What I don’t believe is that the current administration’s practices are anything other than a cynical, racist diversion of tensions and alienation created by Capitalism away from the wealthy and into the scapegoating of immigrants. Broader issues of statehood and sovereignty are not even in question because they’re not meaningful considerations to the people doing these things. They have no allegiance to anything other than what invests them with further wealth, power, and opportunity for cruelty.
The Obama administration absolutely set this all in motion through their feckless, naive, and equally cynical use of immigration enforcement as some bargaining chip for a broader deal. And liberals who fail to acknowledge this should be hung out to dry with him for their hypocrisy.
This whole thread is a wretched tire fire filled with people torching the site guidelines on both sides of the war, and reading it makes me wonder why we even bother. Still, crossing the 'primarily' line is an important distinction and your account stands out as doing that. That means you're continually undermining this site for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The two can't coexist, and the second completely overwhelms the first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This isn't an ideological call, and if anyone knows of other accounts that are using HN primarily for political battle, please let us know at [email protected] so we can ask them not to.
Which is of course why Big Capital is against this ramped up enforcement. To attempt to steel-man your argument for a sec you seem to believe that, because you think this administration is racist, what they're doing is nothing more than a scapegoating of immigrants based on tensions created by global capital movement - they're just taking advantage of existing problems in the economy to push their preferred policy in another different-but-related domain. The larger picture is that Big Capital and the Social Justice inclined left are actually on the same page but don't know it: they both want more immigration, and a depleted or hamstrung level of state sovereignty (the latter leads to the former) and are in a sort of blind-truce right now.
It's not at all clear how mass immigration suddenly stops undermining the existing working class if we just have "more protections" for workers. You clearly understand that the laws of supply and demand are real and brutal. We can do everything you want - increased protections, unionization etc etc - and that will just increase the lumens on the lamp drawing everyone in. A large positive supply shock for cheap, low skilled labor is bad no matter how "worker friendly" your government is - unless of course you want it to go full USSR, where everyone is poor and miserable but they have a job they can count on.
You’re right about that, since they generally didn’t object to the same or similar levels of enforcement from the previous administration. It’s not completely clear why they didn’t, but it probably had to do with olive branch policies like DACA and a mostly compliant media apparatus.
But what’s been the general theme here is that people actually don’t want these laws enforced at all. They have a fundamentally different view about state sovereignty and want that view made real in policy. As I said before, you have a useful rhetorical payload you get to deploy (“everyone who disagrees with me is a racist”) against those who think we should perhaps not just open the borders. Those who don’t want that have to make longer, more complex arguments about things that make states and societies function - which is only “abstract” until it isn’t.