US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1631

On July 04 2019 03:26 IgnE wrote:
Heidegger is not too bad if you already know Aristotle, Kant, etc. And why would you be reading Heidegger if you don’t already have a familiarity with those?

On July 04 2019 04:02 JimmiC wrote:
There seems to be big time interest in the philosophy of politics perhaps a thread specifically about that would do well.

On July 04 2019 03:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
It's ironic that the obscurity of much of far left theory (compared to the familiarity with Nazis) actually lends itself to it's credibility. Whereas something like the meritocracy myth is dependent on mass delusion, justice in equity is both self-apparent and philosophically sound.

On July 04 2019 04:36 GreenHorizons wrote:
I agree that the philosophical underpinnings (or lack thereof) of ones political opinions is rather critical, especially so in today's polarizing political world. Personally I've noticed that many of those shying away from "the extremes" arrive there more as a result of a political philosophy that is geographical. Not just in the literal sense but also as in the "center" isn't just neoliberal hegemony, but a large contingent of people that argue their political opinions relative to whatever is popularly identified as extreme or their political opposition rather than grounded in an overarching principle or philosophy.

On July 04 2019 04:43 semantics wrote:
How is it anti-conservative? Fascism often uses a loss of status from the past as a means of justification. A return to the glory we deserve, to establish the national identity.

On July 04 2019 04:43 semantics wrote:
Granted you can say if it's based on real arguments or made up shit but it's not inherently out of line with conservative politics. Conservatives aren't about not changing, they're just about changing things to how things used to be according to them.

On July 04 2019 04:43 semantics wrote:
I would say social conservatism is a big part of fascism. Economic conservatism not so much.

On July 04 2019 00:30 Acrofales wrote:

A society that works entirely for the benefit of the society, everybody born into their place and satisfied with that place doesn't sound attractive to you?

The main problem is that it assumes that because you are born into position X you will be happy with position X. A Brave New World does an excellent job of illustrating the "flaws" in humanity that make it so this is never possible. But if humans were more like ants, it would be utopia.

MR. GARDNER: The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the
President's position on this issue, just like the plaintiffs
and Your Honor. I do not have a deeper understanding of what
that means at this juncture other than what the President has
tweeted. But, obviously, as you can imagine, I am doing my
absolute best to figure out what's going on.

MR. GARDNER: Your Honor, this is Mr. Gardner. The
one thing I would request is, given that tomorrow is the Fourth
of July and the difficulty in assembling people from all over
the place, is it possible that we could do this on Monday?

THE COURT: No.
MR. GARDNER: And again -- okay.
THE COURT: No. Because timing is an issue. Timing
is an issue, and we've lost a week at this point. And this
isn't anything against anybody on this call. I've been told
different things, and it's becoming increasingly frustrating.
If you were Facebook and an attorney for Facebook told me
one thing, and then I read a press release from Mark Zuckerberg
telling me something else, I would be demanding that Mark
Zuckerberg appear in court with you the next time because I
would be saying I don't think you speak for your client
anymore.

I think I'm actually being really reasonable here and
just saying I need a final answer by Friday at 2 p.m. or we're
going forward. That's where we are. Because we've wasted a
week.

On July 04 2019 03:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
What I've found most fascinating rediscovering various philosophical underpinnings of political ideologies is just how oblivious most of us are to how programmed they are into us at every stage of life and in experiences of all sorts.

We often think "I think this because a combination of my experience and learning has given me the capacity to consciously and rationally arrive at my conclusions" without realizing how influenced we are by hegemonic myths adopted as fact from various thinkers.

It's ironic that the obscurity of much of far left theory (compared to the familiarity with Nazis) actually lends itself to it's credibility. Whereas something like the meritocracy myth is dependent on mass delusion, justice in equity is both self-apparent and philosophically sound.

A 25-year-old man from El Salvador tried to swim with his daughter across the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas. Father and daughter were caught in the current, and drowned. Their bodies washed ashore on the Mexican side of the river, in an image that has seized the attention of the world.

But other sights, not photographed, are equally horrifying. A woman from Punjab, India, tried to walk her 6-year-old daughter across the Arizona desert earlier this month. The girl succumbed to heat stroke in the desert. The Border Patrol found the girl’s body.

Hundreds of African migrants have arrived on the U.S. southern border since October of last year. They’ve reported deaths along their route, again of heat and dehydration.

In the single month of May 2019, 133,000 people were apprehended on the southwestern border. Thanks to better cooperation with Mexico, apprehensions fell to 87,000 in June, still higher than at any previous point in the Trump or Obama administrations. It’s possible that more than 1 million people will be apprehended after entering the U.S. without authorization in fiscal 2019, a rate of unauthorized immigration not seen since the 1990s. They are coming from more than two dozen nations, and some from across two great oceans, transiting countries along the way in which they could find refuge, if refuge were all they sought. It is reasonable to wonder whether they believe that America’s door is open—and whether they are risking their lives and those of their children to rush through it before that door closes again.

Migration is not a project for the destitute or desperate. Human smugglers charge $3,500–$7,000 a person to convey a would-be asylum seeker from Central America to the United States. The trip from Africa costs much more. Some Congolese migrants, interviewed by The New York Times, began by traveling overland to Angola. From that country, they flew across the Atlantic and South America to Ecuador. Then they continued by bus and foot northward thousands of miles across Colombia, Central America, and Mexico to Texas.

How do they afford the journey? There are as many different answers to that question as there are migrants. Here’s the story of the Punjabi family that lost their daughter in the Arizona desert. The father, known as A. Singh, made his way to the United States in 2013. He filed an asylum petition. This was not a promising plan. In 2013, U.S. courts rejected 97 percent of asylum requests filed by Indian citizens.

But after rejection, there’s appeal. If you lose on appeal, you can just stop showing up. The authorities are unlikely to find you, and even if they do, they are unlikely to send you home. Six years later, A. Singh is still in the United States, his asylum case still unresolved. Along the way, he accumulated enough money to send for his wife and daughter. They traveled from India to Mexico, and were then met by smugglers who led them part of the way along the border—and then abandoned them without water in the scorching June desert heat.

Migrant children usually follow adults who have made the journey ahead of them. Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, visited a Clint, Texas, detention facility earlier this month. In a June 21 PBS interview, Binford told Judy Woodruff, “Almost every child that I interviewed had family, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, siblings here in the United States who are waiting for them and are ready to care for them.”

Migration is a networked process. As a migrant diaspora expands, it can accumulate resources to enable more relatives to follow—many of them escaping desperate circumstances, in search of a better future. Those resources include not only the cash necessary to pay the smugglers, but also the sophisticated local understanding that enables asylum seekers to settle more easily. It’s tough to be the first Congolese asylum seeker to arrive in Portland, Maine (the city in which 300 Congolese asylum seekers have recently arrived). It will be easier to be the 300th, and it will be easier than that to be the 3,000th. Their predecessors will help them find places to live and work, and show them how to navigate the bureaucracy that will process their cases.

This network effect may help explain a paradox that would seem otherwise mystifying: Why is migration from Central America surging even as the crimes that supposedly motivate the migration are plunging?

The homicide rate in Honduras dropped by more than a third from its peak, in 2011, to 2016. The homicide rate in Guatemala dropped by nearly half from the peak year, 2009, to 2016. Yet only after 2014 did Central American asylum seekers begin arriving in large numbers.

One answer may be the network effect. The years of peak violence in Central America were a weak period for the U.S. job market. As the U.S. economy improved after 2014, migration from Central America accelerated. And as the numbers of recent Central American migrants grew, so did the resources available to finance the migration of even more. Migration builds on itself. So long as American and European wages greatly exceed those in large portions of the rest of the world, the number of would-be migrants will continue to rise.

Some read the stories published in 2017 about how illegal immigration was reaching its lowest levels in 46 years, and concluded it had come to an end. What happened instead was that the flow of migrants to the U.S. shifted from adults simply crossing the border on an entirely illegal basis, to migrants—increasing numbers of children among them—making claims of asylum.

Over the past 14 years, the United States has made itself less congenial to immigrants without any legal status at all. The Real ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005, has inhibited the ability of unauthorized residents to obtain plausible-looking fake documents. The spread of the E-Verify system is likewise discouraging to the immigrants who have no legal basis at all for their presence in the United States.

Asylum seekers, by contrast, are allowed to work pending resolution of their cases. In most states, they will be allowed to apply for a driver’s license that complies with the Real ID law. This is one reason why some asylum applicants seek to remain within the asylum system as long as they can. So long as their applications are pending, or under appeal, they benefit from a legal immigration status inside the United States. And because the asylum system is so incredibly slow, who knows how long that status might last?

It may be that those with the very weakest claims drop out at the start of the process. Half of those admitted to the U.S. as asylum seekers never actually file a legal asylum application. The other half, however, find their best opportunity to be the provisional legality offered by the asylum process.

The Trump administration has sought to stop this process before it even starts by preventing migrants from entering the United States in the first place.

Óscar and Valeria Ramirez—the father and daughter who died in the Rio Grande—had waited for days to cross a bridge at Matamoros and reach the U.S. to file a claim. Frustration with the long delay pushed Ramirez to his fatal decision to swim across.

The detention of asylum seekers is also intended as a deterrent, but it has not proved very effective. Congress has funded only 45,000 detention beds, declining to 40,000 after September of this year. And since a 1997 judicial settlement forbids immigration authorities to detain adults and unaccompanied minors together, the detention policy in turn has given rise to the inhumane system of separate facilities for minors.

Nobody intended to build “concentration camps,” as they have been polemically denounced. What we’re seeing instead is the inevitable failure of the attempt to process hundreds of thousands of would-be migrants through a system intended for a few thousand victims of state-sponsored persecution—all under the supervision of a slow-moving judiciary and subject to tight budget constraints. Of course it’s a miserable failure. And of course the people responsible for administering that inevitable failure become short-tempered, harsh, and secretive. They are bureaucrats tasked to do the predictably impossible.

How can we make things better?

We have to stop enticing a million people a year to risk their lives and their children’s lives by gaming the U.S. asylum system.

The response of many people of goodwill—open the gates, let the asylum seekers in—will bump into the reality of millions more who will want to come. The more allowed in, the more who will gamble on forcing their way in after them, the more lives will be lost as they make their way toward the United States.

The asylum system is profoundly broken, and the only way to make it work is to begin with fundamental questions. If poverty, unemployment, crime, spousal abuse, and other non-state-imposed forms of human suffering justify an asylum claim, then at least 2 billion people on Earth are eligible if they can make it over the border.

If every asylum claim must be adjudicated by a quasi-judicial tribunal, then appealed, then enforced only after another quasi-judicial tribunal and another appeal, then the asylum system becomes an invitation for abuse, joined to a full-employment scheme for immigration lawyers.

Unlike asylum seekers, refugees who seek entry into the United States are managed through an entirely executive process. The U.S. decides on the number of refugees it will take and from which countries, and deputes selection of individuals to the Department of State. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s fast and efficient compared with the shambles of asylum.

Perhaps even more important: The refugee system is based on truth. Refugees have been displaced from their home countries. The asylum system, by contrast, is built on the idea that most of the asylum seekers moving to the U.S. from Central Africa, South Asia, and Central America cannot halt at any of the other countries on their multi-thousand-mile land-air-land routes to Texas and Arizona, and claim asylum there instead.

This is not 1939. Virtually none of those trying to cross the Rio Grande are fleeing state-sponsored persecution, although many do face real hardship at home. Many are people living in a globalized world willing to brave big risks with their lives and money in hope of bettering their situation. Almost all of us in the United States are descended from people like that, so of course we sympathize. But the policies that made sense for the United States in 1890 do not make sense in 2020.

There’s room for some, but not for all who want to come. Awarding the prize to those who show up on the American doorstep only encourages the abuses of the people-smugglers.The more clearly the U.S. articulates its rules, and the more swiftly and certainly it enforces those rules, the more lives will be saved. Those who seek to change the rules by acquiescing in fictions about asylum are worsening the border crisis, inviting more deadly risk taking by migrants—and igniting more cynicism in this country about the accountability of the U.S. government to its own people.

The Democratic Candidates Are in a Bubble on Immigration

There is now a photograph that sums up everything wrong about America’s broken and overwhelmed immigration system. You’ve seen it, and it is hard to let it leave the mind or the conscience. Together with the accounts of horrifying abuse of children in detention — and “abuse” is not hyperbole — we can see the crisis as it is. We can no longer look away.

The starkness of the crisis is a good thing, though. Until now, many have denied that any crisis existed at all. They have, in fact, denied that the highest levels of mass immigration since the Bush years are an issue at all. As Byron York has noted, Speaker Pelosi called the arrival of close to a million asylum seekers “a fake crisis”; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that hundreds of thousands of men, women, and many children, overwhelming any attempt to process them with the current resources, was “a crisis that does not exist.” This included many Never-Trumpers, like Bill Kristol (“a fake crisis”), and Max Boot (“a faux crisis”). The editors of the Washington Post denied the facts reported by their own Nick Miroff, claiming it was “a make-believe crisis.”

None of these people will admit they were gravely mistaken, or that their denial and delay in acting clearly exacerbated the situation. But now that we’re on the same page, the question is: Where do we go with this now?

Yesterday was a sign of real bipartisan progress. The House passed a Senate bill to spend $4.6 billion to relieve the humanitarian crisis and tackle some of the structural inadequacies of the current failed system. The left wing of the Democratic caucus wanted to insist on various restrictions on the use of the $4.6 billion, primarily to ensure that none of it is earmarked (God forbid) for enforcement of the law. The problem with waging a longer fight would be that Congress would break for its July 4 recess having done nothing to help. Pelosi put children before politics, and it’s hard not to admire her humane pragmatism.

So it’s a start. What’s next? The good news is that the Democrats are finally beginning to announce policy plans that offer some solid ideas. A new bill for an overhaul of the entire system called the Northern Triangle and Border Stabilization Act has been introduced in the House. It proposes increased U.S. aid to Central American countries, to tackle the problem at its roots; a big investment in border facilities to ensure far more humane treatment of asylum seekers; a much stricter monitoring system to keep track of them after processing to make sure they turn up for their court hearings; many more immigration judges to reduce the massive backlog of cases; and it allows for asylum claims to be made in home countries, rather than at the border.

These are all good ideas and certainly worth trying. But what they don’t address is the larger problem of how to reduce levels of mass immigration. The Democrats want to raise the cap on refugees from Central America to 100,000 a year and propose no tightening of asylum law. But it’s the asylum law that needs to change. Since 2014, there has been a 240 percent increase in asylum cases. As Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, the number of asylum cases from Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela has soared at the same time as the crime rate in those countries was being cut in half.

Take the tragic tale of Oscar Ramirez and his young daughter Valeria, the father and daughter captured in death in that heartbreaking photograph. Ramirez’s widow explained to the Washington Post why her husband wanted to move to America: He wanted “a better future for their girl.” This is an admirable goal, but it is classic economic immigration, and it would appear, based on what we know, that it has absolutely nothing to do with asylum. Here again is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services definition: “Refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

But somehow the courts have decided that you qualify for asylum if there is simply widespread crime or violence where you live, and Ramirez was also going to use that argument as well. A government need not persecute you; you just have to experience an unsafe environment that your government is failing to suppress. This so expands the idea of asylum, in my view, as to render it meaningless.

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. As climate change worsens, more will rush to claim it. All they have to do is show up.

Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained at the border making an asylum claim. This year, about a million Central Americans will have relocated to the U.S. on those grounds. To add to this, a big majority of the candidates in the Democratic debates also want to remove the grounds for detention at all, by repealing the 1929 law that made illegal entry a criminal offense and turning it into a civil one. And almost all of them said that if illegal immigrants do not commit a crime once they’re in the U.S., they should be allowed to become citizens.

How, I ask, is that not practically open borders? The answer I usually get is that all these millions will have to, at some point, go to court hearings and have their asylum cases adjudicated. The trouble with that argument is that only 44 percent actually turn up for their hearings; and those who do show up and whose claims nonetheless fail can simply walk out of the court and know they probably won’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.

None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting ” 3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.

What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?

This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.

I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.

I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.

When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?

I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide. I think the courts’ expansion of the meaning of asylum would strike most Americans as excessively broad. I think many Americans will have watched these debates on immigration and concluded that the Democrats want more immigration, not less, that they support an effective amnesty of 12 million undocumented aliens as part of loosening border enforcement and weakening criteria for citizenship. And the viewers will have realized that their simple beliefs that borders should be enforced and that immigration needs to slow down a bit are viewed by Democrats as unthinkable bigotry.

Advantage Trump.

On July 04 2019 21:03 Destructicon wrote:
I've started following US politics about 6 months ago. As an outsider looking it, this is my take on border debate.

1. No country, no matter how affluent and rich can continuously accept immigrants, especially if you advocate as well for something like universal healthcare.
2. A country has the first obligation towards its citizens, if the country already has a problem with unemployment then adding even more illegal immigrants to the equation doesn't help.
3. Every country has and should continue having the right to determine whom they accept or reject from staying in their country.
4. There should be strict border controls to make sure a country can provide asylum to real refugees, not just economic migrants who want a better life. The US nor any country has any moral obligation to help those, its first obligation is to its citizens and accepting them strains resources which could have gone to real refugees or to accepting skilled and qualified labor from abroad.

Now the situation at the border is quite tragic, but unfortunately the democrats haven't seemed to have done anything to help, they refused to give the president his requested funds, and now, a few months later when the situation escalated they complain the detention centers are full and you even have some making the situation worse by blocking additional beds from being shipped to some.

If anyone has manufactured this crisis its the democrats.

Also barriers, like a wall do work. They won't keep out absolutely all illegal immigration, but they will at least reduce it by such a significant margin that it will be way easier to to stop sort the people coming if not countries like Hungary or Israel wouldn't have built them.

On July 04 2019 21:29 iamthedave wrote:


Citation needed.

You don't get to blame the party that isn't in power for the policies of the one that is.

Democrats were willing to give Trump billions for border security, just not for the wall. A project which, I should point out, doesn't have a specific budget ceiling. In all the discussion about it I've never heard a solid number on how much billions will be needed to build the damn thing. But all the people who've had a crack at it suggest the number is REALLY HIGH.