While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric, I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained. The Guardian is just citing speculation from an advocacy group friendly to him. The headline is technically accurate, but it could just as well read "journalist detained after eating cheerios for breakfast".
(ICE's lack of transparency is a valid, but separate, concern, and The Guardian could have at least attempted to contact them before publishing speculation.)
> While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric
I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).
It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
It's not word-of-mouth, you can see his remarks about Hamas' Oct 7 massacres for yourself: "celebrate the victory", "how many of you felt the euphoria", etc.
That’s crazytalk. It sounds like something Pam Bondi would say but the other way around. If you celebrate a clear terrorist attack on civilians, you don’t have to be saying the name Voldemort (Hamas) out loud for everyone to see who you are.
How do we define a terrorist attack? Do we defer to the ICC, the ICJ, the US, the Knesset or the PLO?
Because if we apply that logic across the board, then the United States and Israel are both objectively complicit in internationally illegal war crimes. Any citizens that promote their legitimacy is trying to undermine global order, obstruct legitimate democracy and prevent criminal justice for organized terrorism.
Both sides have their faults, but I'm not willing to indict Hamdi for the same reason I don't accuse US citizens of being responsible for Abu Ghraib. It's not justice, just pugilism.
You cannot quote a single part of the article you listed where he argues in-favor of Hamas, because he does not mention them at all. You are casting aspersions that do not exist, much in the way the White House has to resort to defaming former presidents instead of setting a morally-consistent example.
> I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained
That's always the way it works with secret police. The idea of due process of law and norm following is (1) expressly designed to provide assurances in cases like this and (2) being deliberately degraded and evaded by ICE and DHS at all levels.
Trying to make the story actually about bland journalism criticism is doing their jobs for them. To borrow your framing: your critique is technically accurate, but...
I think the appropriate reaction would be suspicion, not jumping to assumptions. Speculation can be okay too, but we should be forthright about it, unlike The Guardian headline above.
Right, which is why I called you out for bringing it up. Make your bland criticism of the Guardian in a journalism forum.
If the standard for criticizing clear ICE overreach (and yes, an unexplained detainment is very clear overreach for a department who are statutorily just supposed to be checking visas) becomes "You have to be able to prove that ICE was wrong before saying anything", then that simply makes them the secret police.
My point isn't really "no speculation is allowed", but that we should be honest about the assumptions we're making. The Guardian headline that kicked off this thread uses misleading wording to hide the assumption being made. It's fine to criticize ICE based on informed speculation if we're honest about it.
Whilst I don't support any of ICE's efforts but ... CAIR and this journalist complain about this on the grounds of free speech? Are these people serious?
Has anyone thought about their position for 5 seconds? There is NO islamic country with a right to free speech. Zero. Not even countries like Morocco or Turkey have anything remotely like free speech, and they're the most open Islamic countries imaginable. There are dozens of islamic countries with death penalties for criticism of islam or government (and even Morocco and Turkey have prison sentences for that). CAIR is representing these countries' interests in the US, and they are arguing for free speech protection ... in the US. Not in the over 200 countries where muslims use state violence to control speech. In the US. They are making zero efforts to protect free speech anywhere else.
Obviously no sane person can reasonably consider these people to be either engaging in free speech or protecting free speech, can they?
CAIR is an American organization established to protect the rights of Muslims in America. The people who work at this organization are, presumably, Americans by and large. So why would an American civil rights group divert its limited resources to something squarely outside its scope, especially when such advocacy would require entirely different, non-overlapping expertise in Moroccan/Turkish/whatever law?
They have a funny way of showing it. Almost all those people will be immigrants, either themselves, or they'll at the very least have family living in muslim countries. Family who'll get arrested when they're protesting their governments or religion.
Yet they really care about free speech ... in America. THAT is where the free speech problem is according to them. Am I really the only one having trouble believing that this is a genuine attitude? Oh and they only defend their version of free speech, with limits on "hate speech" (but not Sami Hamdi's kind of hate speech of course), limits on criticism of religion, and limits on criticizing middle eastern governments. You know, THAT kind of free speech. CAIR, in the US, is really arguing for limits on free speech, "against hate speech", against "islamophobia", against criticism of middle eastern governments, you know limits on the very thing free speech was created for (ie. to protect all criticism of religion and governments, especially foreign ones, but all governments, including the US one)
And who do they invite? Sami Hamdi.
Please go read his twitter stream and tell me if you believe people who hire this guy have any problem with hate speech. Oh and maybe it's just one issue, so filter out the Gaza conflict, and ... nope still hate speech, mostly about the UK. Okay, filter out the UK too. He's defending people who went "on a Jew hunt" in the Netherlands ... This guy is not a moderate in any way shape or form.
I'm sure he'll have made 5 new posts by the time this is read and they'll be another 5 posts inciting at the very least more hatred of Israeli. You may hate Trump, but let's be blunt here: this guy is thankfully powerless, but is easily a LOT worse than Trump.
If you take CAIR's attitude at face value, limits on free speech against hate speech, they'd help deport Sami Hamdi. But clearly this kind of hate speech they don't just want to allow, but protect and nurture.
What I mean is, CAIR really make themselves look really bad here. Really, really, really bad.
> if someone is seen promoting Hamas and celebrating what happened on Dec 7th, their visa should be removed.
I, too, love taking someones papers and removing them from the country over their speech. I cheer on the army of government agents scanning social media for wrongthink so that we can rid the country of anti-Israel sentiment.
Subversion or otherwise working against the national interest of a country you are in as a non-citizen is generally a bad idea. Even with a rather generous freedom of speech in the culture.
Saying you hate $NATION and that you want it destroyed is definitely saying you don't want to be there and it's probably a good idea not to have you there.
No one is arguing about the practicality of speaking out under this regime or that it'd be unwise to do so in other countries as a guest.
What is being argued is that the government doing this goes against our values as Americans. It's interesting to observe the same side (right-wingers, libertarians) hold water for these actions while they were painting social media bans as censorship and a violation of their First Amendment rights.
Maybe you didn't do that, but your comment certainly reads like a "well, technically their visa can be revoked" argument which is true, but misses the spirit of the First Amendment.
EDIT: there might be legal issues too depending on the reason for revocation but I'm not a legal expert. Most things in our constitution apply to people and not just citizens so someone visiting the US also has free speech rights.
If someone came into my home, told me they hate me, my way of life, want me dead and starts setting fires in my living room, I'm going to kick them out. It's different if their name is on the lease.
It also depends on the severity of what someone is doing... there's a difference between speech and action. Saying you disagree with the administration, vs taking hostages and seizing part of a school are different things. Saying you would like to see amnesty for those who entered illegally is different than defrauding the govt, flaunting it on social media and trying to ram a car into a federal agent.
Commiting acts of violence, making threats, committing fraud, and ramming federal agents are already against the law and not protected speech. Saying that you think October 7th was good is certainly distasteful but not any of those things mentioned above.
> If someone came into my home, told me they hate me, my way of life, want me dead and starts setting fires in my living room
This analogy doesn't hold up because it's your house, of course you have the right to keep whatever company you like. Same for social media companies. You're not the government.
The government IS the people, IE it's citizens... immigrants are guests in the nation in the analogy, illegal immigrants broke in through the window in the middle of the night.
It's called an analogy. As a citizen, this nation IS my home.
it's important to remember that having a right does not mean having the right to use that right wrong. you have to use your rights right, or the government will step in and right the wrong of you wrongly exercising rights with its right to wrong you. this way our rights are preserved equally: i have the right to say what I want, and you have that very same right (the right to say what i want). It's only fair. Hell, it's only right.
We have freedom of speech in the U.S., it's mostly that simple to start with. That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are. Coming into the US on a VISA comes with certain restrictions and understandings. Even as a permanent resident, your privileges i.e. access can be revoked.
This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.
On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.
As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
> That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are.
I most align with libertarian ideals. However, I lived in China full time for 10 years and traveled to many different countries too. I can’t think of even one place I’ve visited where it would have been risk-free to openly criticize the current government leadership or their laws and culture, while I was a guest there.
That's one of the things that (previously, or hypothetically, take your pick) makes America great.
That's why this shift is so frustrating and disappointing to so many Americans. It would be like if the Vatican became protestant, or the UK suddenly stopped drinking tea.
Would you go into someone's home, tell them you hate them, want them dead and start setting fires in their living room then be surprised when they kick you out?
when did the state of free speech rights in majority muslim nations come up? this seems to be an entirely different debate that you'd like to have, but the rest of us are talking about the erosion of free speech in america by an openly authoritarian government that has been clear that incorrect opinions will be punished and correct opinions will be rewarded. this is about an american organization in america having their speech suppressed by america.
Some journalists's job is to risk their life going to dangerous places. Going to the US is not yet being a war reporter but it's more risky than before.
It was never fun to travel to the US, and the border agents have always been rude, unprofessional and arbitrary. But it seems like it has gotten much worse, and there is no way I'm traveling to the US these days.
Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers - gets the root cause. Without fixing that we are just playing wack a mole - people will still venture to the US since jobs exist and ICE is better than what ever crap they are coming from. Sure you may dissuade a few on the margins.
We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country. It’s just a farce.
Companies that employ undocumented workers at scale have significant political power and deporting them en-masse would shock many industries, so this won’t happen.
The recent ICE shenanigans (which don’t get me wrong - are awful and badly executed) are just performative bullshit to please the voter base. In fact I’d argue they are intentionally executed badly to attract media attention so they can all say they are being tough on immigrants.
The deeper purpose is to create another state-sanctioned security force that is highly associated and politically enabled to deal with ‘undesirables’ outside of normal legal process. Then include whoever is needed under the label ‘undesirable’ — see other comment about a journalist being detained and questioned
Yes - ICE is filling a similar role to what Wagner did in Russia and the brownshirts in Germany. A parallel structure which can be deployed anywhere against anyone. The concentration camp building industry is looking great.
I agree they are deadly serious, but to the parent commenter’s point, why wander the streets grabbing random people when they could go straight to the employers? They would have far more success targeting farms, construction sites, restaurant kitchens, etc.
The answer is the business owners are their constituents. They cannot afford to piss them off. If they lose their support the wheels will fall off this farcical performance.
I grew up in Florida, and I remember the sugar plantation “raids” they used to stage. They were a complete dog and pony show. They would announce them in advance so the plantations could hide most of their undocumented workers. Then they would round up just enough people for the photo op to prove they were being “tough on immigration.”
This is the same thing but on a grander and more dangerous scale.
They are targeting those locations... but they need credible reporting of wrongdoing in order to do so. Insider reporting, anonymous tips, etc. They generally don't just randomly show up at an employer without initial reporting of a crime.
For the most part, they've been targeting visa overstays by those who have been charged with and/or convicted of other crimes in the US. Not significantly different than under Obama. It's only that the visibility has been turned up to 11 along with ramped up protests and state/city sanctioned resistance in some locations.
As to the ramp-up in scale.. that's what happens when you let 5x the amount of people legally allowed entry to come into a nation in a relatively short period of time illegally. over 90% of asylum claims are invalid and fraudulent... there is almost no legitimate reason for crossing into the country outside a recognized port of entry.
I say this as someone who feels that immigration should generally be tied to "do you have a source of income and a place to stay?" at its' core... combined with a multiple of minimum wage as an income baseline with hefty employer side taxes to go along with. Arguments against doing so are very similar in my mind to having slavery... it's not okay, not good for the nation. I have similar feelings that "free trade" should only occur when similar quality of life or safety measures are in place. I'm optimistically libertarian minded, but recognize reality.
> why wander the streets grabbing random people when they could go straight to the employers?
Because immigration stuff isn't the primary purpose at this time. The primary purpose is to normalize a police state, to invoke feelings of fear in the general population and to build up a bigger infrastructure to do more authoritarian things.
Not quite. You had a bunch of workers at Tyson Chicken and Hormel Foods... At Tyson, underage and other undocumented workers were complaining about OSHA type stuff... next thing, there's a raid, 900 workers rounded up. Awkward moment as many of them spoke about how Tyson knew they were undocumented, and even handed over the written instructions provided to them on how to fill out paperwork and stay under the radar if they were.
"That is outside the scope of this investigation." Nothing ever happened.
At Hormel, complaining about all sorts of strange diseases and health conditions, possibly from inhaling aerosolized pig brain all day long? Oh, look, another raid.
"Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
Just a theory but it seems highly plausible in both these cases that the companies and ICE colluded... stage a big photo op, get rid of problematic undocumented workers and oh, hey, wouldn't you know, no plans to investigate the company?
This is also your friendly reminder that visa overstays are a misdemeanor, but for an employer, assisting or knowingly hiring undocumented workers is a felony. Tough on crime, indeed.
I'm guessing the companies can make things go away by donating to someone with (R) suffixed to their name. Ha, someone's a magician, they can turn a democracy to a banana republic very quickly.
Is it (R) or (M) for MAGA.
I used to joke "Hello to the NSA analyst reading this!" when talking about "sensitive stuff" in private messages, but I guess that needs to be updated to "Hello to the LLM!"
Just because the grunts are dead serious doesn't mean the initiative is dead serious.
Even then, serious doesn't equal competent. They are still trying to deport Abrego Garcia. Spending millions in legal fees and transport to deport a single man is not pratical in the slightest.
Yes. The cruelty is the point. But that's of course not how they message it to their party.
Turns out cruelty is very expensive to maintain, though. And we certainly do not have the economy to keep accommodating the narrative as real citizens starve and lose jobs. Something's going to break.
Listen I'm sure there are some who are in it only for the messaging.
But you're in denial if you really think certain driven individuals in all three branches of the us government aren't dead ass serious about taking this stuff to misanthropic ends.
We seem to be misaligned on what "serious" is in this context. Perhaps "inefficient" is a better way to phrase it. They are not concenred with effective immigration reform. But they are dead serious about being as bigoted as possible before consequences hit down down the line.
But their message isn't directly saying "spend 1 trillion dollars to be bigoted"
The grunts are surely dead serious, but the bosses? Nah. If they were they'd be sending execs to prison. Anything less is pointless if you truly want to solve the problem.
A MAGA state first and foremost. The hierarchy is "white MAGA > non-white MAGA > white silent > non-white silent > white anti-MAGA > non-white anti-MAGA". Will they eventually come for everyone but the first group? Very likely, but there's always a priority ordering. I'll leave it to the proper historians to decide how similar this is to the state they're using as their main inspiration.
Oh yes and he's not acting alone. The merry band of misanthropes have all but written out their intentions explicitly. And it doesn't appear just to be immigrants they wish this stuff on.
People have been worrying about "ecofascism" well then why aren't you concerned about an administration whose policy is measles outbreaks for the misinformed of their constituency? Whose health minister is a rich environmental lawyer who just so happens to be a huge fan of letting disease rip?
They are serious now, but eventually Pournell’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play. Those who believe in the organization will take over from those who believe in the mission.
Their reasoning for deploying the Texas National Guard to Chicago was because they claim a rebellion has started. They are consistently provoking citizens and lying about it. The courts have dismissed this due to the ridiculousness of it, but they continue to agitate. I don't think it's all for show, they're seeking a violent response so they can deploy the military.
ICE is not just performative bullshit. It's a display of authoritarian power and yet another branch of our government mobilized against the US people. As this article highlights, it's an excuse for surveillance. Of citizens, mind you.
It's also an enormous waste of money, which this admin loves to do. Billions to Israel, $40B to Argentina, $1T+ to bomb boats in the Gulf of Mexico, waste waste waste everywhere and send the bill to the average American, whose economic prospects haven't improved
I think it’s more to scare immigrants with pleasing the base being icing on the cake. Stephen Miller is genuinely anti-immigrant. And anecdotally, it is working. Ask any flight attendant on an international route.
They want people to stop coming here, and the threat of being sent to some torture camp in the third world won’t deter a Haitian (whose daily life already meets that description) but it will deter people from less atrocious locations.
As an american, unless you're descendant from native americans, your ancestors are immigrants... I don't think it's worth pointing out. Most anti-immigration americans obviously aren't native americans.
pulling up the ladder behind you isn't a new concept
In my ancestor's defense, they didn't get much choice on emmigrating here. It'd be truly poetic if they tried to forcefully deport me because they can no longer use me as free labor on the fields.
As Vincent Gallo put it recently re: federal debt:
> The USA can tolerate one of these two things. A system of no welfare, no social services, no socialized medicine, food or housing with open borders. OR. No open boarders and highly limited, highly controlled, assimilating immigration policy. We cannot have both. When the USA had unlimited immigration over 100 years ago, we did not have Government supporting immigrants with welfare, medical services, housing, food etc.
I don't agree with Mr. Gallo here - I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.
> I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.
The policy in my red state is to spend public funds to treat unliked immigrants as harshly as possible, deny social welfare to citizens in need and prioritize gov resources for admin loyalists. At least it is now that courts are sufficiently captured.
What does “no open borders” mean here? I’ve seen this term used but I don’t quite get it. Surely it can’t mean completely closing the borders? I.e. literally nobody can enter the country, ever.
Ive always been ashamed of all the genocidal massacres and forced relocations we did to the native americans but its not in any way accurate to compare establishing a colony to immigration; they came here to create a new society not to live amongst the existing civilizations. The way they did so at the expense of the civilizations already living here is abhorrent and shameful but its also in no way comparable to illegal immigration.
To the extent that it is comparable we would be absolutely justified in regulating immigration because the implication would be that the same thing that we did to the native americans is going to happen to us.
Its also not in any way reasonable to use the sins of the distant ancestor to delegitimize the nation's right to self-determination. Even if i accept your premise that my ancestors are comparable to immigrants i myself am not.
If the argument is that the nation has no rights to control its own borders because that would constitute some sort of "generational hypocrisy" that would also mean we have an obligation to accommodate slavery and genocide because our ancestors committed and benefitted from both of those.
Japan now has Kimi Onoda as Minister in Charge of Foreign Nationals and Immigration, and she's an immigrant herself, but her stance on immigrants is pretty hardline.
These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.
Rather than necessarily hateful (but not excluding that), whats happening here seems like brazen discursive manipulation for gain of political power at expense of a minority of the population.
Power in Japanese society is in large part built on calculating and self serving behaviour, without any real integral morals or values.. so politicians are seeing this stuff work overseas, and know they can get away with it too now.
Japan is truly impressive on taking an anti-immigration stance because they have numbers already that would be the dream of other countries pushing such perspectives. Off the top of my head there's 0.3% immigration.
It's truly saddening that such a stance can still work when it's likely the average citizen will not encounter an immigrant in their day to day life. a million immigrants is not threatening the jobs of 300m Japanese people.
Does the 0.3% figure include the massive US military presence? IDK if they count as "immigrants" under the strict definition of the term but most people would consider them immigrants and that might be where a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from. I would be very surprised if the total amount of immigrants in Japan when including foreign armed services and their family members is a mere 3/10 of a percent.
They get blamed for a lot of crime; idk if that's true or not but it probably is, in part because American culture has less respect for authority, in part because American culture has more respect for individual liberties, and in part because any time you have a large enclave of foreigners (regardless of where they come from or which host nation they're in) they always end up committing more crime than the native population. They also get blamed for driving up prices in the real-estate market (this is definitely true, the US Navy owns 20% of Okinawa).
Blaming "immigrants" instead of specifically blaming the US military is also very convenient for both the US and Japanese government because both governments are largely in-favor of continuing the status quo so it's not surprising that politicians would obfuscate the source of the problem by blaming immigrants as a whole.
That is mostly correct; immigrants account for about 3% of a total 123mil population. Your point does stand, but we are quite visible in Japan -- especially in Tokyo.
You are correct that we do not threaten jobs either. A large majority of the foreign population is working low/unskilled jobs. Generally, the native population is not wanting those jobs.
Those undesirable jobs can also be highly visible. Maybe the most frequent place Japanese notice visible minority immigrants is at convenience stores. So maybe it makes the population feel overrepresented. I see RWers post frequently about convenience store workers at least.
In Japan, the popular sentiment on immigration tends to be grouped together with tourists and temporary foreign workers as a single category: foreigners. This is perhaps understandable but unfortunate, because tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations. Bad experiences with tourists creates hostility towards immigrants, who are few and mostly do work hard to integrate and behave well.
> tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations
Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.
I'm sure the Sanseito party would be happy to add your proposal to their platform. I doubt the people who work in the tourism industry are voting for them anyway, and the people who benefit indirectly from tourism probably aren't aware enough of the dependency to care about it.
Please provide evidence for Kimi Onoda being "hateful". She is 100% culturally Japanese, and even speaks English with an accent. This is different from immigrants who don't know the basic cultural norms of a country and have integration issues.
She had American citizenship until recently. She's overcompensating by larping as a native when she isn't. She was intentionally picked to be a token foreigner to lead the anti-immigration policy of the new administration, just like the US's regime can say "You can't call us far right! That Stephen Miller guy's Jewish!" They love their token minorities since it's an easy counterpoint that they think proves they're angels with good intentions, and unfortunately, half of any given country will completely believe a government that uses minorities for that purpose.
So what's your point? Should minorities be excluded from government? Are individual members of minority groups not entitled to their own opinions? And are "far right" jews really that big of an anomaly?
There is definitely a phenomenon of people sometimes supporting candidates on the basis that their ethnicity won't be used to criticize their policies but they're addressing a complaint that would be made otherwise. It also denies the agency of minorities by requiring them to be monolithic entities wherein all members agree with whatever you think their opinions should be. Would you really be satisfied if the entire trump administration was white Christian males over the age of 40?
One of the criticisms of the pro-life side of the abortion debate has always been that men are over-represented in the US federal government yet they're able to regulate an issue in which they are not directly effected. I don't know if you agree with this specific criticism or not but a lot of people do and I don't think it's fair to then complain about "tokenism" when somebody like Amy Coney Barrett who is immune to this argument gets appointed.
Bad people aren't limited to one race or anything. But far end politicians love propping up a minority on TV because then they can have an excuse whenever they're compared to historically bad political movements.
You're the only one bringing up white Christian males here, which kind of proves my point. You seem to think that for some reason I care if a politician is white or Christian. Extremist Islamic parties love propping up Christian minorities on TV and saying they'll defend them (they won't). Right wing western parties really, really love propping up a Jewish party member because they can say "we're not Nazis!!! All Nazis hated Jews and we love them!!!" Because the average person really thinks nazism was really only about killing Jewish people, when the reality was they only got around to that after several years of other awful stuff.
The LDP is propping up their 100% foreign born, foreign citizenship politician so they can say "see? We can't be anti-foreigner because the lady controlling this is a foreigner." The optics are transparent and it's even what they're astroturfing their message on social media as. Japanese politics are all about image. They don't pick a foreigner who illegally held dual citizenship to head anti-foreigner policies by accident.
We had Dilan Yeşilgöz here in NL, minister of justice and leader of the liberal party VVD (right wing). She's an immigrant, born in Ankara, of Kurdish ancestry. She lied about immigrant subsequent travelers (which she is herself!) being a huge issue, and the government fell because of this issue. Turns out it is 400 people per year. I don't know what it is. Self-hate? Rules for thee, not for me?
I’ve seen Trumps buddy’s (the inhuman lawnmower) big company appear on jobs.now posting for general midlevel dev positions. These people are liars and it’s so painfully obvious.
I’ve seen more people realize this since his Trump started beefing with Massie, but they still glaze him so hard as to not offend, that it’s basically meaningless.
Not to forget they can use the performative bullshit to lay grounds for a paramilitary GeStaPo. ICE as it is already attracts all the wrong character types.
That performance may backfire, since some of the big supporters are agriculture businesses that rely on illegal immigrants to survive. Mass deportations of the type ICE seems to want will put a lot of those businesses out of business. I'm sure someone up in Washington thinks that poor Americans will step in to fill the gaps, but when it's been tried before those assumptions failed, badly.
I've seen some conspiracy theories that RFK, Jr, et al, want to start labor camps for autistic kids and just about anyone else his bunch can get tagged as defective or deficient or whatever, but I don't think that's going to work out like someone hopes it will.
>when it's been tried before those assumptions failed, badly.
Turns out Americans don't want to move out to rural areas to be paid minimum wage to do hard farm labor. Who knew?
That's the only real upside to this gig economy. Their competition isn't just flipping burgers, but anyone who has a car that can sign up to an app to make some quick cash.
I think you'll find that ICE goes to cities, not to the tiny farm towns where most of the field workers stay at. Farmers don't want ICE screwing up harvests, and the admin wants a more visual approach that comes with focusing on cities like LA and Chicago, not places like Seville CA.
A Reuters poll on the White House demolitions had a 63% approval for one question and a 40% approval rating for another question - from Republican voters.
As long as there exists a content economy on the right that does’t have to pay their dues to reality, you will not stop a political machine which is based upon fantasy.
The only thing that will cut through the noise is a recession, because that cannot be spun. Even then - that would just be a speed bump; eventually the recession will pass.
Your comment is not considering the possibility of ICE being used as a secret police force under the guise of enforcing immigration. There are strong indicators of this being the case.
The point is that ICE has been given a mandate to ignore any notion of due process in their handling of immigrants, very visibly and officially. This allows them to deport anyone they want, including American citizens who get on the bad side of the regime, by just claiming that the person is an illegal immigrant and they don't have time for looking at silly papers like a birth certificate.
So ICE, is in fact being shaped into a secret police that can be used to punish anyone speaking against the regime, under the guise of being a brutal anti-immigration force.
Not to pull the Godwin lever, but the German SS went from being security guards to overseeing the entire national police force to running gas chambers in about 10-15 years. The function of an organization can change over time. The purpose of a system is what it does.
When a domestic law enforcement agency is spending 600% more year-over-year on weapons to point at people in frog costumes it's reasonable to wonder if that may reflect a de facto change in that organization.
Are you not an American? (Giving you the benefit of the doubt here)
In America, immigration enforcement is not a criminal issue but a civil issue. So the proper (as in, according to the laws and norms of the last many decades) and appropriate channels through which the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved is the courts. The current usage of ICE as a gestapo is literally illegal (it deprives "suspects" of due process and civil/human rights), in violation of Geneva conventions, and so on.
Furthermore even if we accept the blatantly immoral and illegal idea that federal agents should be able to break and enter into homes and kidnap, traumatize, and traffic people without the slightest pretense of legal justfiability (warrants etc), the fact is that they are not even attempting to choose people by any discernable metric other than their skin color. So it is objectively not about the enforcement of the law, it is about stochastic terrorism and ethnic cleansing, as that is the only thing their actions consistently demonstrate.
Can you explain more how you reached the conclusion that the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved in courts? Parking is not a criminal issue, does it also mean that I need a court order to tow a car blocking my driveway? Building code is not a criminal issue, does it mean I need a court order to install a power outlet? What about car licensing, do you go to court for new tags or to DMV/whatever is your state agency for that? Insurance? Any regulation, really?
It's exactly because this is not a criminal issue, the due process in immigration does not require court hearing, bails etc. The immigration court is not an Article 3 court, it could as well be named "immigration adjudication department" because it's an Executive office. If you believe you had been wronged in the immigration process then you can try to sue the government for the damages in an actual civil court, but the law does not require the government to sue you in order to enforce the immigration laws.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying; ICE is an already-established organization meant for enforcing immigration law, but it's entirely possible that ICE is being/will be used as a secret police force to attack or dissuade political dissidents of the American right wing while claiming they are only enforcing immigration laws. Many American citizens have already been arrested and even deported by ICE, and the FBI has already been used to intimidate American citizens regarding their political speech. ICE is not supposed to be a secret police force, but it's certainly starting to become one.
The issue there is a lot of stolen identities and use of falsified or otherwise fake paperwork to obtain such employment. Then, you get people in positions to aid others to come into that organization illegally. It may not be direct leadership within a company, but I do think plenty of them turn a blind eye to it.
This is where reporting and raid events from ICE come into play. That said, I'd like to see plenty of organizations actually have their leadership held accountable. The East Palestine, Ohio train derailment for example should have seen corporate executives and board members find their personal finances at risk because of the damage caused for example. The US has a very poor history of ever holding company executives accountable in general. "Too big to fail."
instead of assuming we want to stop illegal immigration and then asking why we don't do the obvious thing that would accomplish that goal (eliminating the incentive to hire illegally by punishing companies that do it such that it's not worth it on the balance sheet), look at what the situation actually is and ask yourself why people would want that. The situation right now is that there's a near-endless supply of labor that is 100% exempt from any and all labor protections by dint of if they complain the boss can just call immigration, who will disappear the laborers but not punish the company in any way. The occasional disruption due to unanticipated ice intervention is well worth the cost of being able to pay your laborers sub-minimum wage and not being responsible for workplace injuries or human rights violations.
Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants. So private business men can profit. That's really it. It's not about fixing immigration.
>> Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants.
How does this make sense when cities and states have openly declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants?
How does this work when so many of the prisons are already overflowing? So much so, judges and prosecutors are not capable of sending more people to prisons and instead use diversion programs, down charging, or dismissing more serious crimes to charge these people with lesser crimes specifically in order to avoid jail time? What about states like Minnesota that continually deviate from sentencing guidelines and allow people convicted of crimes to spend the majority of their sentence out of prison? Minnesota isn't the only state that does this either, its just in the top five who do this.
The evidence would overwhelming appear to directly contradict this theory.
Dear Leader has already been talking about instituting some kind of program to formally permit cheap imported labor in "critical" industries like farming, construction, and landscaping. And why would the regime ever want to fix any root causes? Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy applies to autocracies as well. The Republican party has been drumming up support on this bogeyman for decades. Remember when there was a bipartisan immigration bill up for vote before the election and Tramp insisted that it be killed? That's the fundamental dynamic right there - their cultists crave human suffering, not effective policy.
> Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers
How do you imagine such an enforcement effort would proceed? Paint me a picture please. Illustrate a hypothetical example, just one company. What would really happen is that you'd check these businesses, and all the paperwork's in order. Social security numbers for everyone (even if those aren't their own). Without probable cause though, wouldn't even get that far, would they? They'd need that for the search warrants... not that judges are very agreeable to signing those, not when they tend to help illegals flee out the back door of the courthouse so that ICE won't wait at the front door grab and deport them.
>We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country.
Use the existing social security verification system, 5x fines median salary per year of suspected employment. Assume the worker has only worked for one employer for their entire time in the US or since 18 if there is no other verifiable evidence of employment.
It would fix the "problem" of all American workers who fear their job can be taken away by someone who doesn't speak the language, possibly has little education, because a large company thinks it's more profitable to hire them illegally. Nobody actually cares if someone hires their cousin at the family owned restaurant that sends money back home to his family.
But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuses and willing to work below minimum wage. The farmers in Iowa want the cruelty in Chicago. There was a tiny bit of deportation raids in red states at the beginning because of racism, but that was shut down quick.
>Use the existing social security verification system, 5x fines median salary per year of suspected employment.
You explain how to punish them, not how to determine that they deserve punishment. This fixes absolutely nothing. "Social security" won't find anything, because everyone working for those businesses has a social security number (even if it's not their own). To determine those are fake or misused, the government would have to get access to the deep HR paperwork, which would require search warrants and subpoenas, in other words, it would require "probable cause". That isn't going to happen.
>But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuse
Yeh, probably. But nothing you've described could help to change that circumstance.
>You explain how to punish them, not how to determine that they deserve punishment. This fixes absolutely nothing. "Social security" won't find anything, because everyone working for those businesses has a social security number (even if it's not their own). To determine those are fake or misused, the government would have to get access to the deep HR paperwork, which would require search warrants and subpoenas, in other words, it would require "probable cause". That isn't going to happen.
E-verify has existed for more than a decade. Social security card + your name on another form of official identification like a license or passport. It comes back whether they are valid and match. Its literally a plot point in Superstore. You're describing a problem that only exist when the employer willingly bypasses the system, like in Superstore.
If the DMV has issued a driver's license with the fake name thats the problem of another agency and someone there has committed a fireable offense or crime since there has been large pushes across the country since the 9/11 hijackers to lock that down.
I can't understand it. It was a huge story that hyundais entire workforce of 500 were illegals, but i have heard nothing about hyundai facing any consequences for blantantly disregarding the law. That also goes for US companies to be clear, but that was jst the first case that opened my eyes.
Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false. Everyone who got deported is allowed to return under the same visas they were on before. They were not allowed to stay without being ejected first because it would have made the current admin and the frozen water gang look really bad at a time where they're trying to establish a reputation as a fair and just law enforcement agency carrying out the mandate of the will of the people. If anything, the shot callers at the frozen water gang should have faced consequences but they didn't and they won't.
> South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visas or a visa waiver program called the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, to send workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.
It sounds to me like they had relied on a grey area. The most obvious conclusion is that pressure from the top down in ICE caused their agents to "hunt around" and look for "big arrests." When political pressure from South Korea mounted they had to reverse themselves.
Short-term visas might be entirely appropriate for someone who's going to be working in the country for a short time to set something up. I've worked under one myself (You usually need to justify why someone already in the country couldn't do it, but "I designed the thing and literally no-one in your country has seen one before" tends to work). visa-waiver programs like the ESTA generally are not: they're mainly for tourism, conferences, and business/sales meetings, and the latter can get a little blurry depending on how much you are demoing something, but if you're doing actual work and you're being paid directly or indirectly by a US company you're probably not covered (which surprises a lot of people, and there's often stories of people getting kicked out of the country for relatively small pieces of 'work').
Either way, if these were actually workers in the country temporarily and in good faith to set up manufacturing, then it would neither seem to be a particularly good crackdown on illegal immigration nor encouraging manufacturing to be set up in the US.
It's the USA (collectively) that's in the wrong here. You can't both beg a Korean company to build and start up a battery factory in your country and not provide any mechanism for the people needed to make that happen to be present in your country.
>> Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false.
The entire article you posted just referenced short term visas after the raid and said nothing other than the nationals who were arrested were flown home. The article spent less than a sentence with what OP posted:
The announcement came weeks after South Korea flew home more than 300 of its nationals who had been detained in a massive immigration raid at a battery factory being built on Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant campus near Savannah, Georgia.
From September when the raid happened:
"This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses," Steve Schrank, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlanta, said at a news conference on Friday.
"This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews gathered documents and presented that evidence... in order to obtain a judicial search warrant," Schrank added.
He said it was "the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations".
"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."
Some 475 people who were in the country illegally or working unlawfully were detained in the operation, immigration officials said.
>The statement was consistent with earlier remarks by South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, who, after traveling to Washington to negotiate the workers’ release, said that U.S. officials had agreed to allow them to return later to complete their work.
You dont suddenly allow to return someone who was justifiably deported, regardless of what the agent in charge said in the immediate aftermath at a press conference.
“States’ rights” was by and large an excuse for states to marginalize and oppress their minorities without interference from the Federal Government. (The Federal Government is usually the last line of defense a minority has against the state’s oppression.)
There’s a book that makes an incredibly compelling case called Freedom’s Dominion, highly recommended.
Now when I hear “states’ rights” I complete the thought with, “…to do bad things to people we don’t really like”
You might be overthinking it. Republicans support "states rights" only for red states and when they don't have control of all three branches of the federal government.
It was never about state rights. It’s always been about power and control. Trump is the true face of the Republican
party that’s finally come out. He’s not implementing the policies they want, but they wanted someone like him.
The ultimate goal of Christian nationalists (a large part of the Republican Party) is to turn the United States into a single-party theocracy and implement their version of Sharira law. They probably don’t fully realize this is what they’re doing.
A bit of history: "States' Rights" advocates specifically were advocating "States' rights to enforce chattel slavery". The Fugitive Slave Act is a wild usurpation of States' Rights, but the slavers (who have become the modern Repulican party) didn't mind.
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Both parties are globalist TBH. I used to vote Repub but got out 15 years ago, disillusioned by the unapologetic hypocrisy. Would love to see a God-fearing minarchist or libertarian succeed but I know that’s not realistic.
I believe we have different definitions of “globalist.” The dictionary says:
glob·al·ist /ˈɡlōbəlist/ noun 1.) a person who advocates the administering or planning of a political strategy, economic system, etc. on a global rather than a national basis.
“[Right-libertarian populists] are unapologetically anti-globalist while at the same championing free trade and a realist foreign policy.”[1]
Both parties have furthered the advancement of global rule, one world government, top-down planning. In different ways, to be sure. Repubs for example voted in JD Vance, a man who was led by Peter Thiel, who as you know is advancing the surveillance state with Palantir. Peter made him who he is, and certainly has his ear. And Dems marched in lock-step with other globalists around the world in 2021-2024.
Global free trade, where individuals and not politicians decide who to trade with, as I understand it, is the _opposite_ of the dictionary’s definition of globalism. It is the smaller government that Republicans ostensibly stand for and then don’t provide.
Get government out of the way and let people be people.
“States rights” has always been a dog whistle for slavery and Jim Crow, with no connection to the ideal of Liberty that the words imply. It means “my right to deprive others of their rights.”
The issue is with taking anything they say at face value. They don't believe in anything, except what is convenient in the moment and would grant them more power and wealth. Now that they own the White House, Congress and SCOTUS, they are very much federalists and will seek to impose their views on the entire country. Simple, really.
They brandish the "don't tread on me flag" while cheering on Trump sending the national guard to blue cities (when the most violent cities in America are all red). They are supposedly against handouts, but watch Trump bail out the farmers and none of MAGA have anything to say about it. Because a majority of farmers vote red.
They wouldn't have any issue with actual socialism, as long as it only benefitted republican voters.
Now is a transition period - the goal of the cult is to survive with a new leader. After his death, you will hear things like "must not let Trump down" and "We must not fail Trump" and so on. "Only person X can achieve Trumps original vision."
Isn’t the problem that Trump is now doing what he promised? He campaigned on tariffs and deportations (and a decade ago, building a White House ballroom).
when what republicans say align with what they do, I might pay more attention to what they say. so far listening to any of these republicans talk is like listening to an abusive gaslighter on ketamine.
But the AI vote will be used as a fig leaf so they don't even have to pretend to mete out justice. "AI said it, it must be true" will soon become a mantra (even though most people here know how wrong it can be and how often it actually is).
I hear that lazy LEOs now use AI to write police reports. Noice. And the AI can trivially show up for hearings.
Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
"Due process" isn't what you think it is. The due process for someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant is checking to see whether they are an illegal immigrant, and then sending them home. That's the only process "due".
In the world we could assess this completely and with perfect accuracy, you're spot on that that'd be all that we need!
In the current world, though, due process exists because there are sometimes messy and fuzzy details that need evaluation. For instance, the date of an immigration court hearing might be delayed, or an applicant may be granted an extension. An immigrant may have received incorrect information and missed the proper steps through no fault of their own. If immigration enforcement skips due process but is working on even slightly outdated information, we're trashing the rights of people who may be following the process properly.
In the cases where an immigrant is clearly here illegally and there are no extenuating circumstances, deportation is already the thing that the current due-process does.
> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
Criminal court is only one type of use-case for the legal system, there are loads of other ones. The phrase "Civil court" refers to scenarios where no one has committed a crime and no one is accused of a crime, and these represent the majority of court cases.
> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
So if the executive decides they suspect you are an illegal alien, detains you, claims to have checked you are an illegal alien, and then expels you to some foreign country you have no right to challenge this at any point in the process?
Because if that’s what you think “due process” means, than the government never has any need for criminal process at all, it just needs to decide it suspects people of being illegal aliens instead of criminals, then it can imprison them indefinitely while it “checks” and expel them whenever it decides it tires or imprisoning them (perhaps to someplace it knows they will be killed or deprived of then nevessities of life), all without ever defending any of those acts as justified in court.
When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, they are present but allegedly violating immigration _laws_.
That is to say, such a person has been accused of a crime.
Due process in the constitution guarantees that individuals (including non-citizens facing deportation) have the opportunity to defend themselves in court against such accusations.
While the importance of due process cannot be overstated, immigration violations are not generally crimes outside of a few specific areas. Removal proceedings are frequently not tied to any particularly crime, but merely unlawful presence, which is not a crime in its own right.
>When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, t
When someone is allegedly a murderer, or a thief, or a vandal, or whatever... a trial is needed to determine guilt or innocence.
But when they arrest someone for those things, the preliminary process allows police to determine someone's identity. Their address, things of that nature. Their basic information. Basic information is all that is needed to determine whether or not someone is a citizen. There is no trial needed to determine citizenship.
>Due process in the constitution guarantees that individuals (including non-citizens facing deportation) have the opportunity to defend themselves in court
No, you attended public school and someone had you memorize "due process" in 3rd grade and you never were taught what it meant. It does not guarantee "a defense in court", because in this case there is no crime to defend against. No one's wanting to send them to prison. In the simplest terms, due process is the idea that the government must have a process for a particular legal proceeding, and that if someone must undergo that proceeding they get the same process everyone else does. If rich people were getting to skip out of the proceeding, or get a shortened one, but you had to go through the entire thing... it'd be a due process violation. Or alternatively if you wanted that proceeding and they were getting to skip it (say you had a full 30 day period to file, but they canceled your filing that same day) you'd have a due process violation.
While you are correct in stating that an article III court generally is not required, the due process for immigrants, even those not present legally, is more complicated than just "check paperwork for legal status, act immediately". While in some cases expedited removal bypass the normal process, if a deportation is contested, due process still generally entails access to a hearing before an immigration judge (article II judge).
What do you think the process to check whether someone is an illegal immigrant is? It needs to leave a paper trail, and provide someone the opportunity to prove that they're a citizen or here legally.
That doesn't work in all cases. ESTA visa for example you give up the rights to due process if you overstay on that visa as part of the agreement to the visa.
Doesn't justify anything that ICE are currently doing though.
And what if someone claims you overstayed the visa, but you didn't? You still need a legal process to defend yourself from arbitrary accusations. Not having a process is not just morally wrong, it is also simply non-functional.
This is risible. "Sending them home" requires arrest and detention. Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the US Constitution grants people the right to contest their detention in court. So far, the administration hasn't formally suspended habeas corpus, despite what Stephen Miller may assert on TV.
They'd quickly cancel the contract with any supplier that doesn't give them the carte blanche and obfuscation of responsibility they want.
Just like other ML and big data LEO projects in the past, assume the use of AI is to greenlight what they already want to do and would like a fig leaf of justification for from a computer.
So you say that I can burn a bit of ICE's GPUs by typing words suggesting I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers
> You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
Tariffs on goods coming into the US are paid by US residents. (Just had to pay customs to clear a shipment from the UK - I had to pay the tariffs, not the seller.)
Government and law enforcement, not only in the USA, increasingly use AI to control, suppress and punish the people. In this regard AI is not a liberating invention but a harming one, like weapons. This might explain why tech CEOs became part of the military lately.
Many people don’t understand that government power MUST be limited in a democracy if you wish to slow the spread of tyranny.
Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.
As much as a like to fantasize how a Cincinnatus-esque figure could emerge to fix things, the unfortunate truth is that many times the system needs to be rebuilt to secure balance again. It needs to be equal measure of the government protecting the civilian population as well the citizens protecting themselves from the government to be a successful democracy.
And if the particular governmental system that is the US federal government was in fact destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, why would the set of people who are currently legal citizens, legal permanent residents, and legal immigrants remain the same as is today under the laws established by that system? If the US Constitution is moot because there's been a successful military uprising against the US federal government, and people are sitting down to write a new constitution that will actually establish the rules of governance for (some subset of?) the land area of the current United States of America, why would that new constitution have the same rules governing illegal immigration enforcement as the current one? Before citizens can protect themselves from the government to be a successful democracy, they have to decide who is in fact a citizen who can legitimately vote in that democracy.
I think this assumes a scenario where the past ceases to exist. However democratization and transitions back to democracy are built upon on taking the past and building it better. Brazil and Chile did not christine a state of no citizens when they returned to democratic forms of government.
I don't see any benefit to not determining everyone who is in an area at a specific time a citizen or eligible for citizenship.
Can't anyone use AI to surveil social media, even ordinary citizens? It seems like it would be easy to surveil ICE, the police, immigrants, all politicians, the military, businesses, government, individuals, groups, anyone and anything anyone has an interest in. Is the future everyone surveilling everyone else? There used to be web services that let you set up "standing queries" for anything you were interested in. In a sense chatbots already contain a historical record of the internet in compressed format and allow anyone to do historical queries on anything, limited only to what has been accessible on the internet. "Googling someone" is becoming "ChatGPTing someone". People felt Googling someone was somewhat rude and parents warned their children to limit what they posted in case future employers looked them up. Same for anyone employed, they are learning to be careful what they post in case their employers see it. Seems like free speech is being suppressed because it can be used against you by various people and groups already. This may help explain why the web has become less interesting and anonymous posting is ubiquitous.
Do they mean immigrants or illegal immigrants? Do they mean citizens, permanent residents, or some other status?
I'm very anti-surveillance, this shouldn't be allowed, but I feel like a lot of articles are being disingenuous by means of this omission. Is this a problem that only affects immigrants? It doesn't seem that way to me, but by presenting it that way they knowingly divide people and thus make it less likely that a group will prevent or reverse this action. These are the types of articles I'd write if I wanted this issue to drop off the radar of a large portion of the voting population.
Many of the news-reporting institutions who report negative things about US government enforcement of immigration law have an ideological problem with the existence of laws restricting immigration to first-world countries like the US; and one of the ways this manifests itself is by referring to people who are negatively affected by US government enforcement of immigration law as "immigrants", and deliberately avoiding specifying whether those people are illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, permanent residents, etc.
Now we begin to see the true reason for all the AI push.
>You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
Let me play a devil's advocate. Are you (and Orwell) unhappy that people breaking the law get punished? Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you? It doesn't matter if you break the law in the darkness or not.
This went _just great_ in East Germany, which was the last place to seriously try this approach (fortunately the Stasi didn't have modern surveillance tech, but they did quite enough damage with what they had).
The whole point of 1984 is to show how perfect surveillance allows the perfect enforcement of unjust laws, allowing complete control of Big Brother over every aspect of the lives of the country's citizens. The same cameras that can be used to fine you for illegally crossing the street can be used to find and punish you for illegally speaking out against the regime.
This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.
> Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you?
It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.
There's plenty of laws that aren't fit for purpose and are immoral, so any kind of automatic system that enforces punishments without any oversight (e.g. by jury) is going to lead to abuse. (It used to be illegal to help an escaping slave, so just imagine if a system determined that you didn't do enough to help with re-capturing a slave and sent you into slavery as punishment)
Well, other agencies have mostly used things like this to collect evidence against real crimes. ICE is using it to enforce Orwellian "thought crimes" where they are revoking visas and green cards, and then often just minutes or hours later violently kidnapping people for their political views. Over 6,000 USA college students so far have had their visas revoked and been targeted by ICE officers, for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of association.
"United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency under the supervision of the United States Department of Homeland Security." Since 2002.
It is not surprising nor particularly novel. But consider the people upvoting this are supporting a sensationalistic and dishonest Jacobin article right now. Of course it doesn't make sense.
I’m a little surprised at the level of interest in ICE these days. They’ve been around for a while now, and have been used by past presidents in similar ways.
Barack Obama was called out by the ACLU for his use of ICE. He was called a monster.
If people condemn Trump and Obama both, then I respect their thinking. But if they applaud Obama and condemn Trump, I don’t believe they are showing integrity.
> I’m a little surprised at the level of interest in ICE these days
Oh gee, I wonder why? Could it be the deportation of international students and visa holders for their protest against Israel? Maybe the reckless and abhorrent behavior they've shown in blue city neighborhoods and protests (did you see the reporter in Chicago get arrested by ICE with them peeling away afterwards taking off someone's bumper... or the time they tear gassed everyone including Chicago police at a protest before leaving shortly after?)
Or maybe sending people to a labor camp in El Salvador?
> Barack Obama was called out by the ACLU for his use of ICE. He was called a monster.
You're making a point that Obama used them "in similar ways" but provide no actual substance on the "how" part. Just a useless bothsides-ism that is holding water for MAGA/authoritarian policies.
> I don’t believe they are showing integrity.
If all someone does is bring up Obama and fail to call out Trump on civil rights abuses, I don't believe they have integrity.
> $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance
Yeah, that would just about cover the cost of a pizza party in the AI world. You also can look at "Zignal Labs". The website looks like 100% snakeoil.
I have no doubt that ICE would love to have some AI-based software to detect illegal immigrants, but I doubt it's more effective than just regular datamining.
It doesn't need to be effective, it needs to be a computerized excuse to go after more people. Whenever computers are used to target people, the output is always given far too much weight. Recently we had guns drawn on a child because a computer vision algorithm classified his doritos as a gun with a low confidence score, with explicit advice to only investigate further and not assume correctness. But that child still had multiple guns trained on them.
Take that, apply it to here, and it's clear that effectiveness would actually be counterproductive.
So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US. Mass surveillance and enforcement technology is dismal to think about, though NSA and google have been doing it for years. I'm watching from my perspective in the UK where there is growing fury over the gross incompetence, negligence and mishandling of a mass immigration crisis which is so stupid it beggars belief. The various law enforcement agencies in the us don't cooperate that closely, so there's less scope for this to be abused against american citizens unlike in the UK.
Are the lives of immigrants better? Are we importing citizens or slaves? Why are we not interested in improving conditions in their home country? Shouldn't we focus on that first?
I reject that. There is a steadily worsening crisis, even the current labour government have acknowledged that pledging to take lots of action against it, both now and during the election campaign. Specifically small boat crossings, of which more then 43,000 have already arrived this year. There is not a single politician in this country who doesn't admit that there is a serious problem.
Different populists have different ideal numbers for how many people they want to purge. Some want 10 million, some want 20-50 million going decades back and reversing whatever laws allowed the "wrong kind" of even legal immigrants to come here in the first place.
I think more governments around the world are catching on to the idea that your majority population can excuse a large amount of economic mismanagement and bad geopolitical strategy if you blame foreigners who arrived after your decline started.
If a satisfactory amount of foreigners are removed, the technology will still be there and the defense contractors will still need contracts. If there are no viable foreign adversaries at that point, then another domestic target will be needed.
Is mass immigration really a crisis? Like people are upset here in the US too but I don't even know why. There's a lot of immigrants in my state but they're not upsetting me.
Not even a little bit. No one is taking jobs away from citizens or legal immigrants (locals don't want those jobs, either at all, or at the wages offered), rampant "migrant crime" is a myth created and perpetuated by the right (immigrants commit crime at lower rates than citizens), and to top it off, the American economy depends on many of these migrant workers in order to function (often in exploitative ways; explicitly allowing and supporting this type of migration would make things safer for everyone).
It's othering and racism, plain and simple.
I'm not saying we should just open the floodgates and let anyone and everyone in, and I'm not saying we shouldn't deport non-citizens who commit violent crime, but the "crisis" is entirely manufactured.
It sure is, the US government has been underfunding the judicial body responsible for adjudicating asylum claims for years and years. As a result there are indeed people here in status limbo.
Wether or not they should be granted some kind of residency is kind of irrelevant, politicians are happy for this to be a problem they can use.
Even now, they aren’t increasing the rate of process, they’re just blowing the cash on mass surveillance.
I think the job analysis is overly simplistic. The reality is that worker migration from poorer countries to richer ones is a huge low wage problem. Instead of allowing low-skilled labor to pay better in order to attract workers who expect better conditions, you keep the wages fixed and import workers for whom even the bad life you're offering is better than their current life.
Of course, this doesn't mean that allowing 0 immigration in is the right solution, or preventing immigrants from working. And I should also point out that, generally, US leaders have the least amount of problem with this aspect of immigration - even now, Trump has instructed ICE not to go for deporting agricultural and tourism workers in any mass numbers.
Employed privilege. Lots of folks would like to work in construction but haven’t been able to for a while. I know several that retired early in poverty.
I would appreciate a job in construction or at a restaurant for example. Teenagers would benefit from such jobs as well. Not available.
And yet multiple studies have shown that when jobs are offered to Americans that involve labor (farm, construction, food industry), at those wages, then there are generally few to near zero applicants.
There are other reasonings (prevailing wage, location, etc.), but likewise, your "absolute assertion" that undocumented workers have been taking job opportunities from you is also not entirely ... absolute.
The key point is "at those wages". The overall assumption in the economy is that it's good and proper for low-skilled jobs to be very low paying, despite otherwise being very unattractive. As long as people are unwilling to pay the proper cost for hard labor, they'll keep hitting this problem of local people not willing to do the work for a pittance. Then, when they circumvent the local workers, they'll be surprised that local workers are discontent.
I do agree with that. The same as with the trope about McDonalds, etc. being "starter jobs" for teenagers, etc., and that's why it's okay for them to not pay a liveable wage, etc., which has no origin in fact (re the minimum wage law) and only in Republican ideology.
> No one is taking jobs away from citizens or legal immigrants (locals don't want those jobs, either at all, or at the wages offered)
Sorry but i absolutely despise this argument as someone who did the job that "locals don't want" and knew others that did. It's cheap and very right wing classism by the privileged.
Essentially only the last bit is true and the last bit is true because there is a cheap alternative that doesn't involve much unionization either.
Mind you I'm in western europe and the other arguments don't hold up either here but that first one is universally shit.
Absolutely not. They are an essential part of modern American life, and anyone against it either doesn't understand that, or does it for racist reasons.
What has changed is the “messaging” around the topic. This is very common with the Trump administration. When all is said and done, when exceptions are made/bought, and the courts and others get involved, it ends up not being much of a needle move. BUT, what is different every time is the messaging. And I have come to believe, that is what the actual goal is to some degree. The real goal is to send a message to people who are immigrants OR (and this is important) look like immigrants. It’s a message of “remember your place” and “be grateful you get to be here”. It’s the same type of tactics that gets sent to Asian communities, black communities, women, etc.
I am white. I am a male. I am 55. I oscillate between despondently sad and disgusted.
The older you are, the more likely you’ll see more people and say “get off my lawn” when really, you were busy hanging plates when the rest of the world was having babies…
That’s really what happened. The population doubled in 15 years and people moved (people always move). It’s just more people now. So naturally you’ll see more immigrants.
Roughly half the population responds to unfamiliar people and ideas with curiosity, and the other half with fear. The latter half are easily manipulated into nurturing the fear. Everything rolls up to this.
What's your definition of "unfamiliar"? I just want people vetted before they're allowed into my house to live along-side my family? Is that unreasonable?
Uncontrolled influx of millions - mostly with poor finances and very different cultural backgrounds and values - strain a nation's resources, infrastructure, and social cohesion. It exacerbates housing shortages, burdens public services like healthcare, and contributes to economic friction amid existing downturns. It also poses risks to national identity and security, as we are now experiences in many countries who allowed this to happen, as opposed to countries that enforced legal immigration. It complicates integration and social stability. It's unfair to legal immigrants. This is why sovereign states implement rigorous and dynamic immigration controls and capacity limits based on the nation's ability at the time. There has to be sustainable absorption. Countries are not homeless shelters or free handouts; they are the result of blood and tears of the patriots who fought and died to create, defend, and build that nation. Every nation has its values, and it's not the right choice for everyone. China is definitely not a country for me, nor are the CCP's values acceptable to American culture. In short, vet whoever comes into your house, and don't let people sneak in through the backdoor.
>There's a lot of immigrants in my state but they're not upsetting me.
You might not think that, but have you ever complained about housing prices? That food at the grocery store costs more than it did a few years ago? The price of consumer goods in general?
Well, you're not buying those things. You're bidding on them. And the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards.
High housing prices is a complex mix of underbuilding due to zoning laws, companies buying up housing stock to rent, and (a few years ago) very low interest rates. One thing that is _not_ a factor is immigrants, because they are at the bottom of the social pile and usually can't get mortgages to buy houses.
> That food at the grocery store costs more than it did a few years ago?
> the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards
Who do you think is picking most of that food? And if the wages for those jobs went up to an American living wage, what do you think would happen to the price of food even with a bit lower demand?
I know it's all too easy and comforting to throw out knee-jerk comments cheerleading for government power, but at least try applying some basic analysis to what you write.
The people I work with believe the government, the current administration is funding immigrants. Providing them with handlers who are paid to assist them, open up credit cards in their own names on behalf of non-citizens who otherwise couldn't.
Multiple of them believe this. One mentioned it, after she left I turned to my other coworker to say "that was some crazy stuff she was saying" only to be met with, "Hey, it's happening. A lot of federal money goes missing and this is exactly where it's going."
It's a complete disconnect from reality that's malleable to any form desired.
When ICE raided Tyson Chicken (a few years ago), multiple workers provided documentation from Tyson telling them how to stay under the radar and how to fill out paperwork if they were undocumented. There's definitely a very large effort in undocumented labor... and little interest in rocking the boat of those employers.
Yes. The USA runs on undocumented work in many ways. This is a far, far, far (etc) cry from government-funded citizens escorting around and signing up for lines of credit and otherwise paying the way for undocumented workers.
> So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US.
The Trump administration loves gaudy numbers like this. Common sense tells you that's a lot of movement in too short of time. Until they release evidence of these numbers, please do not spread this misinformation.
Indeed, it's a complete lie and fabrication, and those who repeat it are bearing false witness. Take the report it came from, click on any "supporting" link, such as:
> A recent study from the United Nations reported that President Trump’s immigration policies led to a 97% reduction in illegal aliens heading northbound to the U.S. from Central America.
And you find that the document they link does not support their assertion, and in face the "97%" refers to:
> The migrants who returned during the period were primarily Venezuelan nationals, accounting for 97% of the documented southward flow, with most heading to neighboring Colombia.
It's comically bad deception, only people who continuously traffic in lies all day long would even publish something like this.
Like, say we assume it's true: There are 340 million people in the US. That's less than 1% of the current population leaving. I really doubt anybody would notice much of a difference.
If we organized a content storm campaign we could make this effort moot. Time to start building a portfolio of dummy accounts to muddy the water. Remember... TAILS and fresh IP's for each account, ideally nodes you can get back on with ease. Use a public network if possible.
Bonus: You can also use these accounts to undermine the Online Safety Act at the same time!
This is the same tool the right has used to destroy progressive democracy online. Dump tons of money into pro libertarian right wing bots and overwhelm the voices that call for money out of politics and universal heath care with screams of "libtard" and "woke".
Somewhat relevant: ICE detains British journalist after criticism of Israel on US tour
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/26/ice-detains-...
While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric, I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained. The Guardian is just citing speculation from an advocacy group friendly to him. The headline is technically accurate, but it could just as well read "journalist detained after eating cheerios for breakfast".
(ICE's lack of transparency is a valid, but separate, concern, and The Guardian could have at least attempted to contact them before publishing speculation.)
> While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric
I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).
It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
It's not word-of-mouth, you can see his remarks about Hamas' Oct 7 massacres for yourself: "celebrate the victory", "how many of you felt the euphoria", etc.
https://www.memri.org/reports/british-political-commentator-...
What you quoted is, by definition, not pro-Hamas rhetoric. Hamas is mentioned a total of zero times in the entire article.
His language is simply anti-Israel.
That’s crazytalk. It sounds like something Pam Bondi would say but the other way around. If you celebrate a clear terrorist attack on civilians, you don’t have to be saying the name Voldemort (Hamas) out loud for everyone to see who you are.
How do we define a terrorist attack? Do we defer to the ICC, the ICJ, the US, the Knesset or the PLO?
Because if we apply that logic across the board, then the United States and Israel are both objectively complicit in internationally illegal war crimes. Any citizens that promote their legitimacy is trying to undermine global order, obstruct legitimate democracy and prevent criminal justice for organized terrorism.
Both sides have their faults, but I'm not willing to indict Hamdi for the same reason I don't accuse US citizens of being responsible for Abu Ghraib. It's not justice, just pugilism.
It's glorifying the Hamas-led attack; it seems accurate to call that pro-Hamas (as well as anti-Israel) rhetoric.
Once again, it cannot be "pro-Hamas" if he doesn't even acknowledge they exist. His comments are wholly non-rhetorical: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhetoric
You cannot quote a single part of the article you listed where he argues in-favor of Hamas, because he does not mention them at all. You are casting aspersions that do not exist, much in the way the White House has to resort to defaming former presidents instead of setting a morally-consistent example.
Expressing an opinion about the Hamas-led attack means expressing an opinion about Hamas, whether or not the speaker uses the word "Hamas".
> I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained
That's always the way it works with secret police. The idea of due process of law and norm following is (1) expressly designed to provide assurances in cases like this and (2) being deliberately degraded and evaded by ICE and DHS at all levels.
Trying to make the story actually about bland journalism criticism is doing their jobs for them. To borrow your framing: your critique is technically accurate, but...
That's a separate issue though - intransparent law enforcement is bad, but that doesn't justify making assumptions.
Or if it did, then why this particular assumption? Why not assume that Hamdi was arrested because of his hair style or something?
> That's a separate issue though - intransparent law enforcement is bad, but that doesn't justify making assumptions.
... I mean it absolutely does. What on earth are you _supposed_ to do? Give the unaccountable secret police the benefit of the doubt?
I think the appropriate reaction would be suspicion, not jumping to assumptions. Speculation can be okay too, but we should be forthright about it, unlike The Guardian headline above.
> That's a separate issue though
Right, which is why I called you out for bringing it up. Make your bland criticism of the Guardian in a journalism forum.
If the standard for criticizing clear ICE overreach (and yes, an unexplained detainment is very clear overreach for a department who are statutorily just supposed to be checking visas) becomes "You have to be able to prove that ICE was wrong before saying anything", then that simply makes them the secret police.
My point isn't really "no speculation is allowed", but that we should be honest about the assumptions we're making. The Guardian headline that kicked off this thread uses misleading wording to hide the assumption being made. It's fine to criticize ICE based on informed speculation if we're honest about it.
> Why not assume that Hamdi was arrested because of his hair style, for example?
Because he was arrested in the US?
Whilst I don't support any of ICE's efforts but ... CAIR and this journalist complain about this on the grounds of free speech? Are these people serious?
Has anyone thought about their position for 5 seconds? There is NO islamic country with a right to free speech. Zero. Not even countries like Morocco or Turkey have anything remotely like free speech, and they're the most open Islamic countries imaginable. There are dozens of islamic countries with death penalties for criticism of islam or government (and even Morocco and Turkey have prison sentences for that). CAIR is representing these countries' interests in the US, and they are arguing for free speech protection ... in the US. Not in the over 200 countries where muslims use state violence to control speech. In the US. They are making zero efforts to protect free speech anywhere else.
Obviously no sane person can reasonably consider these people to be either engaging in free speech or protecting free speech, can they?
CAIR is an American organization established to protect the rights of Muslims in America. The people who work at this organization are, presumably, Americans by and large. So why would an American civil rights group divert its limited resources to something squarely outside its scope, especially when such advocacy would require entirely different, non-overlapping expertise in Moroccan/Turkish/whatever law?
They have a funny way of showing it. Almost all those people will be immigrants, either themselves, or they'll at the very least have family living in muslim countries. Family who'll get arrested when they're protesting their governments or religion.
Yet they really care about free speech ... in America. THAT is where the free speech problem is according to them. Am I really the only one having trouble believing that this is a genuine attitude? Oh and they only defend their version of free speech, with limits on "hate speech" (but not Sami Hamdi's kind of hate speech of course), limits on criticism of religion, and limits on criticizing middle eastern governments. You know, THAT kind of free speech. CAIR, in the US, is really arguing for limits on free speech, "against hate speech", against "islamophobia", against criticism of middle eastern governments, you know limits on the very thing free speech was created for (ie. to protect all criticism of religion and governments, especially foreign ones, but all governments, including the US one)
And who do they invite? Sami Hamdi.
Please go read his twitter stream and tell me if you believe people who hire this guy have any problem with hate speech. Oh and maybe it's just one issue, so filter out the Gaza conflict, and ... nope still hate speech, mostly about the UK. Okay, filter out the UK too. He's defending people who went "on a Jew hunt" in the Netherlands ... This guy is not a moderate in any way shape or form.
Here's the link: https://x.com/SALHACHIMI
I'm sure he'll have made 5 new posts by the time this is read and they'll be another 5 posts inciting at the very least more hatred of Israeli. You may hate Trump, but let's be blunt here: this guy is thankfully powerless, but is easily a LOT worse than Trump.
If you take CAIR's attitude at face value, limits on free speech against hate speech, they'd help deport Sami Hamdi. But clearly this kind of hate speech they don't just want to allow, but protect and nurture.
What I mean is, CAIR really make themselves look really bad here. Really, really, really bad.
It sounds as if you are suggesting that if some country bans an activity x, then the US ought to ban f(x) for some function f.
.
> if someone is seen promoting Hamas and celebrating what happened on Dec 7th, their visa should be removed.
I, too, love taking someones papers and removing them from the country over their speech. I cheer on the army of government agents scanning social media for wrongthink so that we can rid the country of anti-Israel sentiment.
Subversion or otherwise working against the national interest of a country you are in as a non-citizen is generally a bad idea. Even with a rather generous freedom of speech in the culture.
Saying you hate $NATION and that you want it destroyed is definitely saying you don't want to be there and it's probably a good idea not to have you there.
No one is arguing about the practicality of speaking out under this regime or that it'd be unwise to do so in other countries as a guest.
What is being argued is that the government doing this goes against our values as Americans. It's interesting to observe the same side (right-wingers, libertarians) hold water for these actions while they were painting social media bans as censorship and a violation of their First Amendment rights.
Maybe you didn't do that, but your comment certainly reads like a "well, technically their visa can be revoked" argument which is true, but misses the spirit of the First Amendment.
EDIT: there might be legal issues too depending on the reason for revocation but I'm not a legal expert. Most things in our constitution apply to people and not just citizens so someone visiting the US also has free speech rights.
If someone came into my home, told me they hate me, my way of life, want me dead and starts setting fires in my living room, I'm going to kick them out. It's different if their name is on the lease.
It also depends on the severity of what someone is doing... there's a difference between speech and action. Saying you disagree with the administration, vs taking hostages and seizing part of a school are different things. Saying you would like to see amnesty for those who entered illegally is different than defrauding the govt, flaunting it on social media and trying to ram a car into a federal agent.
Commiting acts of violence, making threats, committing fraud, and ramming federal agents are already against the law and not protected speech. Saying that you think October 7th was good is certainly distasteful but not any of those things mentioned above.
> If someone came into my home, told me they hate me, my way of life, want me dead and starts setting fires in my living room
This analogy doesn't hold up because it's your house, of course you have the right to keep whatever company you like. Same for social media companies. You're not the government.
The government IS the people, IE it's citizens... immigrants are guests in the nation in the analogy, illegal immigrants broke in through the window in the middle of the night.
It's called an analogy. As a citizen, this nation IS my home.
And YOU are the law. Oh right, no you aren’t.
it's important to remember that having a right does not mean having the right to use that right wrong. you have to use your rights right, or the government will step in and right the wrong of you wrongly exercising rights with its right to wrong you. this way our rights are preserved equally: i have the right to say what I want, and you have that very same right (the right to say what i want). It's only fair. Hell, it's only right.
We have freedom of speech in the U.S., it's mostly that simple to start with. That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are. Coming into the US on a VISA comes with certain restrictions and understandings. Even as a permanent resident, your privileges i.e. access can be revoked.
This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.
On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.
As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
> That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are.
So, ah, not freedom of speech, then?
The first paragraph of your comment and the rest of what you’ve written in this thread are in conflict with each other.
I most align with libertarian ideals. However, I lived in China full time for 10 years and traveled to many different countries too. I can’t think of even one place I’ve visited where it would have been risk-free to openly criticize the current government leadership or their laws and culture, while I was a guest there.
That's one of the things that (previously, or hypothetically, take your pick) makes America great.
That's why this shift is so frustrating and disappointing to so many Americans. It would be like if the Vatican became protestant, or the UK suddenly stopped drinking tea.
Would you go into someone's home, tell them you hate them, want them dead and start setting fires in their living room then be surprised when they kick you out?
when did the state of free speech rights in majority muslim nations come up? this seems to be an entirely different debate that you'd like to have, but the rest of us are talking about the erosion of free speech in america by an openly authoritarian government that has been clear that incorrect opinions will be punished and correct opinions will be rewarded. this is about an american organization in america having their speech suppressed by america.
So? The USA isn't Morocco.
Like, just don't go to the US right now. What is wrong with people. If someone payed me money to go there right now I wouldn't do it.
I'm not defending the US actions here, but UK is even worse when it comes to criticizing Israel or free speech in general.
Some journalists's job is to risk their life going to dangerous places. Going to the US is not yet being a war reporter but it's more risky than before.
paid not payed
It was never fun to travel to the US, and the border agents have always been rude, unprofessional and arbitrary. But it seems like it has gotten much worse, and there is no way I'm traveling to the US these days.
Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers - gets the root cause. Without fixing that we are just playing wack a mole - people will still venture to the US since jobs exist and ICE is better than what ever crap they are coming from. Sure you may dissuade a few on the margins.
We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country. It’s just a farce.
Companies that employ undocumented workers at scale have significant political power and deporting them en-masse would shock many industries, so this won’t happen.
The recent ICE shenanigans (which don’t get me wrong - are awful and badly executed) are just performative bullshit to please the voter base. In fact I’d argue they are intentionally executed badly to attract media attention so they can all say they are being tough on immigrants.
The deeper purpose is to create another state-sanctioned security force that is highly associated and politically enabled to deal with ‘undesirables’ outside of normal legal process. Then include whoever is needed under the label ‘undesirable’ — see other comment about a journalist being detained and questioned
Yes - ICE is filling a similar role to what Wagner did in Russia and the brownshirts in Germany. A parallel structure which can be deployed anywhere against anyone. The concentration camp building industry is looking great.
You're telling yourself what you want to hear. I guarantee you these guys are dead serious, and they've recently gotten a huge flush of cash.
I agree they are deadly serious, but to the parent commenter’s point, why wander the streets grabbing random people when they could go straight to the employers? They would have far more success targeting farms, construction sites, restaurant kitchens, etc.
The answer is the business owners are their constituents. They cannot afford to piss them off. If they lose their support the wheels will fall off this farcical performance.
I grew up in Florida, and I remember the sugar plantation “raids” they used to stage. They were a complete dog and pony show. They would announce them in advance so the plantations could hide most of their undocumented workers. Then they would round up just enough people for the photo op to prove they were being “tough on immigration.”
This is the same thing but on a grander and more dangerous scale.
The employers are more often white and/or more politically aligned.
They are targeting those locations... but they need credible reporting of wrongdoing in order to do so. Insider reporting, anonymous tips, etc. They generally don't just randomly show up at an employer without initial reporting of a crime.
For the most part, they've been targeting visa overstays by those who have been charged with and/or convicted of other crimes in the US. Not significantly different than under Obama. It's only that the visibility has been turned up to 11 along with ramped up protests and state/city sanctioned resistance in some locations.
As to the ramp-up in scale.. that's what happens when you let 5x the amount of people legally allowed entry to come into a nation in a relatively short period of time illegally. over 90% of asylum claims are invalid and fraudulent... there is almost no legitimate reason for crossing into the country outside a recognized port of entry.
I say this as someone who feels that immigration should generally be tied to "do you have a source of income and a place to stay?" at its' core... combined with a multiple of minimum wage as an income baseline with hefty employer side taxes to go along with. Arguments against doing so are very similar in my mind to having slavery... it's not okay, not good for the nation. I have similar feelings that "free trade" should only occur when similar quality of life or safety measures are in place. I'm optimistically libertarian minded, but recognize reality.
They are showing up at workplaces and getting people.
Here's one that happened near me last month: https://cnycentral.com/news/local/breakdown-ice-detains-work... - and there are more happening in other places.
>why wander the streets grabbing random people when they could go straight to the employers? They would have far more success...
"The purpose of a system is what it does", not what it claims to do. Today it looks like that purpose includes mass surveillance of social media.
> why wander the streets grabbing random people when they could go straight to the employers?
Because immigration stuff isn't the primary purpose at this time. The primary purpose is to normalize a police state, to invoke feelings of fear in the general population and to build up a bigger infrastructure to do more authoritarian things.
Not quite. You had a bunch of workers at Tyson Chicken and Hormel Foods... At Tyson, underage and other undocumented workers were complaining about OSHA type stuff... next thing, there's a raid, 900 workers rounded up. Awkward moment as many of them spoke about how Tyson knew they were undocumented, and even handed over the written instructions provided to them on how to fill out paperwork and stay under the radar if they were.
"That is outside the scope of this investigation." Nothing ever happened.
At Hormel, complaining about all sorts of strange diseases and health conditions, possibly from inhaling aerosolized pig brain all day long? Oh, look, another raid.
"Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
Just a theory but it seems highly plausible in both these cases that the companies and ICE colluded... stage a big photo op, get rid of problematic undocumented workers and oh, hey, wouldn't you know, no plans to investigate the company?
This is also your friendly reminder that visa overstays are a misdemeanor, but for an employer, assisting or knowingly hiring undocumented workers is a felony. Tough on crime, indeed.
I'm guessing the companies can make things go away by donating to someone with (R) suffixed to their name. Ha, someone's a magician, they can turn a democracy to a banana republic very quickly.
Is it (R) or (M) for MAGA.
I used to joke "Hello to the NSA analyst reading this!" when talking about "sensitive stuff" in private messages, but I guess that needs to be updated to "Hello to the LLM!"
> I guarantee you these guys are dead serious
Just because the grunts are dead serious doesn't mean the initiative is dead serious.
Even then, serious doesn't equal competent. They are still trying to deport Abrego Garcia. Spending millions in legal fees and transport to deport a single man is not pratical in the slightest.
It's not about practically, it's about enforcing will and punishing enemies, especially self-created ones.
Yes. The cruelty is the point. But that's of course not how they message it to their party.
Turns out cruelty is very expensive to maintain, though. And we certainly do not have the economy to keep accommodating the narrative as real citizens starve and lose jobs. Something's going to break.
Listen I'm sure there are some who are in it only for the messaging.
But you're in denial if you really think certain driven individuals in all three branches of the us government aren't dead ass serious about taking this stuff to misanthropic ends.
We seem to be misaligned on what "serious" is in this context. Perhaps "inefficient" is a better way to phrase it. They are not concenred with effective immigration reform. But they are dead serious about being as bigoted as possible before consequences hit down down the line.
But their message isn't directly saying "spend 1 trillion dollars to be bigoted"
The grunts are surely dead serious, but the bosses? Nah. If they were they'd be sending execs to prison. Anything less is pointless if you truly want to solve the problem.
You're assuming that the thing they're "serious" about is ending illegal immigration.
The bosses are serious about making the US an authoritarian ethno state.
A MAGA state first and foremost. The hierarchy is "white MAGA > non-white MAGA > white silent > non-white silent > white anti-MAGA > non-white anti-MAGA". Will they eventually come for everyone but the first group? Very likely, but there's always a priority ordering. I'll leave it to the proper historians to decide how similar this is to the state they're using as their main inspiration.
The thing they are series about is racism, and having power to terrorize anyone they deem “undesirable”, a group which may one day include you
"truly solve the problem" ???
I believe Stephen Miller want a final solution to the immigration problem.
Oh yes and he's not acting alone. The merry band of misanthropes have all but written out their intentions explicitly. And it doesn't appear just to be immigrants they wish this stuff on.
People have been worrying about "ecofascism" well then why aren't you concerned about an administration whose policy is measles outbreaks for the misinformed of their constituency? Whose health minister is a rich environmental lawyer who just so happens to be a huge fan of letting disease rip?
They are serious now, but eventually Pournell’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play. Those who believe in the organization will take over from those who believe in the mission.
The theatre is also there for the immigrants (or whatever undesirable that's being targeted).
It has a chilling effect on what people say and do.
You'll notice the same effect in other states that have armed people who turn up unexpectedly to make people disappear.
Their reasoning for deploying the Texas National Guard to Chicago was because they claim a rebellion has started. They are consistently provoking citizens and lying about it. The courts have dismissed this due to the ridiculousness of it, but they continue to agitate. I don't think it's all for show, they're seeking a violent response so they can deploy the military.
Note that the courts have split on the deployment of national guard troops so the issue is destined for the Supreme Court.
ICE is not just performative bullshit. It's a display of authoritarian power and yet another branch of our government mobilized against the US people. As this article highlights, it's an excuse for surveillance. Of citizens, mind you.
It's also an enormous waste of money, which this admin loves to do. Billions to Israel, $40B to Argentina, $1T+ to bomb boats in the Gulf of Mexico, waste waste waste everywhere and send the bill to the average American, whose economic prospects haven't improved
I think it’s more to scare immigrants with pleasing the base being icing on the cake. Stephen Miller is genuinely anti-immigrant. And anecdotally, it is working. Ask any flight attendant on an international route.
They want people to stop coming here, and the threat of being sent to some torture camp in the third world won’t deter a Haitian (whose daily life already meets that description) but it will deter people from less atrocious locations.
> Stephen Miller is genuinely anti-immigrant.
I don't know much about him but aren't his grand parents Belarusians who came over to the US?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-m...
As an american, unless you're descendant from native americans, your ancestors are immigrants... I don't think it's worth pointing out. Most anti-immigration americans obviously aren't native americans.
pulling up the ladder behind you isn't a new concept
In my ancestor's defense, they didn't get much choice on emmigrating here. It'd be truly poetic if they tried to forcefully deport me because they can no longer use me as free labor on the fields.
As Vincent Gallo put it recently re: federal debt:
> The USA can tolerate one of these two things. A system of no welfare, no social services, no socialized medicine, food or housing with open borders. OR. No open boarders and highly limited, highly controlled, assimilating immigration policy. We cannot have both. When the USA had unlimited immigration over 100 years ago, we did not have Government supporting immigrants with welfare, medical services, housing, food etc.
I don't agree with Mr. Gallo here - I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.
> I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.
The policy in my red state is to spend public funds to treat unliked immigrants as harshly as possible, deny social welfare to citizens in need and prioritize gov resources for admin loyalists. At least it is now that courts are sufficiently captured.
What does “no open borders” mean here? I’ve seen this term used but I don’t quite get it. Surely it can’t mean completely closing the borders? I.e. literally nobody can enter the country, ever.
No tolerance for people trying to live in the country without going through the legal process.
Public policy discussions always get boiled down to some simple wording that isn't strictly accurate.
Legal immigration is also under heavy scrutiny with the "no open borders" folks. It is not as simple and law-abiding as you make it out to be.
Ive always been ashamed of all the genocidal massacres and forced relocations we did to the native americans but its not in any way accurate to compare establishing a colony to immigration; they came here to create a new society not to live amongst the existing civilizations. The way they did so at the expense of the civilizations already living here is abhorrent and shameful but its also in no way comparable to illegal immigration.
To the extent that it is comparable we would be absolutely justified in regulating immigration because the implication would be that the same thing that we did to the native americans is going to happen to us.
Its also not in any way reasonable to use the sins of the distant ancestor to delegitimize the nation's right to self-determination. Even if i accept your premise that my ancestors are comparable to immigrants i myself am not. If the argument is that the nation has no rights to control its own borders because that would constitute some sort of "generational hypocrisy" that would also mean we have an obligation to accommodate slavery and genocide because our ancestors committed and benefitted from both of those.
>As an american, unless you're descendant from native americans, your ancestors are immigrants.
How'd that work out for those native americans again? Maybe I'm a little reluctant to let things play out the way it did for them.
Japan now has Kimi Onoda as Minister in Charge of Foreign Nationals and Immigration, and she's an immigrant herself, but her stance on immigrants is pretty hardline.
These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.
Rather than necessarily hateful (but not excluding that), whats happening here seems like brazen discursive manipulation for gain of political power at expense of a minority of the population. Power in Japanese society is in large part built on calculating and self serving behaviour, without any real integral morals or values.. so politicians are seeing this stuff work overseas, and know they can get away with it too now.
Japan is truly impressive on taking an anti-immigration stance because they have numbers already that would be the dream of other countries pushing such perspectives. Off the top of my head there's 0.3% immigration.
It's truly saddening that such a stance can still work when it's likely the average citizen will not encounter an immigrant in their day to day life. a million immigrants is not threatening the jobs of 300m Japanese people.
Does the 0.3% figure include the massive US military presence? IDK if they count as "immigrants" under the strict definition of the term but most people would consider them immigrants and that might be where a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from. I would be very surprised if the total amount of immigrants in Japan when including foreign armed services and their family members is a mere 3/10 of a percent.
They get blamed for a lot of crime; idk if that's true or not but it probably is, in part because American culture has less respect for authority, in part because American culture has more respect for individual liberties, and in part because any time you have a large enclave of foreigners (regardless of where they come from or which host nation they're in) they always end up committing more crime than the native population. They also get blamed for driving up prices in the real-estate market (this is definitely true, the US Navy owns 20% of Okinawa).
Blaming "immigrants" instead of specifically blaming the US military is also very convenient for both the US and Japanese government because both governments are largely in-favor of continuing the status quo so it's not surprising that politicians would obfuscate the source of the problem by blaming immigrants as a whole.
That is mostly correct; immigrants account for about 3% of a total 123mil population. Your point does stand, but we are quite visible in Japan -- especially in Tokyo.
You are correct that we do not threaten jobs either. A large majority of the foreign population is working low/unskilled jobs. Generally, the native population is not wanting those jobs.
Those undesirable jobs can also be highly visible. Maybe the most frequent place Japanese notice visible minority immigrants is at convenience stores. So maybe it makes the population feel overrepresented. I see RWers post frequently about convenience store workers at least.
In Japan, the popular sentiment on immigration tends to be grouped together with tourists and temporary foreign workers as a single category: foreigners. This is perhaps understandable but unfortunate, because tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations. Bad experiences with tourists creates hostility towards immigrants, who are few and mostly do work hard to integrate and behave well.
> tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations
Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.
I'm sure the Sanseito party would be happy to add your proposal to their platform. I doubt the people who work in the tourism industry are voting for them anyway, and the people who benefit indirectly from tourism probably aren't aware enough of the dependency to care about it.
Please provide evidence for Kimi Onoda being "hateful". She is 100% culturally Japanese, and even speaks English with an accent. This is different from immigrants who don't know the basic cultural norms of a country and have integration issues.
She had American citizenship until recently. She's overcompensating by larping as a native when she isn't. She was intentionally picked to be a token foreigner to lead the anti-immigration policy of the new administration, just like the US's regime can say "You can't call us far right! That Stephen Miller guy's Jewish!" They love their token minorities since it's an easy counterpoint that they think proves they're angels with good intentions, and unfortunately, half of any given country will completely believe a government that uses minorities for that purpose.
So what's your point? Should minorities be excluded from government? Are individual members of minority groups not entitled to their own opinions? And are "far right" jews really that big of an anomaly?
There is definitely a phenomenon of people sometimes supporting candidates on the basis that their ethnicity won't be used to criticize their policies but they're addressing a complaint that would be made otherwise. It also denies the agency of minorities by requiring them to be monolithic entities wherein all members agree with whatever you think their opinions should be. Would you really be satisfied if the entire trump administration was white Christian males over the age of 40?
One of the criticisms of the pro-life side of the abortion debate has always been that men are over-represented in the US federal government yet they're able to regulate an issue in which they are not directly effected. I don't know if you agree with this specific criticism or not but a lot of people do and I don't think it's fair to then complain about "tokenism" when somebody like Amy Coney Barrett who is immune to this argument gets appointed.
My point was pretty clear.
Bad people aren't limited to one race or anything. But far end politicians love propping up a minority on TV because then they can have an excuse whenever they're compared to historically bad political movements.
You're the only one bringing up white Christian males here, which kind of proves my point. You seem to think that for some reason I care if a politician is white or Christian. Extremist Islamic parties love propping up Christian minorities on TV and saying they'll defend them (they won't). Right wing western parties really, really love propping up a Jewish party member because they can say "we're not Nazis!!! All Nazis hated Jews and we love them!!!" Because the average person really thinks nazism was really only about killing Jewish people, when the reality was they only got around to that after several years of other awful stuff.
The LDP is propping up their 100% foreign born, foreign citizenship politician so they can say "see? We can't be anti-foreigner because the lady controlling this is a foreigner." The optics are transparent and it's even what they're astroturfing their message on social media as. Japanese politics are all about image. They don't pick a foreigner who illegally held dual citizenship to head anti-foreigner policies by accident.
> and she's an immigrant herself
Not really. Her mother is Japanese and they moved back when she was one year old.
We had Dilan Yeşilgöz here in NL, minister of justice and leader of the liberal party VVD (right wing). She's an immigrant, born in Ankara, of Kurdish ancestry. She lied about immigrant subsequent travelers (which she is herself!) being a huge issue, and the government fell because of this issue. Turns out it is 400 people per year. I don't know what it is. Self-hate? Rules for thee, not for me?
Hey now, we don't need no fancy logic 'round here. /s
normalize adversarial face paint, make up, and apparel.
Silver linings…
Only works until that's no longer legal, see face coverage laws in various countries.
I’ve seen Trumps buddy’s (the inhuman lawnmower) big company appear on jobs.now posting for general midlevel dev positions. These people are liars and it’s so painfully obvious.
I’ve seen more people realize this since his Trump started beefing with Massie, but they still glaze him so hard as to not offend, that it’s basically meaningless.
Not to forget they can use the performative bullshit to lay grounds for a paramilitary GeStaPo. ICE as it is already attracts all the wrong character types.
That performance may backfire, since some of the big supporters are agriculture businesses that rely on illegal immigrants to survive. Mass deportations of the type ICE seems to want will put a lot of those businesses out of business. I'm sure someone up in Washington thinks that poor Americans will step in to fill the gaps, but when it's been tried before those assumptions failed, badly.
I've seen some conspiracy theories that RFK, Jr, et al, want to start labor camps for autistic kids and just about anyone else his bunch can get tagged as defective or deficient or whatever, but I don't think that's going to work out like someone hopes it will.
The plan is more and more exploitable temporary migrant workers evidently.[1][2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251008104110/https://prospect....
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdWrHb8b-c0
>when it's been tried before those assumptions failed, badly.
Turns out Americans don't want to move out to rural areas to be paid minimum wage to do hard farm labor. Who knew?
That's the only real upside to this gig economy. Their competition isn't just flipping burgers, but anyone who has a car that can sign up to an app to make some quick cash.
Sub-minimum wage, agricultural work is exempt from minimum wage. It makes me so mad.
I think you'll find that ICE goes to cities, not to the tiny farm towns where most of the field workers stay at. Farmers don't want ICE screwing up harvests, and the admin wants a more visual approach that comes with focusing on cities like LA and Chicago, not places like Seville CA.
Nothing will backfire.
A Reuters poll on the White House demolitions had a 63% approval for one question and a 40% approval rating for another question - from Republican voters.
As long as there exists a content economy on the right that does’t have to pay their dues to reality, you will not stop a political machine which is based upon fantasy.
The only thing that will cut through the noise is a recession, because that cannot be spun. Even then - that would just be a speed bump; eventually the recession will pass.
Short term pain for long term gain. Locker room economics.
Which companies employ undocumented workers at scale?
Your comment is not considering the possibility of ICE being used as a secret police force under the guise of enforcing immigration. There are strong indicators of this being the case.
It's not even a question, that is objectively and observably what is happening, and they even admit it.
Everyone is a conspiracy theorist now.
ICE is just filling the role of the bureau of corrections under Trump1.
It was a bit weird for corrections to be arresting people in DC but a lot less weird for ICE to do it.
>> a secret police force under the guise of enforcing immigration.
Isn't that role of ICE? To police and enforce immigration? Doesn't ICE stand for "Immigration & Customs Enforcement"?
What am I missing here?
There is no need for a "secret police" when that is the intended, declared and funded function of their organization.
The point is that ICE has been given a mandate to ignore any notion of due process in their handling of immigrants, very visibly and officially. This allows them to deport anyone they want, including American citizens who get on the bad side of the regime, by just claiming that the person is an illegal immigrant and they don't have time for looking at silly papers like a birth certificate.
So ICE, is in fact being shaped into a secret police that can be used to punish anyone speaking against the regime, under the guise of being a brutal anti-immigration force.
Not to pull the Godwin lever, but the German SS went from being security guards to overseeing the entire national police force to running gas chambers in about 10-15 years. The function of an organization can change over time. The purpose of a system is what it does.
When a domestic law enforcement agency is spending 600% more year-over-year on weapons to point at people in frog costumes it's reasonable to wonder if that may reflect a de facto change in that organization.
Are you not an American? (Giving you the benefit of the doubt here)
In America, immigration enforcement is not a criminal issue but a civil issue. So the proper (as in, according to the laws and norms of the last many decades) and appropriate channels through which the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved is the courts. The current usage of ICE as a gestapo is literally illegal (it deprives "suspects" of due process and civil/human rights), in violation of Geneva conventions, and so on.
Furthermore even if we accept the blatantly immoral and illegal idea that federal agents should be able to break and enter into homes and kidnap, traumatize, and traffic people without the slightest pretense of legal justfiability (warrants etc), the fact is that they are not even attempting to choose people by any discernable metric other than their skin color. So it is objectively not about the enforcement of the law, it is about stochastic terrorism and ethnic cleansing, as that is the only thing their actions consistently demonstrate.
Can you explain more how you reached the conclusion that the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved in courts? Parking is not a criminal issue, does it also mean that I need a court order to tow a car blocking my driveway? Building code is not a criminal issue, does it mean I need a court order to install a power outlet? What about car licensing, do you go to court for new tags or to DMV/whatever is your state agency for that? Insurance? Any regulation, really?
It's exactly because this is not a criminal issue, the due process in immigration does not require court hearing, bails etc. The immigration court is not an Article 3 court, it could as well be named "immigration adjudication department" because it's an Executive office. If you believe you had been wronged in the immigration process then you can try to sue the government for the damages in an actual civil court, but the law does not require the government to sue you in order to enforce the immigration laws.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying; ICE is an already-established organization meant for enforcing immigration law, but it's entirely possible that ICE is being/will be used as a secret police force to attack or dissuade political dissidents of the American right wing while claiming they are only enforcing immigration laws. Many American citizens have already been arrested and even deported by ICE, and the FBI has already been used to intimidate American citizens regarding their political speech. ICE is not supposed to be a secret police force, but it's certainly starting to become one.
You're misreading the sentence: ICE is meant to be "enforcing immigration" but is actually "a secret police force" _disguising_ as immigration police.
"A secret police force" there means "a direct enforcement tool for whatever the oligarchy wants to do, legal or not".
The issue there is a lot of stolen identities and use of falsified or otherwise fake paperwork to obtain such employment. Then, you get people in positions to aid others to come into that organization illegally. It may not be direct leadership within a company, but I do think plenty of them turn a blind eye to it.
This is where reporting and raid events from ICE come into play. That said, I'd like to see plenty of organizations actually have their leadership held accountable. The East Palestine, Ohio train derailment for example should have seen corporate executives and board members find their personal finances at risk because of the damage caused for example. The US has a very poor history of ever holding company executives accountable in general. "Too big to fail."
POSIWID
instead of assuming we want to stop illegal immigration and then asking why we don't do the obvious thing that would accomplish that goal (eliminating the incentive to hire illegally by punishing companies that do it such that it's not worth it on the balance sheet), look at what the situation actually is and ask yourself why people would want that. The situation right now is that there's a near-endless supply of labor that is 100% exempt from any and all labor protections by dint of if they complain the boss can just call immigration, who will disappear the laborers but not punish the company in any way. The occasional disruption due to unanticipated ice intervention is well worth the cost of being able to pay your laborers sub-minimum wage and not being responsible for workplace injuries or human rights violations.
no kidding. But what assuages white fragility more? This is what they voted for.
Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants. So private business men can profit. That's really it. It's not about fixing immigration.
>> Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants.
How does this make sense when cities and states have openly declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants?
How does this work when so many of the prisons are already overflowing? So much so, judges and prosecutors are not capable of sending more people to prisons and instead use diversion programs, down charging, or dismissing more serious crimes to charge these people with lesser crimes specifically in order to avoid jail time? What about states like Minnesota that continually deviate from sentencing guidelines and allow people convicted of crimes to spend the majority of their sentence out of prison? Minnesota isn't the only state that does this either, its just in the top five who do this.
The evidence would overwhelming appear to directly contradict this theory.
You're ignoring some pretty crucial evidence about this administration, which is that:
A) They're building more prisons specifically to fill with immigrants
B) Sentencing trends don't really affect immigrants who are denied due process.
>> A) They're building more prisons specifically to fill with immigrants
Correction: They're building more prisons specifically to fill with ILLEGAL immigrants. The vast majority of whom have committed crimes while here.
If you have a problem with criminals being put in jail then you have a much bigger problem with your moral compass.
Dear Leader has already been talking about instituting some kind of program to formally permit cheap imported labor in "critical" industries like farming, construction, and landscaping. And why would the regime ever want to fix any root causes? Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy applies to autocracies as well. The Republican party has been drumming up support on this bogeyman for decades. Remember when there was a bipartisan immigration bill up for vote before the election and Tramp insisted that it be killed? That's the fundamental dynamic right there - their cultists crave human suffering, not effective policy.
> Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers
How do you imagine such an enforcement effort would proceed? Paint me a picture please. Illustrate a hypothetical example, just one company. What would really happen is that you'd check these businesses, and all the paperwork's in order. Social security numbers for everyone (even if those aren't their own). Without probable cause though, wouldn't even get that far, would they? They'd need that for the search warrants... not that judges are very agreeable to signing those, not when they tend to help illegals flee out the back door of the courthouse so that ICE won't wait at the front door grab and deport them.
>We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country.
Sometimes all you can do is treat the symptoms.
Use the existing social security verification system, 5x fines median salary per year of suspected employment. Assume the worker has only worked for one employer for their entire time in the US or since 18 if there is no other verifiable evidence of employment.
It would fix the "problem" of all American workers who fear their job can be taken away by someone who doesn't speak the language, possibly has little education, because a large company thinks it's more profitable to hire them illegally. Nobody actually cares if someone hires their cousin at the family owned restaurant that sends money back home to his family.
But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuses and willing to work below minimum wage. The farmers in Iowa want the cruelty in Chicago. There was a tiny bit of deportation raids in red states at the beginning because of racism, but that was shut down quick.
>Use the existing social security verification system, 5x fines median salary per year of suspected employment.
You explain how to punish them, not how to determine that they deserve punishment. This fixes absolutely nothing. "Social security" won't find anything, because everyone working for those businesses has a social security number (even if it's not their own). To determine those are fake or misused, the government would have to get access to the deep HR paperwork, which would require search warrants and subpoenas, in other words, it would require "probable cause". That isn't going to happen.
>But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuse
Yeh, probably. But nothing you've described could help to change that circumstance.
>You explain how to punish them, not how to determine that they deserve punishment. This fixes absolutely nothing. "Social security" won't find anything, because everyone working for those businesses has a social security number (even if it's not their own). To determine those are fake or misused, the government would have to get access to the deep HR paperwork, which would require search warrants and subpoenas, in other words, it would require "probable cause". That isn't going to happen.
E-verify has existed for more than a decade. Social security card + your name on another form of official identification like a license or passport. It comes back whether they are valid and match. Its literally a plot point in Superstore. You're describing a problem that only exist when the employer willingly bypasses the system, like in Superstore.
If the DMV has issued a driver's license with the fake name thats the problem of another agency and someone there has committed a fireable offense or crime since there has been large pushes across the country since the 9/11 hijackers to lock that down.
Are we really deporting people or just putting them to work in labor camps as has been reported.
I can't understand it. It was a huge story that hyundais entire workforce of 500 were illegals, but i have heard nothing about hyundai facing any consequences for blantantly disregarding the law. That also goes for US companies to be clear, but that was jst the first case that opened my eyes.
Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false. Everyone who got deported is allowed to return under the same visas they were on before. They were not allowed to stay without being ejected first because it would have made the current admin and the frozen water gang look really bad at a time where they're trying to establish a reputation as a fair and just law enforcement agency carrying out the mandate of the will of the people. If anything, the shot callers at the frozen water gang should have faced consequences but they didn't and they won't.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-will-allow-south-kor...
It's not "completely false."
> South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visas or a visa waiver program called the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, to send workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.
It sounds to me like they had relied on a grey area. The most obvious conclusion is that pressure from the top down in ICE caused their agents to "hunt around" and look for "big arrests." When political pressure from South Korea mounted they had to reverse themselves.
Short-term visas might be entirely appropriate for someone who's going to be working in the country for a short time to set something up. I've worked under one myself (You usually need to justify why someone already in the country couldn't do it, but "I designed the thing and literally no-one in your country has seen one before" tends to work). visa-waiver programs like the ESTA generally are not: they're mainly for tourism, conferences, and business/sales meetings, and the latter can get a little blurry depending on how much you are demoing something, but if you're doing actual work and you're being paid directly or indirectly by a US company you're probably not covered (which surprises a lot of people, and there's often stories of people getting kicked out of the country for relatively small pieces of 'work').
Either way, if these were actually workers in the country temporarily and in good faith to set up manufacturing, then it would neither seem to be a particularly good crackdown on illegal immigration nor encouraging manufacturing to be set up in the US.
It's the USA (collectively) that's in the wrong here. You can't both beg a Korean company to build and start up a battery factory in your country and not provide any mechanism for the people needed to make that happen to be present in your country.
>> Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false.
The entire article you posted just referenced short term visas after the raid and said nothing other than the nationals who were arrested were flown home. The article spent less than a sentence with what OP posted:
The announcement came weeks after South Korea flew home more than 300 of its nationals who had been detained in a massive immigration raid at a battery factory being built on Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant campus near Savannah, Georgia.
From September when the raid happened:
"This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses," Steve Schrank, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlanta, said at a news conference on Friday.
"This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews gathered documents and presented that evidence... in order to obtain a judicial search warrant," Schrank added.
He said it was "the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations".
"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."
Some 475 people who were in the country illegally or working unlawfully were detained in the operation, immigration officials said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xe5d6103o
>> frozen water gang
>> the current admin and the frozen water gang
Why do you have a problem using the term ICE??
From the article:
>The statement was consistent with earlier remarks by South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, who, after traveling to Washington to negotiate the workers’ release, said that U.S. officials had agreed to allow them to return later to complete their work.
You dont suddenly allow to return someone who was justifiably deported, regardless of what the agent in charge said in the immediate aftermath at a press conference.
those weren't undocumented workers
Really impressive how quickly Republicans have co-signed the vaporization of civil and state rights that were once a tenant of their party's identity.
“States’ rights” was by and large an excuse for states to marginalize and oppress their minorities without interference from the Federal Government. (The Federal Government is usually the last line of defense a minority has against the state’s oppression.)
There’s a book that makes an incredibly compelling case called Freedom’s Dominion, highly recommended.
Now when I hear “states’ rights” I complete the thought with, “…to do bad things to people we don’t really like”
You might be overthinking it. Republicans support "states rights" only for red states and when they don't have control of all three branches of the federal government.
Sure… but your point could neatly support my hypothesis, so I’m not sure I understand the distinction.
Republicans don’t need to crow about states’ rights right now because they have an even bigger stick with which to oppress minorities.
For the GOP states rights are just "when we say so" any other states rights are not allowed.
It was never about state rights. It’s always been about power and control. Trump is the true face of the Republican party that’s finally come out. He’s not implementing the policies they want, but they wanted someone like him.
The ultimate goal of Christian nationalists (a large part of the Republican Party) is to turn the United States into a single-party theocracy and implement their version of Sharira law. They probably don’t fully realize this is what they’re doing.
A bit of history: "States' Rights" advocates specifically were advocating "States' rights to enforce chattel slavery". The Fugitive Slave Act is a wild usurpation of States' Rights, but the slavers (who have become the modern Repulican party) didn't mind.
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
What is the quote from?
Jean-Paul Sartre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew
Both parties are globalist TBH. I used to vote Repub but got out 15 years ago, disillusioned by the unapologetic hypocrisy. Would love to see a God-fearing minarchist or libertarian succeed but I know that’s not realistic.
Wait. Aren't the libertarians pretty much for global free trade and unlimited immigration? I'm sensing some cognitive dissonance here.
I believe we have different definitions of “globalist.” The dictionary says:
glob·al·ist /ˈɡlōbəlist/ noun 1.) a person who advocates the administering or planning of a political strategy, economic system, etc. on a global rather than a national basis.
“[Right-libertarian populists] are unapologetically anti-globalist while at the same championing free trade and a realist foreign policy.”[1]
Both parties have furthered the advancement of global rule, one world government, top-down planning. In different ways, to be sure. Repubs for example voted in JD Vance, a man who was led by Peter Thiel, who as you know is advancing the surveillance state with Palantir. Peter made him who he is, and certainly has his ear. And Dems marched in lock-step with other globalists around the world in 2021-2024.
Global free trade, where individuals and not politicians decide who to trade with, as I understand it, is the _opposite_ of the dictionary’s definition of globalism. It is the smaller government that Republicans ostensibly stand for and then don’t provide.
Get government out of the way and let people be people.
[1] https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/right-libertarian...
“States rights” has always been a dog whistle for slavery and Jim Crow, with no connection to the ideal of Liberty that the words imply. It means “my right to deprive others of their rights.”
nit: tenet
The issue is with taking anything they say at face value. They don't believe in anything, except what is convenient in the moment and would grant them more power and wealth. Now that they own the White House, Congress and SCOTUS, they are very much federalists and will seek to impose their views on the entire country. Simple, really.
They brandish the "don't tread on me flag" while cheering on Trump sending the national guard to blue cities (when the most violent cities in America are all red). They are supposedly against handouts, but watch Trump bail out the farmers and none of MAGA have anything to say about it. Because a majority of farmers vote red.
They wouldn't have any issue with actual socialism, as long as it only benefitted republican voters.
Republicans were always the party of big government.
It’s a cult. It won’t go away until its leader does.
Who is that leader, though? Is it Trump, Miller or Thiel?
Now is a transition period - the goal of the cult is to survive with a new leader. After his death, you will hear things like "must not let Trump down" and "We must not fail Trump" and so on. "Only person X can achieve Trumps original vision."
What are you actually saying here?
That Trump is a cult leader and his followers are the cult followers? And that the following won't go away if the leader doesn't go?
Try to actually listen to what Republicans are saying, and it won't be surprising anymore.
Or ignore everything they say and watch what they do.
Isn’t the problem that Trump is now doing what he promised? He campaigned on tariffs and deportations (and a decade ago, building a White House ballroom).
when what republicans say align with what they do, I might pay more attention to what they say. so far listening to any of these republicans talk is like listening to an abusive gaslighter on ketamine.
Do they ever make a coherent and consistent argument?
There will be a court case where some bit of evidence is going to be similar to:
Ice Agents: "Is <name> here illegally?" AI prompt: "you're absolutely right!"
Not sure why they'd bother, since we're in the "random kidnappings are the MO" territory already, regardless of the citizenship status.
This. It’s more about using AI to do facial recognition or similar things to detect individuals en masse and flag them for the gulag.
If only. If ICE arrests and deports someone without due process, there is no court case.
But the AI vote will be used as a fig leaf so they don't even have to pretend to mete out justice. "AI said it, it must be true" will soon become a mantra (even though most people here know how wrong it can be and how often it actually is).
I hear that lazy LEOs now use AI to write police reports. Noice. And the AI can trivially show up for hearings.
Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
"Due process" isn't what you think it is. The due process for someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant is checking to see whether they are an illegal immigrant, and then sending them home. That's the only process "due".
In the world we could assess this completely and with perfect accuracy, you're spot on that that'd be all that we need!
In the current world, though, due process exists because there are sometimes messy and fuzzy details that need evaluation. For instance, the date of an immigration court hearing might be delayed, or an applicant may be granted an extension. An immigrant may have received incorrect information and missed the proper steps through no fault of their own. If immigration enforcement skips due process but is working on even slightly outdated information, we're trashing the rights of people who may be following the process properly.
In the cases where an immigrant is clearly here illegally and there are no extenuating circumstances, deportation is already the thing that the current due-process does.
> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
Criminal court is only one type of use-case for the legal system, there are loads of other ones. The phrase "Civil court" refers to scenarios where no one has committed a crime and no one is accused of a crime, and these represent the majority of court cases.
> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?
So if the executive decides they suspect you are an illegal alien, detains you, claims to have checked you are an illegal alien, and then expels you to some foreign country you have no right to challenge this at any point in the process?
Because if that’s what you think “due process” means, than the government never has any need for criminal process at all, it just needs to decide it suspects people of being illegal aliens instead of criminals, then it can imprison them indefinitely while it “checks” and expel them whenever it decides it tires or imprisoning them (perhaps to someplace it knows they will be killed or deprived of then nevessities of life), all without ever defending any of those acts as justified in court.
When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, they are present but allegedly violating immigration _laws_.
That is to say, such a person has been accused of a crime.
Due process in the constitution guarantees that individuals (including non-citizens facing deportation) have the opportunity to defend themselves in court against such accusations.
While the importance of due process cannot be overstated, immigration violations are not generally crimes outside of a few specific areas. Removal proceedings are frequently not tied to any particularly crime, but merely unlawful presence, which is not a crime in its own right.
>When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, t
When someone is allegedly a murderer, or a thief, or a vandal, or whatever... a trial is needed to determine guilt or innocence.
But when they arrest someone for those things, the preliminary process allows police to determine someone's identity. Their address, things of that nature. Their basic information. Basic information is all that is needed to determine whether or not someone is a citizen. There is no trial needed to determine citizenship.
>Due process in the constitution guarantees that individuals (including non-citizens facing deportation) have the opportunity to defend themselves in court
No, you attended public school and someone had you memorize "due process" in 3rd grade and you never were taught what it meant. It does not guarantee "a defense in court", because in this case there is no crime to defend against. No one's wanting to send them to prison. In the simplest terms, due process is the idea that the government must have a process for a particular legal proceeding, and that if someone must undergo that proceeding they get the same process everyone else does. If rich people were getting to skip out of the proceeding, or get a shortened one, but you had to go through the entire thing... it'd be a due process violation. Or alternatively if you wanted that proceeding and they were getting to skip it (say you had a full 30 day period to file, but they canceled your filing that same day) you'd have a due process violation.
> No, you attended public school and someone had you memorize "due process" in 3rd grade and you never were taught what it meant.
It seems like at your school they didn't mention habeas corpus or Magna Carta? Maybe it sounded too scary and foreign?
While you are correct in stating that an article III court generally is not required, the due process for immigrants, even those not present legally, is more complicated than just "check paperwork for legal status, act immediately". While in some cases expedited removal bypass the normal process, if a deportation is contested, due process still generally entails access to a hearing before an immigration judge (article II judge).
What do you think the process to check whether someone is an illegal immigrant is? It needs to leave a paper trail, and provide someone the opportunity to prove that they're a citizen or here legally.
Maybe a court case?
That doesn't work in all cases. ESTA visa for example you give up the rights to due process if you overstay on that visa as part of the agreement to the visa.
Doesn't justify anything that ICE are currently doing though.
And what if someone claims you overstayed the visa, but you didn't? You still need a legal process to defend yourself from arbitrary accusations. Not having a process is not just morally wrong, it is also simply non-functional.
> And what if someone claims you overstayed the visa, but you didn't?
It's just a simple matter of checking the ESTA details online, and your entry stamp in your passport.
The ESTA visa states you waive your rights to a judge if you overstay.
Like I said, I am not condoning what ICE is doing.
Most of the people the admin wants to remove are not eligible for ESTA in the first place.
Ironically the same argument applies
I'm curious for your opinion on SEC v Jarkesy.
This is risible. "Sending them home" requires arrest and detention. Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the US Constitution grants people the right to contest their detention in court. So far, the administration hasn't formally suspended habeas corpus, despite what Stephen Miller may assert on TV.
They'd quickly cancel the contract with any supplier that doesn't give them the carte blanche and obfuscation of responsibility they want.
Just like other ML and big data LEO projects in the past, assume the use of AI is to greenlight what they already want to do and would like a fig leaf of justification for from a computer.
So you say that I can burn a bit of ICE's GPUs by typing words suggesting I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers
Right?
https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/spook/
Oh, ECHELON. Haven't heard this term for a while.
It’s the tax you paid, it’s just being allocated more towards GPUs.
You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
> You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
Tariffs on goods coming into the US are paid by US residents. (Just had to pay customs to clear a shipment from the UK - I had to pay the tariffs, not the seller.)
Government and law enforcement, not only in the USA, increasingly use AI to control, suppress and punish the people. In this regard AI is not a liberating invention but a harming one, like weapons. This might explain why tech CEOs became part of the military lately.
Many people don’t understand that government power MUST be limited in a democracy if you wish to slow the spread of tyranny.
Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.
As much as a like to fantasize how a Cincinnatus-esque figure could emerge to fix things, the unfortunate truth is that many times the system needs to be rebuilt to secure balance again. It needs to be equal measure of the government protecting the civilian population as well the citizens protecting themselves from the government to be a successful democracy.
And if the particular governmental system that is the US federal government was in fact destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, why would the set of people who are currently legal citizens, legal permanent residents, and legal immigrants remain the same as is today under the laws established by that system? If the US Constitution is moot because there's been a successful military uprising against the US federal government, and people are sitting down to write a new constitution that will actually establish the rules of governance for (some subset of?) the land area of the current United States of America, why would that new constitution have the same rules governing illegal immigration enforcement as the current one? Before citizens can protect themselves from the government to be a successful democracy, they have to decide who is in fact a citizen who can legitimately vote in that democracy.
I think this assumes a scenario where the past ceases to exist. However democratization and transitions back to democracy are built upon on taking the past and building it better. Brazil and Chile did not christine a state of no citizens when they returned to democratic forms of government.
I don't see any benefit to not determining everyone who is in an area at a specific time a citizen or eligible for citizenship.
Can't anyone use AI to surveil social media, even ordinary citizens? It seems like it would be easy to surveil ICE, the police, immigrants, all politicians, the military, businesses, government, individuals, groups, anyone and anything anyone has an interest in. Is the future everyone surveilling everyone else? There used to be web services that let you set up "standing queries" for anything you were interested in. In a sense chatbots already contain a historical record of the internet in compressed format and allow anyone to do historical queries on anything, limited only to what has been accessible on the internet. "Googling someone" is becoming "ChatGPTing someone". People felt Googling someone was somewhat rude and parents warned their children to limit what they posted in case future employers looked them up. Same for anyone employed, they are learning to be careful what they post in case their employers see it. Seems like free speech is being suppressed because it can be used against you by various people and groups already. This may help explain why the web has become less interesting and anonymous posting is ubiquitous.
There should be a bounty pool for the person who can get ICE to do the most stupid, embarrassing thing based on "social media" chaff.
>There should be a bounty pool for the person who can get ICE to do the most stupid, embarrassing thing based on "social media" chaff.
[FLAG] 'HIZONNER' CAT3-SDA-HN: DISSIDENT DEPORTATION ALERT
Do they mean immigrants or illegal immigrants? Do they mean citizens, permanent residents, or some other status?
I'm very anti-surveillance, this shouldn't be allowed, but I feel like a lot of articles are being disingenuous by means of this omission. Is this a problem that only affects immigrants? It doesn't seem that way to me, but by presenting it that way they knowingly divide people and thus make it less likely that a group will prevent or reverse this action. These are the types of articles I'd write if I wanted this issue to drop off the radar of a large portion of the voting population.
Many of the news-reporting institutions who report negative things about US government enforcement of immigration law have an ideological problem with the existence of laws restricting immigration to first-world countries like the US; and one of the ways this manifests itself is by referring to people who are negatively affected by US government enforcement of immigration law as "immigrants", and deliberately avoiding specifying whether those people are illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, permanent residents, etc.
Now we begin to see the true reason for all the AI push.
>You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
– George Orwell, 1984
they can see with our wifi now so that darkness part is accounted for
:(
Let the Ethernet Revolution begin!
Let me play a devil's advocate. Are you (and Orwell) unhappy that people breaking the law get punished? Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you? It doesn't matter if you break the law in the darkness or not.
This went _just great_ in East Germany, which was the last place to seriously try this approach (fortunately the Stasi didn't have modern surveillance tech, but they did quite enough damage with what they had).
The whole point of 1984 is to show how perfect surveillance allows the perfect enforcement of unjust laws, allowing complete control of Big Brother over every aspect of the lives of the country's citizens. The same cameras that can be used to fine you for illegally crossing the street can be used to find and punish you for illegally speaking out against the regime.
This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.
1984 doesn't have one "point" it is trying to show, your point is the most recent point to get popularized after the Snowden leaks.
For instance 1984 also is very clear about how this system is engineered for the survival of the inner party, effectively immortal.
> Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you?
It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.
There are no cars in sight.
Intention of the law > letter of the law.
Lord no.
There's plenty of laws that aren't fit for purpose and are immoral, so any kind of automatic system that enforces punishments without any oversight (e.g. by jury) is going to lead to abuse. (It used to be illegal to help an escaping slave, so just imagine if a system determined that you didn't do enough to help with re-capturing a slave and sent you into slavery as punishment)
No, never in human society have laws been perfectly enforceable. Laws, and society, are shaped by that fact.
The concept of perfectly, uniformly and constantly emotion every law in the books is completely absurd. We need to figure out how to deal with that.
s/emotion/enforcing/
Why would the law have any necessary relation to what is right?
> Let me play a devil's advocate.
No. Either stand by your opinion or don't waste our time on it.
Shhhhh...they're listening
How quickly will people make fake AI accounts for real people?
Don't all agencies pretty much do social media surveillance in some way?
Why is it surprising if another law enforcement agency like ICE uses it?
Well, other agencies have mostly used things like this to collect evidence against real crimes. ICE is using it to enforce Orwellian "thought crimes" where they are revoking visas and green cards, and then often just minutes or hours later violently kidnapping people for their political views. Over 6,000 USA college students so far have had their visas revoked and been targeted by ICE officers, for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of association.
ICE is not law enforcement.
They are thugs that see themselves as above the law.
"United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency under the supervision of the United States Department of Homeland Security." Since 2002.
Sure, that's what they call themselves.
And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy :)
>Why is it surprising if another law enforcement agency like ICE uses it?
I think the nuance is how they'll use the information: less random pick-ups (and associated crowds), versus more targetted swoops.
Agencies with checks and balances maybe. But this is extra-legal in so many ways.
It is not surprising nor particularly novel. But consider the people upvoting this are supporting a sensationalistic and dishonest Jacobin article right now. Of course it doesn't make sense.
.. . in the la-and of the freeee, and the ho-ome of the brave!
Go nuts, ICE. I haven't been on social media in over a decade.
Feel free to get your undies in a bundle over my "I'm on a MF-in' boat" FourSquare check-in.
Rule #1 of staying off the radar: Don't deliberately put yourself on the radar.
I’m a little surprised at the level of interest in ICE these days. They’ve been around for a while now, and have been used by past presidents in similar ways.
Barack Obama was called out by the ACLU for his use of ICE. He was called a monster.
If people condemn Trump and Obama both, then I respect their thinking. But if they applaud Obama and condemn Trump, I don’t believe they are showing integrity.
> I’m a little surprised at the level of interest in ICE these days
Oh gee, I wonder why? Could it be the deportation of international students and visa holders for their protest against Israel? Maybe the reckless and abhorrent behavior they've shown in blue city neighborhoods and protests (did you see the reporter in Chicago get arrested by ICE with them peeling away afterwards taking off someone's bumper... or the time they tear gassed everyone including Chicago police at a protest before leaving shortly after?)
Or maybe sending people to a labor camp in El Salvador?
> Barack Obama was called out by the ACLU for his use of ICE. He was called a monster.
You're making a point that Obama used them "in similar ways" but provide no actual substance on the "how" part. Just a useless bothsides-ism that is holding water for MAGA/authoritarian policies.
> I don’t believe they are showing integrity.
If all someone does is bring up Obama and fail to call out Trump on civil rights abuses, I don't believe they have integrity.
> $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance
Yeah, that would just about cover the cost of a pizza party in the AI world. You also can look at "Zignal Labs". The website looks like 100% snakeoil.
I have no doubt that ICE would love to have some AI-based software to detect illegal immigrants, but I doubt it's more effective than just regular datamining.
It doesn't need to be effective, it needs to be a computerized excuse to go after more people. Whenever computers are used to target people, the output is always given far too much weight. Recently we had guns drawn on a child because a computer vision algorithm classified his doritos as a gun with a low confidence score, with explicit advice to only investigate further and not assume correctness. But that child still had multiple guns trained on them.
Take that, apply it to here, and it's clear that effectiveness would actually be counterproductive.
So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US. Mass surveillance and enforcement technology is dismal to think about, though NSA and google have been doing it for years. I'm watching from my perspective in the UK where there is growing fury over the gross incompetence, negligence and mishandling of a mass immigration crisis which is so stupid it beggars belief. The various law enforcement agencies in the us don't cooperate that closely, so there's less scope for this to be abused against american citizens unlike in the UK.
A perceived mass immigration crisis, which has little to do with reality and much more to do with gas bags stoking fear and spreading nonsense.
Here's reality: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
Are the lives of immigrants better? Are we importing citizens or slaves? Why are we not interested in improving conditions in their home country? Shouldn't we focus on that first?
Thanks for that. Here's a more up to date link https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-....
I reject that. There is a steadily worsening crisis, even the current labour government have acknowledged that pledging to take lots of action against it, both now and during the election campaign. Specifically small boat crossings, of which more then 43,000 have already arrived this year. There is not a single politician in this country who doesn't admit that there is a serious problem.
Don’t you have a coast guard?
This is a skill issue.
Different populists have different ideal numbers for how many people they want to purge. Some want 10 million, some want 20-50 million going decades back and reversing whatever laws allowed the "wrong kind" of even legal immigrants to come here in the first place.
I think more governments around the world are catching on to the idea that your majority population can excuse a large amount of economic mismanagement and bad geopolitical strategy if you blame foreigners who arrived after your decline started.
If a satisfactory amount of foreigners are removed, the technology will still be there and the defense contractors will still need contracts. If there are no viable foreign adversaries at that point, then another domestic target will be needed.
Is mass immigration really a crisis? Like people are upset here in the US too but I don't even know why. There's a lot of immigrants in my state but they're not upsetting me.
> Is mass immigration really a crisis?
Not even a little bit. No one is taking jobs away from citizens or legal immigrants (locals don't want those jobs, either at all, or at the wages offered), rampant "migrant crime" is a myth created and perpetuated by the right (immigrants commit crime at lower rates than citizens), and to top it off, the American economy depends on many of these migrant workers in order to function (often in exploitative ways; explicitly allowing and supporting this type of migration would make things safer for everyone).
It's othering and racism, plain and simple.
I'm not saying we should just open the floodgates and let anyone and everyone in, and I'm not saying we shouldn't deport non-citizens who commit violent crime, but the "crisis" is entirely manufactured.
>the "crisis" is entirely manufactured.
It sure is, the US government has been underfunding the judicial body responsible for adjudicating asylum claims for years and years. As a result there are indeed people here in status limbo.
Wether or not they should be granted some kind of residency is kind of irrelevant, politicians are happy for this to be a problem they can use.
Even now, they aren’t increasing the rate of process, they’re just blowing the cash on mass surveillance.
And mass incarceration.
I think the job analysis is overly simplistic. The reality is that worker migration from poorer countries to richer ones is a huge low wage problem. Instead of allowing low-skilled labor to pay better in order to attract workers who expect better conditions, you keep the wages fixed and import workers for whom even the bad life you're offering is better than their current life.
Of course, this doesn't mean that allowing 0 immigration in is the right solution, or preventing immigrants from working. And I should also point out that, generally, US leaders have the least amount of problem with this aspect of immigration - even now, Trump has instructed ICE not to go for deporting agricultural and tourism workers in any mass numbers.
Employed privilege. Lots of folks would like to work in construction but haven’t been able to for a while. I know several that retired early in poverty.
I would appreciate a job in construction or at a restaurant for example. Teenagers would benefit from such jobs as well. Not available.
Your absolute assertions are myopic at best.
Who or what is stopping you from getting a job at a restaurant?
Doesn't seem to be a problem with any motivated person I know.
Last one gave me a hint, too many applicants. Most don’t bother.
And yet multiple studies have shown that when jobs are offered to Americans that involve labor (farm, construction, food industry), at those wages, then there are generally few to near zero applicants.
There are other reasonings (prevailing wage, location, etc.), but likewise, your "absolute assertion" that undocumented workers have been taking job opportunities from you is also not entirely ... absolute.
The key point is "at those wages". The overall assumption in the economy is that it's good and proper for low-skilled jobs to be very low paying, despite otherwise being very unattractive. As long as people are unwilling to pay the proper cost for hard labor, they'll keep hitting this problem of local people not willing to do the work for a pittance. Then, when they circumvent the local workers, they'll be surprised that local workers are discontent.
I do agree with that. The same as with the trope about McDonalds, etc. being "starter jobs" for teenagers, etc., and that's why it's okay for them to not pay a liveable wage, etc., which has no origin in fact (re the minimum wage law) and only in Republican ideology.
> No one is taking jobs away from citizens or legal immigrants (locals don't want those jobs, either at all, or at the wages offered)
Sorry but i absolutely despise this argument as someone who did the job that "locals don't want" and knew others that did. It's cheap and very right wing classism by the privileged. Essentially only the last bit is true and the last bit is true because there is a cheap alternative that doesn't involve much unionization either.
Mind you I'm in western europe and the other arguments don't hold up either here but that first one is universally shit.
Absolutely not. They are an essential part of modern American life, and anyone against it either doesn't understand that, or does it for racist reasons.
I observe the following. ICE has not caused a huge step change in people leaving the country. If you look at the stats since Reagan (https://infographicsite.com/infographic/deportations-under-u...), it wanders up and down and is (imo) complicated.
What has changed is the “messaging” around the topic. This is very common with the Trump administration. When all is said and done, when exceptions are made/bought, and the courts and others get involved, it ends up not being much of a needle move. BUT, what is different every time is the messaging. And I have come to believe, that is what the actual goal is to some degree. The real goal is to send a message to people who are immigrants OR (and this is important) look like immigrants. It’s a message of “remember your place” and “be grateful you get to be here”. It’s the same type of tactics that gets sent to Asian communities, black communities, women, etc.
I am white. I am a male. I am 55. I oscillate between despondently sad and disgusted.
The older you are, the more likely you’ll see more people and say “get off my lawn” when really, you were busy hanging plates when the rest of the world was having babies…
That’s really what happened. The population doubled in 15 years and people moved (people always move). It’s just more people now. So naturally you’ll see more immigrants.
Not only is it not a crisis but many nations NEED immigration because their natality rates are so low. Including the UK.
Why would they need them because of that? Must every nations population perpetually go up? Do you know how insane that sounds?
Every argument that starts like this ends up defending a pyramid scheme.
I think it's a capitalism thing to need more people
Roughly half the population responds to unfamiliar people and ideas with curiosity, and the other half with fear. The latter half are easily manipulated into nurturing the fear. Everything rolls up to this.
What's your definition of "unfamiliar"? I just want people vetted before they're allowed into my house to live along-side my family? Is that unreasonable?
It was. Not since Trump took office. It's still a crisis in Europe though.
I'm more asking why immigration is a "crisis"?
Uncontrolled influx of millions - mostly with poor finances and very different cultural backgrounds and values - strain a nation's resources, infrastructure, and social cohesion. It exacerbates housing shortages, burdens public services like healthcare, and contributes to economic friction amid existing downturns. It also poses risks to national identity and security, as we are now experiences in many countries who allowed this to happen, as opposed to countries that enforced legal immigration. It complicates integration and social stability. It's unfair to legal immigrants. This is why sovereign states implement rigorous and dynamic immigration controls and capacity limits based on the nation's ability at the time. There has to be sustainable absorption. Countries are not homeless shelters or free handouts; they are the result of blood and tears of the patriots who fought and died to create, defend, and build that nation. Every nation has its values, and it's not the right choice for everyone. China is definitely not a country for me, nor are the CCP's values acceptable to American culture. In short, vet whoever comes into your house, and don't let people sneak in through the backdoor.
>There's a lot of immigrants in my state but they're not upsetting me.
You might not think that, but have you ever complained about housing prices? That food at the grocery store costs more than it did a few years ago? The price of consumer goods in general?
Well, you're not buying those things. You're bidding on them. And the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards.
I've come to blame nimby for housing and Trump for food.
That's not how food prices works.
High housing prices is a complex mix of underbuilding due to zoning laws, companies buying up housing stock to rent, and (a few years ago) very low interest rates. One thing that is _not_ a factor is immigrants, because they are at the bottom of the social pile and usually can't get mortgages to buy houses.
> That food at the grocery store costs more than it did a few years ago?
> the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards
Who do you think is picking most of that food? And if the wages for those jobs went up to an American living wage, what do you think would happen to the price of food even with a bit lower demand?
I know it's all too easy and comforting to throw out knee-jerk comments cheerleading for government power, but at least try applying some basic analysis to what you write.
> have left the US
They did not "leave" the US, they were deported without due process.
> though NSA and google have been doing it for years
That does not make it less dismal
> less scope for this to be abused against american citizens unlike in the UK
There are agencies in the US that do as they please without needing to cooperate with anyone. Not sure how you arrived in that conclusion.
> So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US.
Why would anyone believe this? It's such a strange thing to say, and one would have to be an absolute fool to believe it.
The people I work with believe the government, the current administration is funding immigrants. Providing them with handlers who are paid to assist them, open up credit cards in their own names on behalf of non-citizens who otherwise couldn't.
Multiple of them believe this. One mentioned it, after she left I turned to my other coworker to say "that was some crazy stuff she was saying" only to be met with, "Hey, it's happening. A lot of federal money goes missing and this is exactly where it's going."
It's a complete disconnect from reality that's malleable to any form desired.
When ICE raided Tyson Chicken (a few years ago), multiple workers provided documentation from Tyson telling them how to stay under the radar and how to fill out paperwork if they were undocumented. There's definitely a very large effort in undocumented labor... and little interest in rocking the boat of those employers.
Yes. The USA runs on undocumented work in many ways. This is a far, far, far (etc) cry from government-funded citizens escorting around and signing up for lines of credit and otherwise paying the way for undocumented workers.
> So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US.
The Trump administration loves gaudy numbers like this. Common sense tells you that's a lot of movement in too short of time. Until they release evidence of these numbers, please do not spread this misinformation.
Indeed, it's a complete lie and fabrication, and those who repeat it are bearing false witness. Take the report it came from, click on any "supporting" link, such as:
> A recent study from the United Nations reported that President Trump’s immigration policies led to a 97% reduction in illegal aliens heading northbound to the U.S. from Central America.
And you find that the document they link does not support their assertion, and in face the "97%" refers to:
> The migrants who returned during the period were primarily Venezuelan nationals, accounting for 97% of the documented southward flow, with most heading to neighboring Colombia.
It's comically bad deception, only people who continuously traffic in lies all day long would even publish something like this.
He also got "20 trillion dollars".
Is it really that much movement though?
Like, say we assume it's true: There are 340 million people in the US. That's less than 1% of the current population leaving. I really doubt anybody would notice much of a difference.
> So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US.
According to the current administration, who have a ... not exactly sterling ... reputation for accuracy and honesty in reporting.
If we organized a content storm campaign we could make this effort moot. Time to start building a portfolio of dummy accounts to muddy the water. Remember... TAILS and fresh IP's for each account, ideally nodes you can get back on with ease. Use a public network if possible.
Bonus: You can also use these accounts to undermine the Online Safety Act at the same time!
This is the same tool the right has used to destroy progressive democracy online. Dump tons of money into pro libertarian right wing bots and overwhelm the voices that call for money out of politics and universal heath care with screams of "libtard" and "woke".