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.
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.
"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.
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!"
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But their message isn't directly saying "spend 1 trillion dollars to be bigoted"
Silver linings…
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.
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...
These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.
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.
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 generally not wanting those jobs.
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.
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.
Not really. Her mother is Japanese and they moved back when she was one year old.
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.
pulling up the ladder behind you isn't a new concept
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Public policy discussions always get boiled down to some simple wording that isn't strictly accurate.
I'll just go with the dictionary:
>to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated
So, why are we bailing out Argentina, or bombing the South American gulfs? We can't be efficient if we can't even explain our reasoning. I've heard very little reasoning from the administration.
The best I heard was "we're hitting drug dealers". Even if I believed that, pending hundreds of billions to attack boats with drugs on them sounds horribly inefficient. Drugs are not an immediate threat to people and we have many methods through negotiation to simply limit/stop such imports.
I've heard zero justifications anywhere on the Argentina issue. It seems even many republicans do not like this approach.
You're confusing transparency with efficiency. Military and international politics decisions often need public lies or omissions for political reasons but that doesn't mean they're inefficient for their intended purpose. If you word it more honestly as "The government can't be efficient if it doesn't explain its reasoning to the public", then it obviously doesn't follow from the definition of waste.
They go hand in hand. Or is it fine that the government is openly lying about how it claims to want to be "America First"?
>that doesn't mean they're inefficient for their intended purpose.
And that's what I ask. What is the intended purpose? I fail to explain it, and even with my most cynical interpretations I don't see how this is an efficient route.
Transparency would help a lot in evaluating if they aren't being wasteful. But as is, it seems to be a bunch of special interests all clashing with one another in the White House. They don't make sense because there's no unified plan.
Which meets the above definition of "waste"
> even with my most cynical interpretations
Of course if you're thinking cynically, you won't come up with anything good.
Anyway, the definition is stupid, it says "or become dissipated" which is probably meant to refer to waste energy from a machine but without that context you could consider social welfare spending to be dissipation of money, so the most efficient way for the government to spend would be on huge concentrated projects.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251008104110/https://prospect....
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.
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.
You can't solve the problem at the "just regulate the employers" level because it invariably turns into a tighter regulatory capture further enriching the incumbents. Any reform will necessarily increase the competitive advantage of the current winners because they are the ones in a position to shape it.
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.