upset.

This is kind of an interesting thread. thrawa8387336 says "There would be turbo-inflation" as justification for continuing exploiting workers.

Then both liberals and conservatives accuse thrawa8387336 of being a member of the opposite group, due to how bad thrawa8387336's argument sounds.

> and seriously argue that illegal immigrants are needed

Nothing GP wrote suggests that. Listing some realities and effects doesn't mean you approve of them.

I know, that’s why I said political crowd rather than directing it at them specifically. I’ve seen it come up often recently.

What the parent comment meant is that business owners love the illegal immigration status quo so they can rip workers off overtime and wages because those workers can't complain to the government.

Your analysis is simply off. The side pushing for worker and immigrant rights are not saying "please keep immigrants here so we can exploit them more".

transcriptase was likely referring more to thrawa8387336's comment than to thinkingtoilet's comment. thrawa8387336's comment says "There would be turbo-inflation" as justification for continuing to exploit workers.

It's incoherent, just like the corporate claim that we need moar immigration and moar imports to keep prices down at Walmart, even if that means none of us make enough to buy anything. Both sides have to dress up their real motives, one pretending to care about the immigrant and the other pretending to care about the consumer. Both are lying.

Yes, the side that is fighting for immigrant rights and due process is lying about caring about immigrants. Excellent point.

> fighting for immigrant rights

The side that's trying to maintain a population of illegal immigrants and explains that this is necessarily because it is necessary to have a pool of workers willing to work for illegal wages.

Republicans. Republicans want an exploitable underclass. They wouldn't have worked so hard at protecting large employers of undocumented workers (like Trump) or worked so hard to kill compromise legislation that would have moved the needle on enforcement.

Trump needed immigration to go unsolved in 2024 to have something to run on.

Liberals may make the point that removing millions of workers from the country would be bad for the economy, but you're being downright disingenuous if you suggest that is the primary reason people are upset about the raids and deportation.

It must be those republican business owners out there throwing rocks at the police because their illegal workforce is being deported.

You assert that because some violent elements of the anti-ICE protests exist, that business owners cannot have any motivation to maintain an exploitable underclass of workers by not implementing e-Verify and not passing reform legislation multiple times in the past 20 years.

There are many problems but immigration isn't one of them.

The employers/government don't do this because the prices of existing goods depend on that cheap labor. Money printing (deficit spending) through the economy has created many chaotic distortions and as a result of currency debasement has pushed the profit margins down close to zero for many businesses concentrating them in few hands.

These businesses can continue functioning for a time thanks to money-printer loans they receive in the form of non-reserve based debt to a primary dealer, but that doesn't solve the issue that the price of good inputs and the amount of money that gets circulated through work in the economy is insufficient to purchase basic necessities (its sieving, which often happens before a deflationary collapse).

On top of this already floundering problem which we cannot address, we have a demographics problem. The old, infirm, and disabled outnumber the young who work. There is no way forward without replacement as the costs of the old far exceed the young, and the only means to do so is through taxing immigrants who come here to work.

On top of this, China wants to go to war to retake Taiwan, and so securing the border is a critical national security interest/threat.

Its called a debt trap, any historian can tell you about how this and other behaviors towards empire (hegemony) culminate in destructive cycles.

The baby boomers as a cohort largely caused this, and have been orchestrating it in leadership so that the consequences of their choices don't hit until after they die.

Romney pushed for E-Verify in his campaign. He lost and it never happened.

Neo-feudalism. Lords are punished for embarrassing the sovereign.

I see this comment often.

you think tyson foods is paying ppl cash under the table?

Yep. That is the real message here. Corporations are the ones that hire immigrants, to pay less. And Corporations are the ones that off shore manufacturing, to pay less to foreign workers. But lets blame the workers, for working?

Shh! We can’t do that! You’d piss off the republican donors. Not to mention the American public when their grocery bill significantly increases.

No, it’s much better to go harass people who aren’t in republican circles. Us vs them. Round up some illegals, make some examples, stick it to the democrats (who loosened the borders and are complicit). Trump is strong, and finally cracking down on all of this illegal nonsense, hoo rah!!

It’s all theater, that’s what Trump is - a darn good showman. Some illegals will get deported, eventually some of his core will see him as the thug he is. We just need to ensure democrats have a viable candidate lined up…ideally a white southern man. Clearly the push to elect a woman isn’t working at this time - we’ve tried it twice and Americans vote Trump instead.

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll run Newsom for president this time.

This. And two santas.

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.. what does Stalin have to do with this?

The argument about pro-Russian "votes" in Eastern Europe, post-WWII, was caused by Stalin sending and/or supporting his people, in the occupied territories. The US had no such problem - no one invaded to forcibly place Trump there.

Because that would be anti-business. Illegal immigration is only a problem when you need to wind up the right wingers about something.

Trump can't implicate himself whie pretending he cares about American labor.

Also, I'll keep saying it: the cruelty is the point. And sadly the Stanford experiment shows that people will always oblige over the change to torture others if there's no consequences.

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How is it being illegal relevant? Everything cops arrest people for is (theoretically) illegal.

If you're implying that employers of illegal immigration are hard to find, it's really not. Any farmer who receives subsidies (which is most of them) has to submit all sorts of paper trails, and if they have both no employees and no fancy farm-automation equipment, then it's pretty easy to check if they have illegal immigrants.

Hell, a single surveillance drone during harvest season could do 90% of your work. Work you're already doing if you're looking for illegal immigrants. "Gee I have no idea why a bunch of illegal immigrants harvested all my fruit for free", yeah pull the other one.

>and if they have both no employees and no fancy farm-automation equipment, then it's pretty easy to check if they have illegal immigrants.

That's not how it works in practice. They use someone else's SSN and proper withholdings so nobody's the wiser unless the owner of the SSN being used both gets audited and has some portion of their income bumped into another bracket, which is rare.

Many countries do it, with random controls such as statistics checks (like revenue vs employees count, compared to similar businesses) and random visits.

This does not eliminate illegal labor completely but significantly reduces it.

First, the word you are looking for is "disingenuous."

Second, I disagree. It's important to disincentivize both the supply and demand. Right now, employers of illegal immigrants suffer no negative consequences when caught... so they keep in doing it. Which means that these mass deportations are purely performative, and the next wave of immigrants will get the same jobs.

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Asylum seekers come to the US to literally escape torture and death. It's not like they're searching for the best freebies. They're looking for someplace safe to live.

Once they get into the US they don't just live off of social services. What the US provides isn't nearly enough for that. So they end up working, their kids go to school, and those kids eventually have children who are US citizens. That's literally the concept that the United States of America was founded upon (after the genocide of the natives). That's the entire intent behind the US Constitution.

By letting people come to the US and stay in the US we're following the founding fathers playbook. It's the founding principal of the nation. That's how things are supposed to work.

Less than half of the asylum seekers have valid claim.

Saying "Asylum _seekers_ come to the US to literally escape torture and death" is disingenuous.

crackdown on immigration is exactly to allow business to profit from informal and legal immigration.

it's so widely know im unsure if you're really oblivious or being sarcastic. sorry.

I think most of the voters who want this also want that but the choices are: mass illegal immigration vs mass deportations. People voting in primaries should probably take this into consideration.

False dichotomy.

- Recall back to the old republican party of just 20 years ago, GW Bush wanted a guest worker program.

- Recall back to just a year and a half ago, a big bill was in congress to drastically ramp up employment laws and increase border funds - funny enough that was rejected. That rejection by the republican party _increased_ illegal immigration

- The deportation rate under BOTH Obama and Biden has been higher to date compared to the current (second) Trump administration.

So, if you want higher deportation and laws to increase border security - apparently we need to go back to the previous administration... The facts are seemingly all very topsy turvy compared to the narrative.

LA is actively supporting illegal immigrants.

If you want something like this to work, federal agents need to do it.

Even this supreme court has said the way in which ice is "doing the work" that they're doing isn't constitutional. As in, the way in which "federal agents need to do it" is being done right now is literally illegal. Hence, protests. This isn't rocket science

One case brought before the Supreme Court was the humanitarian legal status for migrants, which it was struck down and they can be sent back.

The other was about the deportations, which the court said they need to serve deportees a notice of deportation before they are actually deported.

There is no ruling that says ICE can't go after them wherever they are and arrest them.

so you agree

> If you want something like this to work, federal agents need to do it

Doing the arrests? Sure. Intimidating protesters for partisan messaging while desecrating the honour of our armed forces? No.

They are doing arrests and others are trying to block them from doing arrests. That is why the National Guard had to step it, because local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals.

The anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2].

The balance between State and Federal power is part of how the country works. You can’t just call in the military whenever States refuse to help you, which they aren’t obligated to do.

[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/

[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476

> They are doing arrests and others are trying to block them from doing arrests

The only "they" doing arrests are ICE and the LAPD. The California National Guard isn't arresting anyone to my knowledge.

> local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals

Source? For literally any of this sentence.

ICE is doing immigration arrests.

LAPD/Sheriffs are doing vandalism related arrests including unlawful assembly.

CA guard is standing around federal properties. They normally don’t do arrests but they can and will do “detainments” until another agency can take over.

But the FBI is on site doing federal arrests (vandalism etc against a federal building is both a state and federal offense).

> ICE is doing immigration arrests.

Not properly, they are hiding while wearing masks and not making it clear they are LEOs.

Not to mention arresting people here LEGALLY....

I won’t google it for you. It there’s multiple video evidence readily available.

Evidence of absence is harder than that.

Yesterday I saw a pic claiming to be of local law enforcement keeping the protestors separated from ICE. It was shared by protestors very upset that ICE was being kept safe while ICE shot at the protestors with tear gas — but(!) I have no way to tell if that was even taken this week in LA or 10 years ago in a different continent, because even before GenAI, there's loads of cases where people share videos of something awful, but label it about something completely different and use it as evidence about that other thing.

The person you replied to is looking for evidence that "local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals" — it's really hard to show "did nothing" from any single clip.

Even absent GenAI being pretty good now, what kind of video do you think will actually demonstrate that (1) local law enforcement, (2) did nothing, not just in the area being filmed but even when the camera was off, (3) specifically that the mobs were trying to set free "illegals" rather than being very unhappy that unidentified armed people wearing masks were hauling away their local pizza maker who they'd known for a decade?

"illegals"

Doing a lot of work for you there.

Technically, ICE were carrying out arrests for cartel activity and money laundering by illegals as Tom Homan pointed out. They were executing criminal warrants. Then they were attacked. LAPD never came to help them.

What is "this" and how do you define "work?"

And if illegals are such a problem, why do the Republicans toady up to the corporations that perpetuate and profit from it?

You are posting on a site, that is part of the problem of anti-government thinking without placing any other government structure in place.

LA is definitely okay with illegal immigrants, but it's akin to a deal with the devil. It's a sacrifice on their part for cheap labor in exchange for the occasional burning down and looting of their favorite locations when the tide turns against their favor as it is right now. There is an entire economic system and mechanism of living wrapped around this blood-contract in states like California. The moment something threatens it, you see them out there burning, looting, basically being a terrorizer to preserve this system.

Looking at it from both sides, they are providing cheap labor to the bourgeois, taking a penance and it's agreed that it's okay, and now an outsider is coming in(trump and his administration) threatening that contract and they expect the state leaders to protect them, as they currently are with their inaction and posturing that everything is fine and safe until Trump opened his big mouth and showed force. The inaction and posturing not being effective, now they are out there punishing the elite for not protecting them by burning down the city they love, and love for them to work in, like slave labor.

Everyone knows this to be the case in LA, the argument is does ICE have the right to go in and mass-raid? I believe it does act in the interest of the state, but I also believe that no party has ever wanted to solve the issue of illegal but otherwise law-abiding people having a path to be legal, and that issue also should also be of great interest to the state.

1992 riots weren't perpetrated by migrants, to the extent they were involved it was as victims. Neither was any of the looting in 2020 to my knowledge.

Btw, nothing significant was "burned down" in 2020 either. Some shops hit by looters closed for a while and eventually reopened. Fairfax was hard hit by looting and if you went there today you would have no clue that anything happened.

The current events are primarily happening in an area that is full of state and federal government facilities, not really anyone's favorite spot. No looting either, there's nothing to loot. The demonstrators are burning Waymos and Bird scooters, better if it would not happen at all, but it's nobody's personal property.

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Also, the downvoting provides very deep insight of thinking that has taken over. These people have no critical thinking - not to mention self-criticism, as that has been carefully rooted out - apparently knowledge is not important, but education. The paid actors in streets are not the main problem of USA, but whole generation of imbeciles, that can't take responsibility of their own - not to mention for whole country.

Count how many gray posts are here and think what will happen when they will all leave. Not to mention that this site is Reddit v2.0 and have the same result and that is not coincidence.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is not true, just last night an Apple store and Ootoro were completey looted and destroyed. I'm clearly calling out a problem from both sides unwilling to move a needle properly.

Lol, people really believe in paid actors at protests? You need to work on your critical thinking if you think that is an actual problem.

Where are they finding these actors? Why aren't the job advertisements ever leaked to the public? Why hasn't an investigative journalist gone undercover to get paid to protest?

But, you're the smart guy, right? We're all imbeciles because we don't want a ruling class of billionaire grifters to normalize the concept of extrajudicial kidnappings. My bad.

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There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

Just watched a vid of LAPD trampling a person with a horse, then shooting them with what looked like a baton round at a range of 5-10 feet. That is a life altering injury, administered with direct intent, while the protestor was trying to flee. Holding my breath for zero consequences for unnecessary force. Not to mention qualified immunity. LAPD doing LAPD things.

How can one argue that the police serve the people? They don't necessarily even serve local government. They get a lot of federal funding and equipment, and in riot-control mode their purpose is to brutalize protestors until people stop showing up.

I also find it rather grotesque to watch Newsom argue that state and local police are perfectly capable of handling (i.e. crippling) protestors by themselves and don't need any federal assistance to do so.

Nobody should be trampled, but for some context there was a Molotov about 10 seconds beforehand, and the first trample was a horse being spooked by some fireworks.

Longer vid: https://streamable.com/bc1sog

Still doesn't make it right.

I was watching live. There are better views. I don't think you throw Molotovs at your feet.

https://www.twitch.tv/rhyzohm/clip/SmellyCourageousSardineTT...

Your linked video is in the background in my clip.

Well, I mean, not intentionally :)

Thanks though, better angle.

It's a teargas canister that caught on fire.

Last I checked, police arrests dangers, not shoot them while they are already incapacitated.

Sometimes they put the arrested in direct harm... not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kaw2ecckwWI

Then you haven't been paying attention to policing since its inception.

it's unclear to me if that is a firework or a police 'blast ball' both can detonate like that.

How can the incident (with video evidence) you describe not potentially result in criminal charges? Why hold your breath? Surely there are countless people to act on that.

We know from the BLM protests that police are rarely prosecuted for misconduct unless there's massive public outrage, i.e. you need another riot to get the injuries from the first one prosecuted.

Goes all the way back to Rodney King.

In the U.S. police are not typically held accountable for violence like this. They might go to trial, but even then are rarely found guilty.

Presidential pardon? All jan 6ers were pardoned, despite extensive video evidence of their crimes. If you're loyal to the power in place, you can do whatever you want. That's fascism 101.

What would be the point? There's almost nothing they could do that would be against the law if they're just given a pre-emptive pardon. They could put up an arena with citizens vs lions as long as it pleases Donald...

Only federal charges can be pardoned by the executive branch

Technically, yes.

Practically? The judicial branch will do it via qualified immunity. "Not clearly established law that you can't trample people on a street with a horse."

I initially thought this was a joke or sarcasm, but not everyone has seen everything that happens (the lucky 10,000 and all that). But during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, police, especially in Portland Oregon, used brutal and indiscriminate violence against protestors [1]. Some of the most brutal and blatant cases were eventually prosecuted [2] but most were not and never will be [3,4]. There were also multiple cases of Federal officers without uniforms in unmarked vehicles grabbing people off the streets to take them to unknown locations [5]. But there were cases across the country. In buffalo, 57 officers resigned after two cops were suspended for shoving a 75-year-old to the ground and cracking his skull (better to find a new job than the slight chance of accountability, I guess) [6].

But there was countless incidents that were not high profile that went completely unpunished. The purpose was to terrify protestors. If the police beat, abduct, maim, and injure protestors, and a year or two later, a half dozen get some light punishment, are you going to risk getting your eye shot out by a rubber bullet or your arm broken by a baton to protest the police next time?

[1] “Police here routinely embrace the violent crowd-control tactics … indiscriminately attacking protesters with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, and other “less lethal” munitions. The bureau has been hit with two temporary restraining orders from federal judges: one rebuking the PPB for likely violations of protesters’ rights to free speech and against excessive force; the other ordering the PPB to stop arresting journalists and legal observers for documenting police clashes with protesters.” https://archive.ph/39lib

[2] “Donovan LaBella, 30, was peacefully protesting outside the federal courthouse in Portland on July 11, 2020, when a deputy U.S. Marshal fired a “less lethal” impact munition that struck LaBella in the face, causing brain damage.” https://www.opb.org/article/2024/11/20/portland-protester-do...

[3] “A Portland cop who chased down and beat a protest medic, in one of the most harrowing incidents of police violence from the city’s Black Lives Matter protests last year, will not face criminal charges.” https://archive.ph/6ErUo

[4] “[N]ot a single federal officer on the Portland streets at that time has been held individually accountable for alleged constitutional violations over claims brought by David and other protesters. In fact, courts have not had a chance to assess whether constitutional violations even occurred. That is thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court, which in a series of rulings has created an accountability-free environment in which federal officials interacting with the public on a daily basis…can violate people’s constitutional rights with impunity.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/portland-prot...

[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

[6] “the video shows Mr. Gugino stopping in front of the officers to talk, an officer yells “push him back” three times; one officer pushes his arm into Mr. Gugino’s chest, while another extends his baton toward him with both hands. Mr. Gugino flails backward, landing just out of range of the camera, with blood immediately leaking from his right ear… ‘These officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square’[John T. Evans, the president of the Buffalo police union]”. https://archive.ph/KYOIS

> better to find a new job than the slight chance of accountability, I guess

People have long argued for a national register of police officers who were terminated for cause, or resigned to avoid termination for cause.

Awesome.

Except, at last count, about 70-75% of the nation's police departments have forbidden its use in hiring decisions due to their collective bargaining agreement with police unions...

There is a misunderstanding compared to OP's intent. It's not that separating military and police guarantees that the police will make the police serve and protect the people. Rather, if separated, police has a better chance to serve and protect the people, compared to a situation where it's the military's job.

Consider the the separation of church and state. It's done so the government remains neutral in religious matters and does not favor or establish any religion. In reality, some churches are clearly favored. Or the review system in academia. Peer reviews are so that bullshit doesn't make it into published papers. Yet, bullshit and bias does make it into published papers.

This is just a system that is working somewhat well. With obvious, very large room for improvement. But the direction, separating military and police, is good. Just not enough.

You are seeing what hatred like like up close.

True. Forming a Presidential Guard and have them rolling over protestors with tanks isn’t very enticing either IMHO

> One fights the enemies of the state

"At stake is a fundamental component of the framework of US constitutional democracy. It begins with the principle, enshrined in law, that military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law.

Most fundamentally, the founders of the American republic understood very clearly that concentrated military power, loyal to a single man, could be used to achieve total control by that person. And they had a historical example in mind: Rome — a republic governed by the people and the Senate — was transformed into an empire ruled by an emperor as a result of the Roman army being turned against its citizens."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-06-09/trump-...

Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it?

Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).

You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.

On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)

The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.

In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.

I meet these in my home country Finland all the time nowadays. They've probably been there all along but have been emboldened and riled up by the rise and normalization of the far-right.

My read is that this is even further along in many places in Europe.

> You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.

The nice thing about the HN Small World is that it can be efficiently searched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_w...

Well, one would have guessed that the service powering HN search would know about HNSW: https://www.algolia.com/blog/ai/a-simple-guide-to-ai-search

> how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it?

This was supposedly a staunch conservative stance once upon a time. The last decade clearly shifted such mentality towards one not dissimilar to Russia. I guess the cold war never true ended.

> Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it?

Quite often, and the answer is not many. It's why I've returned to a frankly elitist worldview, because this seems to be a historical pattern when power is diffused too widely. The lesson of our age may be that the Chinese political system, which seeks to restrit political competition within a small, carefully-selected group, is fitter than the American experiment.

You think the lesson that the president of a democratic country is amassing power and becoming less Democratic is to just go all the way and remove democracy?

I'll additionally note that China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military.

> China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military

Agreed. I'm saying if we're accepting this as precedent, a Presidential republic is not a stable system. We either reject the military being called in to quell protests. Or we accept it as precedent and revise our system of government to remove that power from the madness of crowds.

Why won't the Chinese system just collapse eventually? You have a small elite who perhaps currently are well-selected (besides the point) but what is preventing that elite from leaving the reins to someone who is not so good? With the added effect that the incompetent ruler will call upon the reputation for competence built up by previous rulers?

Seems like it's just cultural norms all the way down. If people want to take advantage of the system, they can break these norms while pretending to be what they used to be.

The political system that brought us Wolf Warrior Diplomacy? Being an authoritarian uniparty doesn’t make them immune to seeking political capital one way or another, and they’ve dipped into the “encouraging jingoistic nationalism” part of that playbook plenty.

> military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law.

serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy?

All of them are, verbatim from wikipedia, "a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population.". Ditto for spain Guardia Civil, and many of the countries listed in that same wiki page: Algeria, Netherlands, Poland, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Chile, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie

Having police not separated from military doesn't invalidate the democracy, it just makes it easier to subvert democracy at some point.

The spanish Guardia Civil is a very good example of a police force tied too deeply with the military. In 1981 some parts of the force attempted an actual coup, with one guy entering the parliament and shooting in the air (or ceiling).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt

The continuity of the Guardia Civil after Franco's dictatorship is one of many vestiges that has not been removed due to fears of creating an instability leading to some coup and a reversal to fascism. IMHO this may have been justified the years immediately after Franco's death, but should have been addressed at some point. See the 1981 coup as for why "appeasing" the oppressors usually doesn't work out, or even works out for the oppressors.

The Guardia Civil itself predates Franco, and to be fair some GC agents fought for the Republican side in the war.

True. But AFAIK they were a crucial element of the regime's oppression, especially in rural areas.

Their logo even today still contains a fasces[1] shield, which as been added during the Franco regime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces

Gendarmerie are simply policemen with a military status which give them some duty (like I think they cannot strike) and some benefits (earlier retirement) but they are still really a police force in reality. I don't think it would look good to send actual army to fight citizens, and I don't think the army would appreciate it either (it might have been done already, no idea)

What you say is true, but I'd add that Gendarms/Guardia Civil/Carabinieri etc.; tend to hang around carrying big guns, are responsible to the country as a whole (rather than the local community), are under the relevant defence ministry (while also reporting to the interior ministry).

In my experience they don't act at all like normal cops, and sometimes can be in conflict with them. The only interactions I ever hear of with citizens is if they beat the shit out of someone. You're not going to be going to them for a lost phone or a cat in a tree.

I don't know about the other forces mentioned here, but the French Gendarmerie are pretty much "regular police" as far as the people are concerned. The main difference with "actual regular police" is that they tend to operate in sparsely populated areas instead of large cities.

But they absolutely will do traffic police on highways, intervene to reason with a loud neighbor, etc. They'll also routinely show up during large protests in big cities.

The "big-gun carrying" Gendarmerie is a special unit, the GIGN, probably akin to US' SWAT teams. They'll intervene when "very dangerous" people are involved, think hostage situations or the like. "Regular police" also has a similar outfit.

Thank you for the correction. Indeed the main force of the French Gendarmerie (Gendarmerie Départementale) is much more like a "regular" police force than I described.

The unit I was confusing with the Gendarmerie as a whole was the Mobile Gendarmerie, whose role is more similar to the the Guardia Civil and Carabinieri.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Gendarmerie

I wouldn't have included GIGN, since I they appear to be much smaller and have a more "special”/"tactical" role.

I'll also note that the the Gendarmerie don't appear to be sending a team to the AWC (the olympics of smashing through the ceiling and shooting you in your bed) in two weeks, whereas the Guardia Civil and Carabinieri will. This may be a geopolitical thing though.

https://www.kasotc.com/14th-annual-warrior-competition

Lived in Paris 30 years ago, my experience:

Seeing Gens D'Armes on the street was somewhat common. The Gens D'Armes are akin to 'heavy' police and are a show of force. The Gens D'Armes were pretty common to see in the subways, airports, and/or just on patrol. They were Gens D'Armes stations in the city just how there were also regular police stations. Gens D'Armes patrols were a bit distinct from other police patrols, almost always larger groups, around 5 to 7 people with long-guns and plate carriers. Meanwhile regular police had much lighter weapons, no body armor, and very rarely were in groups of more than 2 or 3.

Times have changed. Nowadays, the gendarmes only show up when protests are expected to turn into rioting (so basically most of them). You don't see them around Paris in day to day life. We now have actual military patrolling the streets, "Operation Sentinelle". They're supposed to show some muscle to discourage terrorism. They are actual military, with actual military weapons. This has been going on for multiple years, I don't remember when it started.

However, regular police now wear bulletproof vests, too, even when randomly patrolling the streets. Since some years ago, we now have "municipal police", basically police which answer to the mayor [0], as opposed to the state, with somewhat fewer powers. But even they walk around with bullet-proof vests.

---

[0] In France, "the police" usually means "Police Nationale", which answers to the Prefect, who represents the State in the local Jurisdiction (département) – they are not elected, but appointed by the Interior Ministry. The "Municial police" answers to the City, but they're not allowed to conduct all the operations that the National Police do. The City means the Mayor, who's elected by the local population.

> The Gens D'Armes are akin to 'heavy' police and are a show of force

I've only seen that when they show up as support for or operating in a similar role as CRS† (crowd control, security for major events) which indeed would be Gendarmerie Mobile but that's a far cry from the range of operational responsibilities of Gendarmerie as a whole.

Turns out this is probably what city dwellers in France would only see of Gendarmerie, because Police Nationale and Municipale (city) typically have much more presence in cities than countryside, and the other way around for Gendarmerie.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_Républicaines_de_Sé...

That is not universally true. A Gendarmerie is literally a military force with law enforcement duties and many are exactly that.

In the Netherlands, the Royal Marechaussee are literal soldiers who perform military police duties and also many civilian policing duties, but all of them are soldiers first.

> A Gendarmerie is literally a military force with law enforcement duties

The second part is a huge differentiator from "normal" military. A police force even if administratively under the military has one crucial differentiator: their daily duties and training revolve almost exclusively around policing civilians from the same country. Military training and tactics are overwhelmingly aimed at dealing with foreign enemy combatants, mainly other military forces.

The methods give away the intentions and expected outcome. The US already has a very "militarized" police force. You send actual military only if you want to inflict the maximum amount of damage, and with that threat overwhelmingly scare the country into compliance.

> their daily duties and training revolve almost exclusively around policing mainly civilians, citizens of the same country.

That is the part that is not universally true. There are plenty of Gendarmeries who are soldiers first, with combat training and ethos, who also perform policing duties, the Marechaussee included.

> plenty of Gendarmeries who are soldiers first

Fair enough, but Wikipedia confirms that they all have civilian law enforcement and police duties so clearly their training, tactics, and experience revolve heavily around dealing with civilians.

I'll still take that over "soldiers only", even more with US's very active military where the soldiers routinely see active combat. Both the theory and practice shapes their "soldier vs. enemy combatant" world view. That's a hammer if I've ever seen one.

It's not the same though:

* when used domestically, it's under the Minister of Justice and Security

* there's also no Dutch equivalent of the U.S. presidency with unilateral executive control over the military

I'd argue this kind of danger is something you get more in presidential systems. Not that we all shouldn't be wary of military forces within our civilian populations.

Yes, sorry, I was answering only regarding the French gendarmerie, which I thought was made clear by the fact it's a French word but it turns out to be used more broadly.

Superficial argument. The "gendarmerie" is exclusively trained in law enforcement. The military aspect is only relative to organisational aspects.

In Portugal, the Guarda Civil are cops in rural areas. I have no special insight into their training or hierarchy, but I can tell you that in practice they interact with the population like cops, not like soldiers. E.g. you wouldn't report shoplifting to the army, but you can report to the Guarda Civil.

So I don't think your comment makes any sense, at least in Portugal.

There is no "Guarda Civil" in Portugal. It's called Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR).

I haven't lived there in almost 15 years. I stand corrected. In fact I'm closer in time to having lived in Spain than in Portugal, that must be the origin of my confusion.

In any case, I hope you agree my description of the GNR was accurate in substance.

Yes you are correct. They also patrol some highways (although I believe some are the jurisdiction of PSP)

If the US has laws that forbid that, and other nations have laws that establish that, then the US military being used for police activities is threatening to democracy - or at least to the rule of law - in a way that it is not threatening in other countries.

Other countries can do that if they want. It may or may not be a threat to them. But in the US, it's absolutely a threat to democracy, because it's already the executive deploying the military against the law.

> serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy?

They are, but not in the the "framework of US constitutional democracy." A system for which we have more evidence of stability than either of Italy or France's modern republics. (Note, too, les gendarmes' heritage: imperial France. Also, gendarmes aren't usually deployed overseas. They are, in a sense, more similar to the FBI than the U.S. Marines.)

I have always found confusing the existence of the gendarmes. They are indeed a vestigial force of the XIXth century, and should be transformed into a regular police force.

On the contrary, they are more relevant than ever in today's era of peacekeeping and anti-terrorism activities. They are fundamental to the stabilisation of the Balkans, for example. They fill the gap between full war and "normal" (punctual) criminality.

The issues are two-fold

1- the territorial split between gendarmerie/police within the French territory

2- the fact the gendarmes for police work report to the Ministry of Defense.

If one had to design the police system from crash, they would likely merge police and gendarmes for police work.

You forgot 3: a hatred between the organizations for ego reasons (not everyone, not everywhere).

The split is nonsense today.

As a French, I'd argue we're a flawed democracy. Shame on us when we compare ourselves to Scandinavian countries.

Those are bad too. Anyone that grew up in a country with a gendarmerie knows they are the most violent, unpleasant and fascist (personally, not like "all cops are fascist") people you’ll ever meet.

Some of the cases you mention involve "military" police who are under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, instead of the Ministry of Defense. Many also are not the only police force, in Chile the investigative duties fall to the non-military PDI.

IMO as Chilean, it's a pretty bad thing democratically, for both historical (dictatorship) and more recent reasons. Still, there is a clear difference between when the police with deep ties to the army enforce the law and when actual troops do it.

While copper Gutiérrez and grunt Herrera both technically have the rank of corporal, one mostly writes tickets, deals with noise complaints, and has riot training, while the other only knows how to march and shoot an assault rifle.

The actually important thing is that this is testing the waters. Trump will use the troops for flimsier and flimsier reasons.

NOTE: Chilean police are semi-routinely brutal; this is not an endorsement.

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LOL, so if I travel to Australia and wave my American flag there, they should consider me to be part of an invasion force?

Heard a rumor this morning that organizers have realized the bad optics in that, and have put out word to wave US flags today. It'll be interesting to see if they're obeyed.

Socal is majority latino today and was originally mexican land. There is no invasion. A reversion to historical norms if anything. People carrying flags to trigger conservative bigots does not an invasion make.

Then we should make it official by surrendering the territory to Mexico.

America is a melting pot, many people are proud of their heritage. If seeing a Mexican flag triggers you, I'm wondering if you hold American values, or something else?