From an outsider's view, everything looks so performative and fabricated to be consumed by a tv target audience. I mean, if there is so much illegal immigration in the US, is it the most effective use of resources to target a TV cliche that would gather a residual number of people?
I think the whole point of these stupid stunts is to mobilize the base and distract critics. Your random redneck racist might feel strongly about the Hollywood caricature of Mexicans wearing sombreros at a Home Depot parking lot, but the truth of the matter is that Trump is mobilizing the US armed forces against a governor's will while threatening him with imprisonment.
They is doing lots and lots of heavy lifting here. At the same time things are very confusing, because it seems like your fellow American is out for blood in a manner that shows no humanity.
Your fellow American on the right is plugged into a Matrix that traffics in its own narratives and can now freely manufacture or amplify its own fringe facts and narratives.
They are actually fighting very hard for the soul of america - as they see it. Virtuous efforts to stop the villainy and stupidity of the venomous yet weak liberals, leftists and democrats.
There’s a system in place to manufacture narratives, the closest analogy would be wrestling - except the President doesn’t treat it as fiction, he acts as if it’s real.
And since you can make and sell narratives incredibly quickly, while facts and analysis are days of effort - well, you have a structural change to the market place of ideas.
It happens everywhere in democracies now. See Brexit - entirely predictable. Yet completely unable to “sell” the known and clear problems to a majority of the citizenry.
Same with tariffs.
There’s a floor to people’s capability in navigating our current information environments - and partisan groups of experts are happy to use it to their advantage.
The problem began empirically with conservative positions, but the efficacy of the technique has now created its own political force.
The image the Trump administration conveys goes way beyond targeted hate. They appear to be replaying the Nazi playbook of persecuting minorities as a strategy to wedge in totalitarian control over a nation and society. Illegal immigrants just so happen to be the path of least resistance in the US.
So in late May, Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of the president’s immigration agenda, addressed a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The message was clear: The president, who promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased. The agency had better step it up.
Gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the “worst of the worst,” weren’t the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, who had come from across the U.S., according to people familiar with the meeting.
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-...
I think this makes it even scarier. This means the goal is clearly not establishing sound policy, but to output propaganda that is designed to be easily consumed by TV audiences. It is beyond reality because it is not designed to make sense, it is designed to make sense to TV consumers by feeding on the context they get from their TV tropes. The Mexicans hanging around in Home Depots is a TV cliche that's recognized by people living wel beyond any Home Depot.
The best is Trump crowing about historically low unemployment numbers, and then peddling hysteria about illegals "taking American jobs." None of his degenerate followers care that this argument is stupid, and calls them stupid.
Now it's been papered over with other excuses, like the mythical "fentanyl" that's pouring in from Canada.
Whether it’s good public policy is neither here nor there, so long as our Leader is right.
For example, you are deporting labor. Ostensibly Because of fairness and justice - they are in the country illegally. Ergo they should go.
No one should be above the law.
This has zip to do with gangs and criminality though.
But why this process ? Why not punish people who are employing them ?
This is more efficient and even more just. People are employing workers they know are here illegally and undercutting minimum wage.
Or why not raise minimum wage so more people will be willing to work those jobs ?
People act on incentives - and america is a country with a concentration of some of the hardest working and smartest people in the world.
It has a tradition of valuing this and converting those strengths into its own.
Now I have enough of a background in econ, business and politics to see through the narratives.
I also know you can’t sell all those interventions, not the least because none of these address the issue of gangs and criminality and eating pets.
Which brings us to the issue that your rationale, the ones which are debated online - are downstream from whatever controversy and theory that’s going to show up as soon as a new distraction is needed.
I mean, just Take a look at your original question,
“Leave the hardest working and deport the lazy ones ?”
America is built on immigration of the hardest working, most driven people from across the globe.
America is a machine for hardworking people to move ahead. That’s its promise.
And this is the question its citizens are unironically asking.
As I said, many ways to skin a cat.
People follow incentives, so why not punish people who are paying for the labor? Arrests for employing them?
Its an economic system, theres 2 way incentives.
The process used, depends on what problem you are solving.
As it stands, employers can pretend ignorance and as long as they were not really stupid, put putting things in writing or personally arranging for the trafficking, they can likely get away with it. There’s no reason I can think of why we shouldn’t change that.
So, you know, maybe they could try to do what they said they'd do for once?
They said they'd target violent criminals, but they didn't say they wouldn't target non violent criminals as well. People who heard that were wishcasting.
Whether or not they are a "priority" is semantics. If you hear them explain it, they're all defacto criminals for being undocumented, and therefore equally culpable as a murder or a rapist in matters of deportation.
The crime they're concerned about over all others is illegal immigration. According to them, an illegal immigrant who has done nothing else wrong deserves to be deported just as much as rapist illegal immigrant.