EPTUS Politics Feedback Thread - Page 323
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Broetchenholer
Germany1921 Posts
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KwarK
United States42628 Posts
On July 21 2025 03:23 Broetchenholer wrote: You are not stupid enough to make that argument. MP is not suggesting keeping illegal immigrants as second tier humans to abuse when he says he is against deporting them and that keeping them is a boon for the economy. He is for allowing them to stay because they want to be there and can contribute to society and I am pretty sure he is for naturalizing them in the us. And you would know this cause you have argued with him for a decade. He literally is. The economic argument for them is that they provide a pool of labour that is cheaper than traditional citizen labour because you don't have to provide them with benefits or minimum wage or weekends and if they complain too much you can set ICE on them. People don't specifically say that, they say "consider all the economic benefits" and leave the how unspoken. It's like promoting beef without talking about the killing of cows. It's a perfectly simple moral question and he landed on the wrong side of it. Either we want them here, in which case they should get the full benefits and protections of legal status, or we do not want them here in which case we should want them repatriated humanely. That's the only moral stance. You can't land in the middle with "they can stay as long as we don't have to treat them like people" which is what his establishment and recognition of an illegal immigrant population amounts to. That's some bullshit. You either want them or you don't, you can't want the labour but not the people. As for naturalizing them down the line if they work and contribute to the economy, I dunno man, are we sure we want to go with "work will make them free" as the slogan for his new two tier system? That seems a little too on the nose, even for me. Edit: My stance on this is fairly simple, there shouldn't be an implicit toleration of a large illegal immigrant population who exist without rights or legal recourse because that situation is ethically intolerable. If congress acting to express the will of the people legislate to give them all legal status then great, as far as I'm concerned that's problem solved. We no longer have a large illegal immigrant population. If these people are now raped by an employer then they can go to the police. The exploitation intrinsic in the system of tolerating without legislating has been fixed. If congress do not give them legal status then they should be repatriated humanely. The middle ground in which you de facto tolerate their presence by failing to enforce immigration laws but fail to recognize their presence by giving them rights and protections is total bullshit. Let's say that MP is for allowing them to stay but is unable to get legislation passed to provide them with any kind of legal status. At that point he is perpetuating the second tier captive population for the economic benefits of the first tier. That's the problem with any stance of "let them stay and worry about the legislation later". It's a single issue and must be taken as a single issue. Also it doesn't actually matter one bit whether they want to be exploited. Whether they might prefer to be at the mercy of an employer who can call ICE on them if they complain about unsafe equipment because it's still better than conditions back home. It has been argued for decades that children love the opportunity to work in sweat shops because without sweat shops they'd have no work at all. That multinationals wouldn't create all the sweat shop jobs in their cities if the children weren't permitted to work in them. Our obligation not to exploit vulnerable people is not absolved by the vulnerable people preferring our exploitation to whatever shittier alternative they have. Insisting that they want to stay as an excuse for continuing exploitation is morally abhorrent. | ||
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Broetchenholer
Germany1921 Posts
That the US would rather act as if these workers did not exist while abusing them for their cheapness and being outside the social net and tax is for him a symptom of the US not allowing enough immigrants legally into the country. He would 100% prefer if they were all paying taxes, having healthcare and living comfortable lives. For some reason you see the broken system of US immigration, see someone that hates it and would love to abolish it in favor of the undocumented already living there and say he has to love seeing them abused because he is not in favor of getting them out of the country. Seriously, i don't mean to insult you here, do you have trouble understanding the motivation of people, because the way you are arguing against what he has written down ignores a ton of context that i think is fairly obvious. | ||
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KwarK
United States42628 Posts
He wasn't saying pass legislation first and then enforce borders per the new policy which grandfathers in legal recognition of previously illegal immigrants. If he was saying that then I'd be fine with it, that'd be fully compliant with my "enforce the laws" stance. He was saying "don't enforce the laws, enforcing the laws is racist". You can't have a legal population of workers if you don't enforce the laws because enforcing the laws is literally what makes them a legal population of workers. It's inseparable. If you don’t deport people here illegally and if you allow people here illegally to work then what you’re arguing for is, by definition, an illegal immigrant pool of workers. There’s no way around that. Whatever your stance on what the law is, if your stance is against enforcement of that law then your stance is in favour of toleration of people with no legal status. | ||
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Broetchenholer
Germany1921 Posts
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KwarK
United States42628 Posts
It goes back to the old guild vs open market divide. The guild members believed that the existence of the guild and the monopolization of the right to perform a certain type of labour provided a higher standard of living for the members because they could set rates, control the supply of labour, and monopolize the economic activity. They did this through control of trade secrets, enshrining their rights in the law with lobbying, and violence against non guild members competing against them. Whereas the open market believers argued that it stifled free competition and innovation, that if the demand for labour exceeded that supplied by the guild members then naturally anyone who could perform the activity should be allowed to perform it and get paid for doing so. Supply and demand should rule, it should not be artificially constrained. The pro guild ideology bled into the trade unionist ideology and became one of the cornerstones of the socialist left whereas the pro competition ideology is foundational to Libertarianism. That's why Old Labour always opposed the EEC (now EU), they didn't want British steel workers competing with German ones, they wanted to maintain an exclusive right to sell steel in Britain free of competition. And conversely it's why the Conservatives were very pro EEC, they wanted the right to buy a superior German car over a shitty British car, they didn't want to be forced to subsidize the workers of a failed business. The monopolization of labour within an area by citizens, whether it is of the nation or of the EU as a whole in the case of EU nations, is an extension of that old guild mentality. And the EU remains highly protectionist with the common external tariff, tight immigration restrictions, and internal subsidies. Over time the coalitions that make up our larger political divisions have evolved and we now have very strange bedfellows. The economic right have allied with the social conservatives to enshrine and tighten the monopoly of the citizen worker on the sale of labour within the territory of the guild, despite it being antithetical to their core beliefs. Meanwhile the left have ditched their trade unionist roots and are now wondering why the hell all their traditional trade unionist base are voting for social conservatives as if they didn't abandon them first. People were somehow baffled that Corbyn didn't encourage his people to vote Remain as if they forgot that Old Labour never liked the EU in the first place. This isn't a left vs right thing, or at least not in the way you imagine it. Free movement of Labour outside of any artificially imposed state restrictions is very much an old school right wing idea. Neoliberalism defeated the traditional left and social conservatism has adopted the politically homeless trade unionist protectionism. It’s bizarro world in politics right now with self identifying leftists proudly proclaiming the most hardline free market beliefs of the most ardent capitalists. Repatriate humanely is the left wing position, pay them under the table is the right wing position. Self identifying leftists spent too long hanging out with neoliberals and forgot who they were. | ||
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KwarK
United States42628 Posts
On July 21 2025 04:18 Broetchenholer wrote: Then he fucked up his argumentation. it does not invalidate where he is coming from. In current Trump's america, it is preferable for most undocumented to not have the laws enforced on because there is no path to citizenship. He wants American undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants with an easy pass to citizenship and a fair share for the work they are doing. And this is very consistent with everything else he writes on this forum. And I feel like you know this and just berated him because you saw an opening for it. Firstly, I didn't berate him for it, I didn't even bring it up with him. I said it previously in response to a different discussion in a completely different topic in which he wasn't involved. He quoted my post from the US Politics Megathread in which I argued for enforcement of immigration laws as proof for a deranged argument he was making in a completely different topic about how I'm a racist because he, not me, compared Gazans to rabbits. That's how we got there. You keep trying to pin it on me but I wasn't involved in any of that nonsense. Secondly, and crucially, it doesn't actually matter what is preferable to undocumented immigrants. The children can yearn for the mines all they want but that doesn't make it ethical for me to employ them as miners. (note, the children yearn for the mines is a meme, I'm not saying that immigrants are children, in this case children is a standin for people vulnerable for economic exploitation, I'm saying that people can voluntarily submit themselves for economic exploitation within a capitalist system). That's some champagne socialist bullshit where liberals stand around and jerk each other off while saying shit like "Mexicans are such hard workers, the first company said it'd take a week to put a new roof on my building but Jorge and his team managed it in just 2 days" and "they're so family oriented, Jorge brought his kids with him too, I love that he was able to have that quality time with his family showing them how to properly tar a roof". The only stance that is compatible with basic human dignity is humane enforcement of the laws. Of course Jorge is a hard worker, he still has to make payments to the cartel for getting him across the border, you'll rarely see a more motivated worker than him. That's not a good thing. I don't want immigrants working 14 hour days on the roof in the hot sun without any safety lines. | ||
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