And yet, when you ask them if this illegal act should be treated like a crime under US law (that is, people accused are entitled to due process, counsel, and all the other Constitutional protections for defendants) they say no.
They're perfectly happy with keeping it a civil law violation (rather than criminal), as long as they can keep saying it's illeeeeeeegal.
So frustrating. I go back and read debates from even a few years ago,and while there has always been plenty of xenophobia, the sheer polarization and dig-in-your-heels of the issue is startling.
and while there has always been plenty of xenophobia
If we run out, we can import some.
I say let's generalize this attitude to the cases of slavery and land-theft.
ttiW has come down with a case of spelling-your-name-backwards. Is this highly contagious?
To devil's advocate-up an argument, say what the caller meant was this (I doubt it, frankly. Straight up sadism/xenophobia seems more likely to me.):
There are three reasons we wouldn't want DREAM-Act eligible people to be citizens:
(A) to punish them. Well, that's silly, they didn't do anything wrong, so that can't be it.
(B) because whether or not we want to punish them, giving them citizenship will damage the country, either because the country is full and there's no room for them, or because they have some characteristic that would indicate that they will generally be bad citizens. That can't be it either: we're not talking about numbers out of scale with the amount of immigration generally, and these are either college graduates or military veterans who grew up in the US: we'd generally look on people like that as excellent citizens. So the real reason must be;
(C) Despite the fact that they don't deserve punishment and they would be good citizens, letting them become citizens is such a powerful reward for their wrongdoing illegal immigrant parents that it creates an additional incentive to immigrate illegally. While it's hard on the DREAM-Act kids, if we don't persecute them, we are asking for increased illegal immigration by parents of small children.
I don't buy this argument, but it's makeable.
My suspicion is that most xenophobes tell themselves either "the country is full" or "immigrants drive my taxes up".
I have heard people make argument C on NPR. I don't have a reply to it right now that doesn't invoke the "illegal immigration isn't that much of a crime" premise.
I suppose you could say that the DREAM-Act would only encourage illegal immigration among people who think there kids are very likely to go to college. I bet East and South Asians would be a big portion of this group. And at this point I'd want to invoke the "if you can't compete, tough luck" premise, which, although is illiberal, I feel applies here.
7. Nah, they've just been reading the wrong books:
for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;Shit like that gives you weird ideas.
"immigrants drive my taxes up"
I'm not sure where the number came from, but the pro-DREAM-Act person on yesterday's DR Show kept pointing out that it would cost $25 billion dollars to deport just the people affected by the Act. *That* would drive up taxes.
10: Or think their kids would be willing to do military service.
This is sort of why I have my pie-in-the-sky belief that the only way to handle immigration is mostly open borders. I actually don't think C is a terrible argument in terms of its grasp of the facts: living here undocumented isn't always so bad that a pretty sure shot at citizenship for your kids wouldn't be almost as much of an incentive as a green card for yourself. What makes C a rotten lousy argument is that the kind of undocumented immigrant who wants to come here and raise their kids to be good citizens is the sort of person we're stupid to be keeping out; we should be letting the parents immigrate legally.
This is sort of why I have my pie-in-the-sky belief that the only way to handle immigration is mostly open borders.
That would lead to wage equalization, immediately for industries without political or skill barriers.
14: which would then reduce immigration. Everybody wins!
15: Everybody does win, on average.
That would lead to wage equalization, immediately for industries without political or skill barriers.
No it wouldn't.
The argument against open borders is that without the ability to provide basic services (water+sewer, elementary schools, police), people moving will live in ways that have adverse effects on existing structures.
This applies not just to national borders like US-Mexico, but to internal migration from destitute countryside to cities as well. Brazil, China, and Nigeria are all places where rapid internal migration has created real instability.
I understand that realistic risk assessment is far from the minds of most Republicans insisting on border funds as a precondition for anything. Just saying that there's more than fear or racism arguing against completely open borders.
Has anyone come across good local news about Iraqis in Detroit? That seems like a really interesting community to pay attention to.
7: The conservative edifice is built upon visiting the sins of the fathers upon the sons*. If you consider children's merit separately from the merit of their parents, then you undercut a wide swath of "pro-market" arguments. And high inheritance taxes suddenly becomes a no-brainer.
*It's sexist language because it's right-wing.
An entertaining if limited solution would be a reality show pitting undocumented immigrants against rabid xenophobes in contests of education, military service and willingness to pay taxes. Winning immigrants are awarded citizenship and the assets of the losers, who are stripped of their citizenship and sent south of the border. You could then spin off a Cops-style show featuring border patrol agents chasing down the ones who try to sneak back in. You know that both would be huge hits.
I think a whole lot of the fear is about culture -- and maybe more this than about taxes. 'They' speak a different language, eat different foods, and are not like 'us.' The economics and taxes arguments end up inconclusive, and even serious xenophobes will admit it. But there's nothing ambiguous about pressing 1 for English.
Bonus point: one need not listen to people from big cities like New York or Los Angeles which have cultures that are already (let's use a charitable verb) exposed to this sort of thing
And the DREAM Act lets more of 'them' in and rewards cheating.
But there's nothing ambiguous about pressing 1 for English.
You mean that it is unambiguously a terrible hardship?
Right, it's the "rewards cheating" part that everybody hates. Frankly, *I* hate it. It outrages my ethical, taxpaying, form-filling-out, rule-following, rule-enforcing soul. The problem is that the current system is totally unworkable. The canonical chart.
And people making argument "C" aren't wrong either -- passing a bill to regularize people's status, no matter how correct and humane and economically wise a thing to do, is inevitably going to make some people think, "Well, they did it before -- maybe I'll gamble that they'll do it again." Then again, if you're watching your kids starve, you've got plenty of incentive to migrate right there.
The annoying part about the transcript Stanley linked is that the CIS guy mostly didn't get called on his factual mis-statements. Being able to file for your parents, 13 years down the road, does nothing if your parents crossed the border without papers and aren't eligible to adjust their status anyway.
Has anyone come across good local news about Iraqis in Detroit?
I don't know if it counts as local, but Time magazine bought a house in Detroit and sent reporters out there for a year.
One of their final articles focused on Arab and Muslim immigrants' economic contributions.
24.3 -- That leaped out at me too.
The CT thread on immigration makes a useful point: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/08/the-coming-labour-shortage/#comments.
26 reminds me that there is one more consideration here: In my years of talking about this, I've become convinced that there is a significant subset of people for whom consigning other people to a long-term illegal status is a feature, not a bug.
Even when they buy the demographic argument, they look at the Bolivian housekeepers in Chile and the Peruvian home health aides in Italy and the landscapers and farmworkers in the US, and it doesn't make them think "There should be a way for these people to immigrate legally!"
Among the hardcore 10-20% of anti-immigrant opinion in the US, it's almost impossible to overestimate the amount of punitiveness they think is good. The astonishing thing to me is that so many of these people are policymakers. Normally having to actually compromise on a regular basis gets the rough edges rubbed off. Doesn't seem to happen on this issue. The more suffering and living in fear, the better.
17: It certainly does in localities that were previously home to relatively isolated labor markets. I'm thinking of rural meat packing plants that were paying $10 to $15 an hour back during the 80s and now, after decades of inflation, pay less than that in many cases. It helped the regional economy, but the transition costs fell almost entirely on a single generation of less educated workers.
That's what's happened under the current system, where the competition in the labor market is largely from undocumented immigrants. Letting people in legally would have a different effect: I think there's a good shot it would be less, rather than more, damaging to the labor markets at the low end.
13: the kind of undocumented immigrant who wants to come here and raise their kids to be good citizens
Yeah, but none of the 27% crazification factor people believe such immigrants actually exist. What they say is "BUT THEY STILL COMMITTED A CRIME!" What they mean is "BUT THEY'RE STILL DARK SKINNED!"
29: Agreed. But, the problem is "This time we're really going to have a law that we enforce" is not the world's most convincing argument.
The world's most convincing argument remains, "I like you because you're different from those other guys/girls."
In considering meaningful immigration reform, who should we be directing our arguments to, the 27% of the population who are irrational bigots, but control the public discourse, or the remaining part of the population who right now doesn't have a voice?
I take it as a given that simply opposing anything proposed by the anti-immigration bigots does not lead to a coherent policy or just laws. That method cannot, for instance, streamline immigration procedures. I also assume that as a practical matter, you can't simply throw open the borders and be done with it. But any time you try to reason out a policy addressing legitimate concerns, the conversations gets hijacked by assholes.
The two problems with argument (C) are: (1) there is little to no evidence that either the incentive effects of the DREAM Act will have any meaningful effect whatseover on the number of illegal immigrants -- who are heavily driven by access and short-term economic trends; (2) there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the country can deal fairly well with an even larger number of illegal immigrants than we have today, so the tiny impact of additional immigrants the DREAM Act might provoke are just fine.
Anyhow, Carp in 21 gets it right; the anti-immigration movement is about culture, not economics, and the economic arguments, which are inconclusive at best (actually, they strongly favor increased immigration, and are inconclusive as to the effect of immigration on native working class income) are really just window dressing.
35.2 -- I assume that you join me in adopting 28, as to particular locales.
Sure, absolutely as to particular locales and industries.
I should also say that, while simple dislike of brown people explains most of the anti-immigrant movement, there is a core of culture-based resistance to immigration which I find totally understandable, even if I don't really agree with it in practice. It really would be disconcerting to have been a white aerospace worker who lived in, say, Whittier, CA for the past 50 years and have watched it have become so completely Mexicanized and Spanish-speaking. While my basic attitude is "that's America, these are your neighbors, get used to it" it's certainly humanly understandable to have a negative reaction to really rapid, disruptive cultural change.
It's sort of inevitable that the part of the US that is geographically and historically part of Mexico is going to end up with lots of Mexicans. If people didn't want it to happen then they shouldn't have invaded in the first place!
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Fucking Luke Scott. I try to ignore the fact that he's an asshole because he hits a lot of home runs for my team but, christ, in addition to bringing firearms to the locker room, turns out he's a birther too.
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Yeah, it's all about culture. It's about folks who have trouble penetrating the accent to know that they do, in fact, want fries with that.
But me, my forebears were among the wave of polacks, wops, and dagos that caused the door to swing shut. Hell, Dad got bored at the grandparents' house because no one spoke English. So I say fuck 'em bring 'em on.
Oooh, this is a good spot to tell a cute story about what immigrants (some of them illegal) have done for Sally, that also lets me brag shamelessly.
So, she's moved on from her dual-language immersion school, where she picked up fluent Spanish from her Dominican and to a lesser degree Mexican classmates, as well as from the teachers, which means that at her current school she's in the Spanish for native speakers class rather than the beginner Spanish class, and she's doing really well: I am told, although I can't check myself, that she can be rude in Dominican, Mexican, and Colombian Spanish. But she's a little visually out of place in the class, which is exclusively Latino/a other than her.
The other week, the teacher announced that they were doing a folk-tales project, and they'd collected folk tales from every single country in Latin America, so they could be absolutely sure that the heritage of everyone in the class was represented. And then everyone turned and looked at Sally.
What she should have done, of course, is directed them to the Clancy Brothers as evidence that she may have had some Spanish speaking heritage, as long as you were willing to go back to the Peninsular Wars for it.
Nah, this is what she should have said.
she's doing really well: I am told, although I can't check myself, that she can be rude in Dominican, Mexican, and Colombian Spanish
Is that really what constitutes "doing really well"?
She's getting good grades on her writing and grammar tests; I was bragging about her colloquial fluency as well. Brag, brag, my children are wonderful.
39 - At least you can take solace in the fact that the Orioles have been soul-crushingly awful forever. If it weren't for the curse of Jeffy Meier, I'm sure Scott would come out in support of single-payer.
But me, my forebears were among the wave of polacks, wops, and dagos that caused the door to swing shut. Hell, Dad got bored at the grandparents' house because no one spoke English. So I say fuck 'em bring 'em on.
Sometimes, when I've encountered the 'it's horrible the way them Mexicans insist on speaking Spanish, not like earlier immigrants from Europe' I just switch to Polish.
I was wondering if that comment of mine would run afoul of the shore patrol. I guess not.
Is that really what constitutes "doing really well"?
Sounds pretty nontrivial to me. I don't know enough to be intentionally rude in anything but English.
I have a firm enough grasp of the English language to be unintentionally rude.
I used to think there was some merit to the fear that immigrants from certain cultures might not have values compatible with liberal democracy, and this might cause problems. Then I realized that most USians don't have values compatible with liberal democracy, so.
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>a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101208/ap_on_bi_ge/us_tax_cuts">Who Is Holding the Economy Hostage to Tax Cuts for Billionaires?
One Democratic opponent, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, forecast a result that would abruptly reverse Congress' voting pattern of the first two years of Obama's term: "It will be passed by virtually all the Republicans and a minority of Democrats."
At least the battlelines will be drawn. I am on the side of Barney Frank, Keith Olbermann, Jamie Galbraith, Digby, and progressive Democrats. IIRC, the thread below correctly, LB and CC are on the side of Obama, Wall Street, and the House Republicans.
Who is for declaring the Obama tax deal for billionaires DOA?
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I am overexcited because it looks like the Obama betrayal will either fail, or definitively reveal Obama for the Reaganite Republican he really is always was.
Wow, this is just perfect. Lame duck Dems kill "tax cut."
Optics, process, bah humbug. One party fucks me with ruthless efficiency, the other with hamhanded bungling.
I don't want to give in to despair. Really, I don't. I don't want to advocate things like decorating Christmas trees with bankers either. I sure as shit don't want to keep sitting around reading blogs about what we should do. Especially since they never actually say what that is. They don't know. I don't know. We're all throwing up our hands. What is to be done?
52 -- Bob, I haven't looked at the thread since I dropped out of it (except to drop back in hours later off topic) but I think you'd have to say that LB and I are not on the same side of this one. She's with the angels.
I'm glad that Barney Frank et al get to take that position without actually endangering the extension of unemployment benefits. Or risking the political consequences of raising taxes on middle income people.
But you're right, it might be dead: one hears Republican objections from out on the fringe. A whole lot of Dems in the House are still going to have to vote for this thing even if 80% of House Republicans go for it.
54.last: When in danger or in doubt
Run in circles scream and shout
And it's good politics, both for House Dems and the President, if this gets the votes of all the players on the Republican side.
http://www.archive.org/download/sci1998-09-26.4011.flac16/sci1998-09-26d2t05.flac
Post title gave me an ear worm (see second verse).
Night all.
alameida asks why Digby isn't on the a-list blogrole with Yglles and Klein
Democrats have never allowed the rate to be cut, even temporarily, in the history of the program, because payroll taxes feed the Social Security trust fund and create the political base of support for the program, said Nancy Altman, author of "The Battle For Social Security", a history of the program, and head of the advocacy group Social Security Works. Republicans have won a long-sought victory, even as President Obama hails it as a win for his party....never, never, never in 75 years before Obama
Change we can believe in?
Here's Jamie Galbraith is worth reading
"Programmatic liberalism is essentially dead for a good long time, and small bore stuff is probably the best we can hope for over the next 10-20 years -- though social liberalism will continue to make steady advances. I reserve judgment on whose fault that is." Kevin Drum, tired of linking.
What social liberals don't seem to get, in the way Lenin and Debs and crew got in the last century is that "rich get richer and poor get poorer" means that the rich have power and they will play with war.
Anyone supporting this bill is supporting Empire and war.
59.last: He knows when you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
What social liberals don't seem to get, in the way Lenin and Debs and crew got in the last century is that "rich get richer and poor get poorer" means that the rich have power and they will play with war.
Er, I think we get that.
"A great grey frog now crouches
On the throne of a former prince
And its endless croaking...croaking
Has no power to convince."
Dory Previn (getting free of her father)
Am I the only one who is pleased with the way the tax cut debate seems to be playing out? On the one hand, you've got Obama saying that the Republicans have successfully held the middle class hostage to extort money for the rich, and on the other hand you've got the liberals saying we shouldn't let the Republicans extort the middle class to pay off the fat cats.
DeMint desperately wants to drag the conversation back to the "death tax," but I don't think he's going to succeed.
This thread is dead, but I thought I'd slip this in to get it on the record for posterity.
Here we've got a leading conservative light explaining how kids don't deserve subsidized meals because their parents are irresponsible if they can't put food on the table.