Haven't done anything myself, unless one of those Facebook comments counts. And, in defense of obnoxious virtue-signaling, am I the only person who thinks "virtue-signaling" is obnoxious? I mean, sure, don't be self-righteous, etc., but 90 percent of the time the term is used it seems to come from someone who thinks racism and police brutality aren't actually all that bad.

Probably yes? I just get self-conscious talking about what I've done because it feels self-aggrandizing. I just used "virtue-signaling" as a stand-in for self-consciousness without thinking very much about it.

Anyway, I mostly need to really, really not start a fight with an ancient friend's conservative mother on Facebook.

Feeling guilty about not doing anything concrete; gave a pile of money to RAICES which seems like a good thing but not exactly on point of stopping this atrocity in the first place.

One of the most depressing things about the past year generally and the children-in-camps thing specifically is that it turns out that the answer to "what would you have done if the US was like 1930s Germany" turns out to be "do my ordinary boring job and live an ordinary life with ever-increasing general anxiety."

Yes I've given money and time to immigrants' rights groups (and other groups) and will do some more, but man does that ever feel insufficient.

They need to move kids around and they can't use cattle cars yet, so it can't be hidden very well.

5 is so right. On some level I really thought there'd be step-by-step obvious steps to take.

I think I was (subconsciously) picturing government resistance as fitting into the natural disaster model. Like, show up here! Bring supplies here! Clear steps!

1. Go to beer hall.
2. Break legs off chairs.
3. Break heads of fascist scum.

I think the online discussion does actually help at least a little in drawing attention to the issue and putting the administration on the defensive. This article (which I saw when my state senator posted it on FB) has some concrete ways to help, which are admittedly mostly organizations to donate to.

Yes, me too, except with even more opportunities to take-a-stand-and-do-the-right-thing. I guess (and I guess this was the point of the OP, so I'm repeating something that was well-said in a worse way) that social media makes the taking-a-stand part easy but only in a totally impotent and dumb and unsatisfying way.

11 to 8

5.1 Well, I, for one, always knew that I would be worthless in this situation.

However, the 1930s Germany stuff is slightly exaggerated. People are still trying to get into the U.S.

13.2 - yes,you're right. Exaggeration is dumb and helps no one. I was just trying to get a pithy way of making the "didn't expect to be so useless" point.

WE WOULD HAVE STAYED IF ONLY THEY HAD LET US

The administration really is on the defensive about this. Notably, even very mainstream news sources like Politico are calling out their lies very explicitly:

Trump and his allies have falsely stated that their hands are tied. They've argued that Democrats are to blame for the much-criticized practice and that the administration is only enforcing laws that are already in place.

Neither argument has stood up to scrutiny. The separation policy was orchestrated not by Democrats, the minority party on both sides of Capitol Hill, but by the Trump administration, which sent a directive ramping up the practice and could send another ending it. And while the White House has claimed that the law mandates that it separate families who cross the border illegally, no such law exists. It is the administration's new "zero-tolerance" policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers as criminals that has prompted the separations.

10 is true, but it is highly dependent on whether or not you've whittled your feed down to an echo chamber or not. Or maybe not - maybe it's ok to be a degree removed from assholes and provide links to people who maintain those friendships. It feels empty though to share things into an echo chamber.

2: For what it's worth I was thinking of things like this, which I've linked to here before.

13.1: Same here. I could and should be doing even more activism and donating than I am, but in the end there's just no other way I could make a difference. I don't mean that in the "one person can't change the world" sense, I mean that in the "I have a BA in English, live and work in safe Congressional districts, and have a 9-to-5 job I'd like to keep" sense.

All I've done is donate to RAICES. So I can't even put the "virtue" in virtue-signaling.

The other thing I did was start studying to take the test to become a voter registrar. Not helpful for the children at this exact moment, but something I could think to do at this exact moment, so.

Scattered thoughts:

Vetting and sharing information on social media does seem helpful: at least we're able to "resist" information blackouts. Expressing horror or snark in a perfunctory way is less valuable, obviously.

And no, I think the 1930s comparison, which I make to myself daily, really is important, because of the basic question it asks of you: how important is your job and your comfortable life? It's easy to imagine asking your family to make sacrifices if you're sure you'll be remembered as a hero, at least by the people you help. But no one can be sure of that. And there was indeed a shit-ton of ineffective resistance in 1930s Germany and later.

I can imagine plenty of helpful things I could do if I were actually working within those detention facilities, or as part of the immigration bureaucracy, but a) I'm not sure I could pull them off, and b) I am sure people would spit on me as I left the office.

The very specific question I ask myself is: can I bring myself to set aside time and money to fly to Wisconsin for a week and help register voters, and/or make calls and knock doors in support of candidates like Tammy Baldwin? If I can't do that much, then I'm fundamentally not serious.

I have no spare money, so I've been giving some of the time I have. Last week I helped someone gather documentation for an asylum claim and helped someone else fill out passport applications for US-born children. I've also been trained to serve as a marshal for immigrant events and to know what ICE warrants need to contain to be valid in the off-chance anyone ever shows up with one, but that feels more about making people feel safer than doing anything meaningful because almost all the harassment is happening at job sites and in neighborhoods. I'm hoping to be at the next event where local churches have a longstanding ID program for people who are undocumented (homeless, immigrants) that local law enforcement recognizes, so trying to make sure more people get covered that way. I still feel pretty useless and inadequate. Didn't take the girls to the rally because we were busy and because I can't very well claim I'm opposed to breaking up families since they know they live with me instead of their original ones.

(And I hope that doesn't seem braggy. It really isn't very much at all that I'm doing. I just think concrete details sometimes spark connections elsewhere.)

I've spent quite a bit of time with people who were children in 1930s Germany, and have never harbored any illusions about what I would do.

I'm going to go to our local demonstration on Wednesday. I'd go to one at an ICE facility if there was one nearby. I'm not sure if there is, accoring to this map there's a very small group in the county jail in Great Falls. https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/detention-statistics/

I already have a suit against the sheriff there for the ACLU that's not related to this. Maybe we can/should try another. I was part of a Facebook debate over the weekend, mostly with lawyers who are in the legislature, about whether and how we could enforce of constitution's individual human dignity provisions against this outrage on the borders. It doesn't have to be me: someone with better political connections in Great Falls ought to be the lead on this.

I think comparisons to 1930s Germany are totally apt. It was incremental, each step necessary because the last step didn't stop anti-social elements from interfering with/subverting the will of the people. People meaning us, not those others who happened to have found themselves living in the same country, or who've embraced aline ideologies.

And yes, I think sharing that crying child hostages recording isn't just beneficial, it's necessary.

Just like everyone, every story about the family separations makes me cry. I want to think I'd do more, but I'm defeated by the distance to Texas, by my elected officials who are already doing exactly what I'd want, by wanting to keep my job.

The best thing ever happened when Sessions showed up to address sheriffs in Sacramento. That was fucking excellent, it was like a free give-away. We protested before work, it was so close. There was no time to organize a march, so no one had to get a permit. It was just this huge freebie and I felt better for a day, that I hadn't wasted it.

I am doing things. This weekend I spoke at a fundraiser for an organization that teaches doctors to do abortions. I invited my friends, so that was tickets sold that wouldn't have otherwise been purchased.

I'm working on a side project against Nunes. I figured his strong point in the Valley is water, so I'm working with people in the Valley to come up with water issues that will be strong for his opponent (Janz). I thought of that and organized the effort, and am getting some kindof surprising results. Like, the thing that makes everyone raise up their heads sharply and inhale deep is the promise of municipal swimming pools. Dude, I'd promise every fucking voter in the Valley a swimming pool in their backyard if they'd come out and vote against Nunes. Every time I get scared, I think, I'd do a lot more than this to help get rid of Nunes, so I should also be willing to do the small next step.

So that's what I can do. What I cannot do is listen to the recording that just came out of children sobbing after being separated. I know I'm not doing the thing, like flying there and, I dunno, pulling doors off their hinges. I'm not ignoring it, but what can I do from here?

The stories about heroes from the 30's in Germany are also stories about people who had some sort of capacity and leverage, even if it was just a storage room on their farm. If I had leverage, like faking documents for a group of people, then I could use it. But I don't feel like I have leverage on the family separations, or at least I'm not thinking of any. Calling my already like-minded representatives is not leverage.

There are some conservative people at the edges of my social network. I'm hoping some of what I post shows up in their feeds, if only to remind them that there is more out there than what echo-chamber algorithms are giving them.

But yeah, I do feel damn helpless.

Even if your reps agree with you, Megan, it's still worth letting them know you support what they're doing. God knows they get plenty of shit from the Nazis who don't agree with them. Politicians like compliments as much as anyone does. Helps keep them going.

It would be wrong to call my representative and try to convince the person answering the phone to quit their job, right?

Doesn't Stephen Miller kinda look like Reinhard Heydrich? It's the nacreous, dead eyes and the pulling-the-wings-off-flies-was-fun-but-it's-even-better-with-real-people smile they share.

This is somewhere where I think talking with people, sharing things online, getting into arguments with people on Facebook, etc is actually not at all a worthless thing to do. This is a new low in the modern era for our country's relationship with immigrants, but not by a lot. I see this as an inevitable outcome of the path we've been going down for decades. I think everyone has realized it's been bad, but it's only recently that it's really entered into the public consciousness how bad it is and how much worse it could get.

Since it's new, it's an important precondition for any successful collective action that there be common knowledge that the continuation of the status quo makes us moral monsters. People need to know how bad it is, know that everybody else knows, and so on, because we can't really collectively deliberate what we're going to do until everyone is on the same page, and I think we are only just getting there.

There are a lot of people who have been fighting this fight for a long time, and that means that they've thought through this. Here's a thread from someone on twitter who has good suggestions.

https://twitter.com/kksteffany/status/1008744420945129473?s=21

I think it's important at this point to also talk about what the goal should be. In my opinion, the barriers to citizenship need to be drastically and permanently reduced, all the way to the point of allowing people to more or less show up at the border, fill out some paperwork, and become citizens. Climate change will very soon make large swaths of Central America uninhabitable. We are morally compelled to accept refugees without questions and without reservation. The long-term policy discussion at this point should be about how many billions of refugees we are prepared to accept, and we need to get it there as quickly as possible. Anything less than this will result in the recurrence of the status quo every few decades at best and environmental genocide at worst.

In Texas, I think phone banking, block walking, and knocking on doors for Beto is worth doing. He leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion, but he's the first politician I think I have seen in the national spotlight who has clearly put more than a few minutes of thought into immigration. The elevation of representatives who represent immigrant -- especially border -- communities can't come soon enough. It would also be a major blow to the freedom caucus and to border militants to unseat Ted Cruz with someone who clearly isn't willing to shy away from a fight about the border.

The only useful thing I imagine we could do, aside from more donations, is foster a kid- our kids are all fluent in Spanish so that would be helpful- but it doesn't sound as if anyone is looking for that, first they need to bust the kids out of prison.

Oh and we even have a secret little attic space where we could hide people from the brownshirts but it's only four feet tall so the refugees would have to be really short.

I think it's important at this point to also talk about what the goal should be. In my opinion, the barriers to citizenship need to be drastically and permanently reduced, all the way to the point of allowing people to more or less show up at the border, fill out some paperwork, and become citizens.

That seems like an overreach on the goal when "not torturing small children" is a debate whose outcome is still pending.

What I don't understand is why, with the giant "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" banner hanging from this atrocity, have the courts not done anything to put a stop to it?

Like, I literally don't understand why. They've put the kybosh on Trump's border shenanigans before. Why not now? What's the hold up?

36

Perhaps it seems like a stretch, but it was only a few years ago when almost all of us were complacent about similar atrocities happening when Obama was President, and now we are all asking what we can do. This kind of thing is hard for people to accept when it is actually on the news, so I think it's possible that changing more minds will not be as hard as you think.

I think it's pretty obvious that a plurality of voters would support candidates who organized a genocide to prevent that much immigration. They'd pretend to believe it wasn't happening until it was done and then blame the media for not telling them.

I realize that comes off as abrasive. I don't mean it to. This is a moral atrocity that's been creeping up on us since DHS was founded. These are easy to get away with in America as long as nobody talks about them, but people are talking about them more, and I think we should keep talking about them. I think you should talk about them with conservative friends and family members -- esepecially liberal business republicans. I think you should let them know that you understand that they aren't bad people and that they don't want this, but that it's simply not as high of a priority to them as maintaining the large faction of republican racists who provide the critical votes needed to make tax cuts politically viable. Let them know you understand that they think that this is bad, but it's an acceptable price to pay.

And I think if you talk to democratic candidates or you go to democratic fundraisers or you're in liberal circles, you should be clear that you think a permanent and drastic immigration fix should come prior to anything else once they have power again, and you should demand stronger stances from democrats on this.

Even if Trump wakes up tomorrow, fucks the wrong goat, and gets a new instantly fatal venereal disease that Sessions also gets from sticking his nose up Trump's ass, all those people who voted for him are still there. It is less than the number who voted for Clinton, but more than enough that you can assume they'll get somebody else into office eventually.

And I think if you talk to democratic candidates or you go to democratic fundraisers or you're in liberal circles, you should be clear that you think a permanent and drastic immigration fix should come prior to anything else once they have power again, and you should demand stronger stances from democrats on this.

Exactly this but for the other party happened in November 2016.

I'm not exactly a ray of sunshine on this and I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think the child-cages hurt the Republicans in the midterms even though it is unpopular with Republican voters. What the topic the voters are thinking about matters almost as much of the content. I'd prefer the election to be fought over basic human decency and corruption, not immigration.

I should probably get some sleep. Goodnight.

I suspect 43 is 100% right.

To elaborate: most of what Trivers is saying appears to be aimed at changing right-wing minds. Right-wing minds will not be changed: if presented with evidence that their stance on immigration makes them monsters, they will deny the evidence and double down on that stance. Any political capital to be had is in mobilizing the left.

38: children were not being systematically separated from their parents in this way under Obama. I don't deny there abuses, but to say this is more of the same seems nihilistic.

43: didn't Katrina help sink Bush?

I was joking with a friend that if we need a superhero movie reference to explain why this is bad, we could show them the opening to X-Men (or X-Men First Class). But then I rewatched it, and I remembered it wrong -- even movie Nazis don't put kids in concentration camps. (They were putting his mother in a concentration camp.)

For whatever it's worth, both Democrats and Republicans clearly think this issue is likely to help Democrats significantly in the midterms.

31: "It would be wrong to call my representative and try to convince the person answering the phone to quit their job, right?"

No, it would not. Tell them, "Just because the Stasi is going to have someone to answer the phone doesn't mean it has to be you."

didn't Katrina help sink Bush?

Interestingly, probably not. I had a quick look around and found this http://pollsandvotes.com/PaV/2017/08/recap-katrina-bush-approval/
and this https://news.gallup.com/poll/24283/Little-Impact-Katrina-Bushs-Overall-Job-Ratings.aspx
and the general conclusion is that it's very difficult to identify any effect of Katrina on Bush's approval rating. Maybe it pushed him down a few points for a couple of months, but then he recovered.

But that's just based on a few seconds googling.

Doesn't Stephen Miller kinda look like Reinhard Heydrich?

Not a huge amount. He looks really, really like Vladimir Putin, though.

Are there any good templates for letters to Senatorsvand Representatives that I could use?

Even if your federal reps are on the right side of things, it is still worth it to call them. There is a lot that a senator can do besides introducing or cosponsoring legislation, and a high volume of very upset constituent calls is one thing that pushes them from the normal channels (legislation, hearing question, press release, social media) into more drastic action (shut down the Senate floor, show up at a detention center unannounced, insist on votes even when their caucus hates it).

Also, the older of the Calif. senators is...not so great on this issue in particular. She's OK, but she could do a lot more, and tends to do the bare minimum to not get yelled at. Especially in an election year, there is pressure to be exerted.

Don't let your senators get away with "I cosponsored the relevant bill." The question is: "You are a United States Senator. How are you going to make this stop?"

I'm completely fucked up about this and feel absolutely helpless. It's much worse because I'm staying with my Trumper parents while I'm in NY and thought we'd had a truce about watching Fox news while I'm around and yesterday my father put it on and I flipped out and gave him a mouthful. The last two years have been like this but this is far worse and if it weren't for my brother who's just ended treatment for his Stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma and his kids I don't think I'd come back to NY for leave.

As with Trump, I wouldn't think that policy reversals or bad narratives make that much of a difference in opinion polls, but show up in elections in the forms of enthusiasm and turnout. Katrina, I think, was demoralizing for a marginal group of Republican supporters (or Republican-leaning independents) who then sat out the 2006 midterms. Those elections were primarily about Iraq and corruption, but I think it's fair to conflate Katrina with Iraq as a demonstration of incompetence and cause for a loss of confidence.

And, obviously, GWB wasn't on the ballot. And the president's party usually does lose seats in the midterms.

Trump is really having a hard time picking a position on the child hostages situation. Is he hamstrung by Democrats, executing a brilliant strategy of changing the conversation from Healthcare to Immigration, or the real victim here?

Also, ICE uses a lot of local and private jails and prisons to detain immigrants. Diminishing their detention capacity is key to keeping more immigrants in the country, and keeping families together. You can urge your local governments that run these jails or contract with private companies to operate prisons to end their contracts with ICE and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which is the part of HHS that handles the kids).

Here's a map of everywhere ICE detains people. These are adults, not kids, but as long as the adults are in detention, they're separated from their kids.

https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities

55: That sounds horrible, Barry! Sorry you have to go through that.

47 Yeah Obama separated children. It's fine to be uninformed about this but don't assert things that are clearly false. https://shadowproof.com/2018/06/15/separation-immigrant-families-part-deportation-obama-now-trump-expanding-practice/

Separating children by sending them into foster care is not the same as caging children separately from their parents. It's not even close.

I'm well past the point of believing the best of anybody who rarely comments coming in repeating Trump talking points and linking to something that uses "liberal" as a slur. It's nothing but chaff to block effective action.

37 is a good question.

I think it's pretty obvious that a plurality of voters would support candidates who organized a genocide to prevent that much immigration. They'd pretend to believe it wasn't happening until it was done and then blame the media for not telling them.

...continue to deny it ever happened forever and ever.

Separating children by sending them into foster care is not the same as caging children separately from their parents. It's not even close.

And it was deporting parents who had committed crimes, and placing the vast majority of those children with relatives, not separating asylum-seeking families and keeping children in detention facilities.

Which is not to say that it's not traumatic for the children and should have been done differently. But it's not the same scale of humanitarian crisis by any stretch.

60 Assuming that is directed at me do you realize that shadowproof is left wing so neither them or me are a fan of Trump. This is meant as criticism of Obama from his left. Because immigrant and undocumented activists called Obama the deporter in chief. Truly effective action is going to require acknowledging the policies of the Obama administration.

Putting the worst spin on Obama in a conversation about Trump is not "left". It's being the right's useful idiot.

A facility run by Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office is still on that list.

"shadowproof.com" looks like some high-quality journalism.

"President Donald Trump's talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have the potential to usher in an era of nonviolent coexistence. However, the political establishment, corporate media, and foreign policy think tanks are deeply upset that Trump offered to end United States military exercises early in the diplomatic talks for de-nuclearization by North Korea. The backlash is the product of a commitment to U.S. empire..."

"Though Trump May Seem More Callous, Obama Had Higher Rate Of Deportation"

"Can you think of any men who were held accountable for CIA torture? No, you cannot. That is why deputy CIA director Gina Haspel should be the agency's next director..."

And this attempt at humour:
"A 33 year-old man, who has #AbsolutelyWithHer and #WhenFemsResist in his Twitter bio, is still waiting on a liberal hotline for people who need talking points on President Donald Trump for their Thanksgiving dinners. The hotline was launched by Stand Above Impeachable Lies, or SAIL..."

65 - Maybe instead of trolling with misinformation and spin driven by ignorance of distinctions on immigration law, you could help my mental effort (it's not easy) to avoid conflating all people who inisist they are leftists-not-liberals with the online clowns who do suchd discredit to the "left" (I have a hard time temembering that, for example, the DSA isn't primarily made up of idiots obsessed with yelling about liberals on twitter). You can achieve this goal by posting evidence of five real-world things you've fone today -- donations, service, your job, specific words of encouragement, whatever, but social media and online conments don't count -- to help achieve any left-progressive goal. I won't even limit it to immigration to make it easier for you. Don't you think meeting this challenge would be a better way to advance whatever left-but-not-liberal goal you claim to have? Go ahead and do it, I'll be happy to look like a liberal jerk for putting you to the task. Then you can both win the argument and actually help thenworld.

69 I've been at work mostly today which limits my activism for today but I'll count that as one as I work in public health including for refugees. Last night I hosted people to write letters to senators about separated children. I spent a little time today planning the next meeting of the DSA accessibility working group for my chapter which I co-lead. At lunch I planned with a coworker to visit a detention facility in my state. next month. I've made plans for the two upcoming protests for separated children in my city next week and the 30th. I certainly don't achieve real life instances of political activism per day but I suspect I'm doing more than most in America.

I am left wing and I think the lack of attention to hold Obama accountable for his failures on immigration, on housing and wall street fraud, a crackdown on whistleblowers and so on is part of what has brought us to this situation so that is what I say online. But that's mostly not what real world activism is about.

Thanks!

Lots of people have been posting about their revelations about Germans in pre-WWII Germany, and how easy it is for people to be willing to swallow a story that makes the government's actions regrettable but justified. But that seems to assume that all the Germans except maybe the SS and the leadership were good people, and what this case has me wondering is exactly how many Germans were totally OK with the camps and the genocide as long as they were winning. Is the 27% crazification factor universal?

What if it's genetic? Most white Americans are Germans if they aren't something reasonable like Irish.

67 doesn't surprise me, working shifts at clinics for DACA renewal and naturalization applications I've heard from supervising attorneys the CC Sherriff is particularly bad at providing documentation to support U visa applications, they basically stonewall.

A couple of months ago the sponsoring organizations started to tell us to advise applicants to provide a non residential address, particularly if the applicant had moved since the last contact with the government, so as to at least slow down agents coming to seize them. And the sickening fatalism of the clients in response ... Despair inducing and chilling. They know they are marked out, no matter how blameless and sterling their lives.

60: Shadowproof is from Gosztola, who appears to be a Putin shill. https://www.thedailybeast.com/defending-putins-propagandists

Can we have a clean up in aisle 59? A shill or useful idiot dropped a doody.

72: Probably. Also, they were probably more okay with it when they started losing, because fear makes another 30% or so crazy too. (The 27% being afraid and crazy all the time.)

Which is the story, probably. Obama was the clearest possible signal that Those People are winning.

72 - the November '32 election is IMO a pretty good baseline proxy (reasonably free election, clear that a vote for the NSDAP was in fact a vote to have Hitler in power and not a strategic vote, clear by that point that Nazis would be bad in power.) Hitler got 33% of the vote, not too far from the crazification factor. You can assume that some decent percentage of that vote, indeed the majority, wasn't gung ho from the outsett for Auschwitz, but safe to say that almost all of them were at a minimum recklessly indifferent toa brutal antisemitic dictatorship.

I'm also going to leave this here (link via LGM) because it lays out what actually is happening at the border and what is and is not different from previous administrations, in the hope that people will actually read it. We've talked about this before here and there's lots of information elsewhere, but maybe it's a public service because there sure is a lot of confusion about immigration and immigration law.

http://www.boards2go.com/boards/board.cgi?action=read&id=1529340044.93821&user=thevictors&page=5

72. There's no exact fraction there, but Peter Gay's Weimar Culture is pretty good. Assassinations of left-ish politicians were super common and not particularly prosecuted.

79: Thank you. There was a thread going around Twitter yesterday by an immigration lawyer talking about Obama's policies, and that post clarifies it, specifically that under the previous administration families weren't separated (except in the case of more serious crimes, as is standard in America). Not that the Obama admin's policies were necessarily great, but there's an order of magnitude difference here.

One big part of it is how public it gets. And another is the fact that it involved children. And it's not just us. Reasonable, sane Australia has been doing cruel things to its migrants for years now and most Australians are fine with it as long as they can avoid thinking about it.

81 - Yes. And as Heebie and others have pointed out there is a big difference between (a) separating children from their parents who are seeking asylum at the border under international law, specifically to punish the asylum-seekers and deter others from seeking asylum in the United States (what Trump is doing) and (b) separating families because a family member of an alien family is, after being incarcerated in the United States, deported back to his or her home country (what immigration law has been like for a long time, with a substantial increase in those deportations of convicted US felons under the Obama administration) and (c) detaining some immigrants, including families and unaccompanied minors but WITHOUT separating families, at the border during the processing of asylum applications, which is what the Obama administration also did.

Lots of people, including the Trump administration but some people with other agendas, are trying to blur these situations and use the general awfulness of immigration law -- and let's admit it, even in the best possible scenario any policy besides truly "open borders" are going to have at least some fairly awful human stories, and US immigration policy has been horrible for a long time under Democratic and Republican administrations -- in order to minimize the brutality and unprecedented nature of the Trump administration's actions towards asylum applicants.

Some other random immigration facts: (1) The link points out something else really important, which is that until 2005-2010 it was fairly easy to cross the US-Mexican border without being detected. After 2010, at the latest, that was no longer the case. In some ways immigration policy was better under, say., Reagan, than it was under Obama for one reason alone -- it was much easier to illegally cross the US border; (2) Although there is immigration taking place along the Mexican border, there is almost no net immigration of Mexicans into the United States anymore, and hasn't been since 2008 -- Mexico is a waystation for people fleeing Central America, or increasingly the middle east or Africa or other parts of the world; (3) despite all the "MS-13" rhetoric the distinctive and new feature of the Trump administration immigration policy is precisely that it does NOT target actual criminal activity as the primary locus of immigration enforcement. Instead, the move is to aggressively pursue the least even-arguably threatening immigrants. Note also that the current administration has done so without a substantial increase of resources devoted to the immigration agencies. That means that the hoped-for increases in processing immigrants out of the country come largely from pressuring IJs and others to ignore procedural safeguards.

I have a hard time temembering that, for example, the DSA isn't primarily made up of idiots obsessed with yelling about liberals on twitter). You can achieve this goal by posting evidence of five real-world things you've fone today -- donations, service, your job, specific words of encouragement, whatever, but social media and online conments don't count -- to help achieve any left-progressive goal.

I haven't done anything except take my child to the hospital for a checkup and take a nap, and now I'm working and waiting for food to come out of the oven. What do I win? (I did do some DSA social media work as well as three things connecting with other chapters because I think the harassment grievance policy I wrote is better than most and they're looking for advice, but that has nothing to do with liberals.) Later I'll go to a neighborhood meeting cookout and I guess that's about it, really. But again, no yelling about liberals!

83 was me. To 82, even now we are (I think) much better on immigration than Australia, which is a horrorshow. Australia literally takes people who HAVE been found to be refugees under international law eligible for asylum and dumps them in Nauru, a barren and bankrupt Pacific island. Refugees deemed eligible for asylum are then trapped in Nauru with no prospects and no ability to go anyplace else (and aren't even allowed to become permanent residents of Nauru). All of that is done explicitly to punish and dissuade refugees from coming to Australia. We haven't reached the level of a secret concentration camp on a remote island for people who have been affirmatively found to be refugees protected under international law. Not yet anyway.

84 - right! But your organization (like many others) is being very ill-served by its affiliated online obsessives.

I voted for a (successful) DSA candidate this last election.

86: Sure, but my chapter itself behaves pretty well and avoids trolling and inconsequential spats, though we're heading for a big internal dustup about police at Pride. It is not complaining about liberals to say that the Democrats here are so bad I mostly can't work with them, because they're not liberals. When there are exceptions, I make exceptions.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a socialist.

That's why you have to put the stupid rose emoji after your name, Mobes! Or I guess just call yourself Thorn.

I guess this is when I should point out that DSA Rust Belt Caucus is meeting in your city in August. Nia and I will be there but I don't know yet if I'll have any free time. Probably I can take it if I want it, since I have a minivan and always have to be one of the drivers.

Let me know. I'm around most of August.

We could have a child-appropriate meet-up with secret drinking, like the usual for holidays.

83/85: Thanks for the further info. If/when we do get to Australia levels of awfulness, I imagine our secret concentration camps will be inland, since we don't have the benefit of being an island.

87: Huh, I didn't realize her district went into the city.

The DSA here (of which I'm a not very active member) is (electorally) mostly focused on local races against ossified centrist/center-right Democrats. There are situations, even now, where I think there's room for the far left to be oppositional to the center left. However, in most cases, the far left is going to have to satisfy itself with pushing the center left to be better. That's surely not universally popular in the DSA, but it's explicitly a big-tent organization. Thorn's chapter seems great. Other chapters (I hear a lot about East Bay) have issues, and national doesn't .

though we're heading for a big internal dustup about police at Pride

As Thorn certainly knows this was a big source of conflict here in Cbus.

Being an island is pretty of key to the hole Nauru awfulness. The whole fiction is that they've never actually arrived in Australia (though that's increasingly transparent, e.g. when some people came to Australia for medical treatment and then were sent back). What the UK does is have its camps located in France for the same reason. (Not saying that the UK camps are as bad as Australia's, but they are similar in terms of them being located in another country.) To do something similar the US would really need to either be seriously cooperating with Mexico, or go a lot further at just blatantly disregarding treaty obligations than Australia is.

The US has lots of random, mostly uninhabited island possessions in the Pacific that would be great locations for secret prison camps. Mostly claimed by various sea captains in the nineteenth century for their guano deposits, as indeed was the case with Nauru.

Yes but as UPETGI points out the whole point of using Nauru is that it is an independent (if bankrupt) country. To get the full effect we'd have to pay the government of Western Samoa a few million a year and then ship people from the Mexican border to Western Samoa and abandon them there, so that we can maintain the fiction that they never formally "entered" the United States and thus can't receive asylum here. It's kinda like stashing your money in an illicit foreign tax haven, only the "money" is Afghan children and the "haven" is a concentration camp on a remote island where people are detained indefinitely and can never escape.

Let's not give people ideas.

Well, there's already a place called Guantanamo. Not exactly the same but serves a similar purpose.

Yeah, I think they'd just throw away the fiction. Members of the administration (or perhaps just Fox News talking heads? So much awfulness, I can't keep it straight) have already defended the WWII internment of people of Japanese descent. And they don't care about international law. They also said just this week that we're not as bad as the Nazis because we aren't keeping asylum-seekers from leaving (not that that's historically accurate); that probably means that's what they want to do and just haven't gotten around to it yet.

99: Right, of course Guantanamo is exactly where they'd be kept, but the problem is how you get people to Guantanamo without them ever entering the US. People aren't traveling to the US by boat, so unless you get Mexico to arrest people and send them there I don't see how it works (again without just throwing away the fiction). Everywhere else doing this kind of thing is an island and you somehow stop people from getting to the island.

Just take a patch of land on the border in trust! While we ate at the sick dystopian musings.

At any rate, whilst i understand why i need in current crises conditions to refrain from mentioning chattel slavery, the Indian removal act, the Chinese exclusion act, etc etc etc to all crying "this isn't who we are!" Nonetheless the next time one of them mentions Raegan approvingly can i explode in rage at him-her? BECAUSE HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK EL SALVADOR GUATEMALA AND NICARAGUA BECAME SOME OF THE MOST VIOLENT NATIONS ON EARTH YOU FUCKERS?

we are (I think) much better on immigration than Australia

On the one hand, why compare, on the other hand, I think taking people's kids is actually worse.

One thing I think bears mention is that the more prisons we build, the more relatively poor local economies will have their fates tied to the continuation of aggressive anti-immigrant policy. In a lot of rural communities, prisons are huge employers, and the political backlash in the town to anything that might decrease the numbers of incarcerated people (immigrants are otherwise) will be to double down on aggressive incarceration. Even Brownsville -- which is over 90# Hispanic -- has this problem. Representatives have made a Faustian bargain where they accept an ever-increasing border security budget because it's the only federal jobs program on offer. Just like social security and Medicare and other universal programs create constituencies to defend them, the deportation industrial complex will have rabid defenders of its own soon, so it's absolutely imperative we scale ICE funding back as soon as possible, or even nix the entire organization if possible -- with jobs on offer for the laid off.

It's worse than just no other jobs because after you've grabbed a couple of babies, you're likely to grow kind of deeply committed to normalizing that behavior.

Senate GOP is signing onto a bill to end child separation - but it would be by detaining families all together.

I've for decades asserted that CA's economic development strategy was for the poor rural white people to play prison guards and the poor brown and black urban people to play inmates, and even very left left leftier than left people are repelled and think this is distasteful and kind of sick to say so baldly. But its true. Mass incarceration preceded ICE and that agency's most recent further putrefaction.

The prison guard union backed out of political spending, but the DAs, police, sheriffs, etc., are still formidable.

IHMHB the story that Deer Lodge Montana had the choice long long ago between the Ag college and the prison, and picked the latter. One reason you guys have heard of Bozeman and have not heard of Deer Lodge. Still, as you'd expect, the prison was a more likely destination for mill-workers laid off in our recent de-industrialization than either of the universities.

(One local mill, closed in 2008, is now the site of what is apparently one of the biggest bitcoin operations in North America. Progress!)

Worth noting that immigration detention, while huge and very important for border town economies (and the two big private prison companies that run facilities) is a tiny fraction of incarceration in the USA. Maybe 50k people max in immigration detention vs more than 2 million in nonimmigration prison in yhe ISA. What a country!

Yeah, I would think the relatively rapid proceeding from detention to deportation (while horrible for the people involved) lets it only be a small source of profits for contractors by comparison.

I heard the story in 109 about Merced vs. Stockton. Urban legend or common choice?

I've heard it about Albuquerque and Santa Fe, of which it is definitely not true.

113 - "You get the university, we'll get fake southwestern buildings and rich new agey weirdos, somehow you with the university will be the American city most associated with violent drug dealers the meth trade, thanks to Hollywood producers and New Mexico tax credits. Done and done."

What exactly are the factors preventing families from being reunited, soon or ever? Is the problem more volume + disorganization, or more legal barriers + deliberate malice? I know it's hard if not impossible to track people post-deportation, and hard if not impossible to match parents and kids. Still, would a more organized volunteer response to keep track of people (trying to network and communicate across borders) be possible? Yes, this question is in part just venting, hyperventilating, etc., But I can't seem to think about anything else.

It sounds like a modern retelling of the old stories "But then City A got the railroad station, and that was about it for City B."

114: Enchanting, isn't it?

116: For these states both sorts of decisions would have been around the same time, so not particularly more modern.

115 See this horrific thread for an explanation.

deliberate malice

That one!

But I think they are reunited eventually, even in Trump world. That is, if the family applies for asylum and gets it, the government of the US is gracious enough to allow parents who receive asylum to see their children. If they don't, they're deported, and I assume (maybe wrongly?) are usually sent back on the same plane. The question isn't prevention of eventual renunification, it's deliberately separating parents from children while the parents apply for asylum and are themselves in immigration detention.

horrific s/b horrifying

Ah, my same-plane assumption was overoptimistic based on 119 (which makes sense). If the family is separated, they are placed on different tracks where the kids can get asylum and avoid deportation more easily than the parents. So after separation the parents get deported on a separate plane and the kids stick around and then maybe get into the USA without their parents or more likely get sent back to Central America, just without their family. Awesome.

Or are fostered out to rabid evangelical families, especially very young children. It is going to happen, if it hasn't already.

110

This, and the general nightmarishness and fundamental injustice of incarceration generally is why I think it's important to get people to see this as part of a much, much larger problem. I maintain that if the images from the news this week make you think that we are moral monsters, then you must commit to the undoing of several decades of essentially bipartisan criminal justice policy. While I agree that Democrats have been better than Republicans and I agree that Obama was better than Trump, we can't succeed in the future until we understand why essentially well-meaning politicians in the past let it get to this point so that those conditions don't come up again.

Personally, I fear that a plausible *best-case* scenario is that Democrats take control of the White House and Congress in 2020 without a plan or a set of priorities. Almost certainly there will be a crisis to attend to, GOP obstruction in confirmation of nominees, and some budget battles. In a two-year window of time, they will have a limited time to pass bills. I worry that with people like Joe Manchin in the party and the recent memory of the Trumpian backlash, Democrats will get cold feet and pass something that grants a path to citizenship for a relatively narrow class of DREAMERs at best or even punt it to deal with something that they perceive as safer (such as health care or infrastructure, which will certainly be central issues of the 2020 campaign). The last time they held congress, a few defections and a Republican filibuster (which will almost certainly happen again), sunk the DACA deal. It is absolutely imperative that we pay close attention in 2020 primaries and support the candidate who comes out the strongest in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. This is also a reason that it is important to support Beto O'Rourke in every way you can: Beto is likely to be a solid vote on immigration and Cruz will certainly filibuster, so winning that race is a two-for-one deal -- in addition to striking at the heart of the Freedom Caucus types.

Because they're both related to immigration, things like refugees being held in private detention centers and DACA tend to get held together in peoples' minds, but this would be happening -- and this will continue happening -- independently of a DACA fix. It will just be decades of climate refugees being detained this way instead of people who were brought to America as children. Frankly, the policy discussion should be about how many billions of climate refugees we are prepared to accept in the coming decades. Unless we vocally support comprehensive reform and demand it from politicians, all of the things we have seen on the news will continue and may get worse as climate change makes Central America uninhabitable.

106

Last I heard the Senate GOP bill was an effort to speed up deportations by creating more immigration justices. This is probably preferable to holding people in cages for longer periods of time, but it seems pretty obvious that this is a shrewd attempt by Cruz to stack the immigration courts with more right wing justices. I have no idea if that's a good trade to make, but I don't think that the GOP is doing this because their consciences compel them to do so. Whether Democrats should sign on is a question immigration lawyers should probably answer.

123: and considered abandoned, so it's only six months most places before the state could terminate parents' rights and start the adoption process.

I have seen 119. Once the parents are deported it seems nearly hopeless. While they are in detention here, can anything be done that isn't already being tried? There's a New Yorker account here of the difficulty: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-government-has-no-plan-for-reuniting-the-immigrant-families-it-is-tearing-apart?mbid=nl_Daily%20061818&CNDID=21850524&spMailingID=13711769&spUserID=MTMzMTc5ODAxNzIyS0&spJobID=1421623671&spReportId=MTQyMTYyMzY3MQS2

A 10 year old with Down's. Jesus fucking Christ.

125: any legal action feasible there?

Indian families have a federal law in theory granting protections against adopting out and that's got a questionable track record of judicial enforcement so I'd not like my chances if i were trying to unwind the adoption of my very young child.

Metro DC DSA is currently yelled at a DHS Secretary while she was eating dinner at a restaurant, which I think is good.

https://www.facebook.com/MetroDCDSA/posts/803611493171511

130 Heroes.

125: according to some of the foster relief services' information, immigrant kids in foster care are unlikely to be eligible for adoption because of the impossibility of determining whether they have relatives who can claim them. So at least the major Catholic and Lutheran organizations aren't looking to this as a chance to steal babies.

125: according to some of the foster relief services' information, immigrant kids in foster care are unlikely to be eligible for adoption because of the impossibility of determining whether they have relatives who can claim them. So at least the major Catholic and Lutheran organizations aren't looking to this as a chance to steal babies.

130: Yes!

132: Not creating opportunities for kid-stealing is a good criterion, I suppose, but does that means they just stay in group or foster homes indefinitely, until 18?

Main-stream adoption organizations will refrain from baby stealing, but I suspect there are fringe groups that will be happy to indulge.

It sounds like a modern retelling of the old stories "But then City A got the railroad station, and that was about it for City B."

I was reading the reminiscences of one of my ancestors and suddenly the idyllic picture of family life was interrupted by the family business going bankrupt when the Delaware and Raritan Canal bypassed New Brunswick, New Jersey. Makes you think.

I've probably related the story (myth?) about how the town of Columbia Falls, Montana got it's name.

137: Specifically, it made me think that I was pretty sure the D&R canal did go through New Brunswick, and after looking it up that does appear to be the case.

Not that that necessarily disproves Ned's ancestor's story, of course. There are lots of ways the specific routing of the canal could have disadvantaged a family business.

Way back at 72, because y'all talk at hours that are not congenial for Berlin: "how many Germans were totally OK with the camps and the genocide as long as they were winning. Is the 27% crazification factor universal?"

78 is a good rough approximation.

The elections in May 1924 give a first picture. Hitler is in jail, after the failure of the Beer-Hall Putsch. His party runs candidate for the Reichstag, but under a different party name because the NSDAP and the SA are both banned organizations. The new-name Nazis get 6.5% of the vote and 32 seats. The most popular party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gets 20.5% and 100 seats. Fourteen parties hold seats in the 472-seat parliament. Significantly for future developments, lefty Social Democrats, who previously had their own party (and the second-largest group of deputies in 1920!), have joined up with the Communist Party (who had 1/11th as many deputies in 1920 as the lefty Social Democrats). Thank you, Moscow. Turnout throughout the Weimar period is in the 75% to 80% range.

Anyway, early-stage Nazis make up just over 5% of voters. But the forces that are generally anti-republic (illiberal and temporary democrats, if you will) are starting to coalesce. Devoted Catholic voters are also stuck out in their own party. Its share of the vote will hold steady throughout the period.

New elections in December 1924 because coalitions blow up sometimes. The new-name Nazis get less than half their previous vote, 3%, and are reduced to 14 seats. Hitler is still in jail. In post-war Germany, they would have received zero seats because they failed to gain 5% of the vote. The Communist vote is also down by a quarter, and they lost 17 seats of the 62 they held after the May elections.

Regular elections in May 1928 because sometimes the center holds. Social Democrats continue as the largest party, and gain both votes (+3.8%) and seats (+22) compared with December 1924. The Nazis are back under their real name, but win only 2.6% of the votes and 12 seats. The Communists make up most of what they lost between May and December of 1924, pulling 10.6% of the votes and 54 seats.

We may complain about our two-party system and the effects of first-past-the-post voting, but the 1928 Reichstag had deputies from 15 parties. Roughly 100 seats, 20% of parliament, went to parties that did not exceed the 5% hurdle. Not only did the German-Hanoverian Party -- whose main demand even in the 1920s was undoing Prussia's 1866 annexation of Hanover -- have a faction in parliament, it wasn't even the smallest group of deputies!

Even if the Social Democrats (largest parliamentary faction) could have worked with the Communists (fourth-largest), the proliferation of kooky parties meant that they would have been 39 seats short of a majority.

Elections in September 1930 produced a radically different parliament. The SPD remained the largest party, although they lost both votes and seats. The Communists rose from fourth to third, even though they only improved their share of the votes by 2.5%. The share of the Catholic party held steady. The big change came at second place, the Nazis. Their share of the vote rose by 15.7%, and they gained 95 seats.

What happened? Where did all the new Nazi voters come from? To a first approximation, Nazi gains are equal to losses by more-established rightist parties. For a loosely affiliated but right-ish voter in 1930, Hitler looked like someone who would shake things up; he had caused a stir with fringe views in the recent past and wasn't cozy with the establishment. His competitors on the right, by contrast, were low energy, tainted by being part of the grand coalition, business as usual. Given a palette of rightist, nationalist parties to choose from in 1930, German voters on that side of the aisle plumped for the loudest, newest, shiniest, most nationalist, most unpredictable candidate on offer.

No chancellor could gain a majority in parliament. The president re-appointed the incumbent who governed by presidential decrees that were tolerated by parliament.

Fast forward to 1932. The Great Depression is wracking developed economies. German unemployment is up to 30%, and industrial production has fallen by more than 40%. Prussia's state government had been forced out in a presidentially-supported putsch. In terms of influence, as if New York and California were one state and NYC still the national capital; then a Republican national government pushes out a Democratic state government and gets away with it.

The Nazis win the election, hands down. They gain 37% of the vote, not far from twice the Social Democrats' 21.5%. The communists gain a bit to 14%, and the share of the Catholic party holds steady. The Nazis gain 123 new seats to bring their total up to 230 deputies.

Where did these Nazi gains come from? As in 1930, some came at the expense of existing rightist parties. Together, depending on how one defines rightist, those parties lost 60-90 seats. Crucially, Weimar parliaments did not have a fixed number of seats. Instead, parties won seats based on the absolute number of votes that they gained. Expanding the electorate led directly to more seats, and turnout in July 1932 turnout was 84%. It's very difficult to argue that the outcome did not reflect the will of the electorate on that day. I'd have to wade deeper into the literature to give details, but it's a fair assumption that lots of previously disengaged voters plumped for the NSDAP.

But there still wasn't a majority to be found for a government, which led to new elections in November 1932 (two days before the US election that brought in FDR). Turnout subsided a bit, to 81%, bringing the size of parliament down to 584 from 608. The Nazis won again, with 33% and 196 seats, down by 4% and 34 from their July results. In January 1933, the caretaker chancellor, who led a government that had never held a parliamentary majority, obtained the elected president's consent to offer the chancellorship to the head of the party that had gained the largest share of votes in an election where turnout was above 80%. And that was that.

Anyway, I am not sure that this guided tour of Weimar elections tells us much about what share of Germans were on board with concentration camps, much less with extermination and total war, because those weren't part of the campaign when voting still mattered.

I do think that "reckless indifference to the republic" is a conclusion you can draw, although many of Weimar's (not least president Hindenburg) showed more of that than the electorate. The appeal of the new and untried is definitely there. The tendency to choose the strongest version of what is on offer is also part of the mix, although the Social Democrat vs Communist results offer a counterexample.

I am not sure that this guided tour of Weimar elections tells us much about what share of Germans were on board with concentration camps, much less with extermination and total war, because those weren't part of the campaign when voting still mattered.

For that, you need to look at the opinion polls conducted by the US Occupation authorities after the war. Caveats about this being only part of Germany apply, and there are arguments about how to interpret them. They're discussed here under "Surveys" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

But things like "A majority in the years 1945-49 stated National Socialism to have been a good idea but badly applied" are interesting. Especially given that these surveys were being carried out by the occupying power, which was at the time busy identifying and denazifying Nazi supporters. Given that, I think you have to assume a fair-sized "shy Nazi" vote.

If the family is separated, they are placed on different tracks where the kids can get asylum and avoid deportation more easily than the parents.

What's the legal basis for this? I'd have thought that outside a few very specific situations (eg child conscription), in a given family the adults are going to have a stronger (or at least as strong) case for well founded fear of persecution or serious harm than the children.

Also a good chunk of at-all-costs anti-leftism, right? Wasn't that a big reason those narrow, semi-random elites had been willing to form government without a majority for so long, despite how hampering that was constitutionally?

( I had known very little about the Prussian coup but I now see that the head of the state government had been SDP.)

I'm becoming so consumed by this ongoing crisis that it's jarring to go out and have people sort of whistling along in their regular life, not acknowledging anything. Of course, perhaps they're saying the same thing about me.

143: Don't Sessions' rulings make it likely that hardly any of these refugees from Central America will be granted asylum?

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17450374/sessions-asylum-domestic-gang-violence

144 - the law is different for children because of the 2008 Torture Victims Prevention Reauthorization Act, an anti-human-trafficking law which requires certain special protections for children (and different rules for children from Canada and Mexico). There may be other laws applicable only to children, as well. See below for a little detail.

https://immigrationforum.org/article/trafficking-victims-protection-reauthorization-act-safeguards-children/

It's great that we have all these laws to protect children.

Link shared on Twitter here: dispersal of kids as young as 3mo to faraway States for foster care. This supports both the "haphazard/lack of resources" theory and the "deliberate malice" theory, and the "Sessions is hardcore nostalgic for the antebellum South" theory.

I read Nancy Bermeo's "Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy" a year or 3 ago, and her thesis is:

Do ordinary people play a leading role in the collapse of popular government? Based on extensive research, this book overturns the common wisdom. It shows that the German experience was exceptional, that people's affinity for particular political positions are surprisingly stable, and that what is often labeled polarization is the result not of vote switching but of such factors as expansion of the franchise, elite defections, and the mobilization of new voters. Democratic collapses are caused less by changes in popular preferences than by the actions of political elites who polarize themselves and mistake the actions of a few for the preferences of the many. These conclusions are drawn from the study of twenty cases, including every democracy that collapsed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in interwar Europe, every South American democracy that fell to the Right after the Cuban Revolution, and three democracies that avoided breakdown despite serious economic and political challenges.

Even in the German case, the key thing wasn't the Nazis getting 37% (or 33% later that year), but the willingness of Hindenburg and other elites to empower them. At least that's what I remember her message to be, and it sounds good to me.

So here we go - foster family stealing child: https://twitter.com/LisaMirandoCNN/status/1009443575715848193?s=17

but the willingness of Hindenburg and other elites to empower them.

Which is also one pattern we're seeing now in Europe. Most obviously in Austria, where the formerly-center-right party simply copied the far-right-nationalist party's anti-immigrant message (and party color!), formed a coalition with them, and is now talking with the CSU-rebels in Bavaria in the hopes of undermining Merkel and creating a "Berlin-Vienna-Rome axis" against migration.

That fits with my thesis that a few rich people are destroying American civic culture and economy opportunity to save themselves a few million.

"creating a 'Berlin-Vienna-Rome axis' against migration."

BECAUSE THAT WORKED OUT SO WELL THE LAST TIME FOR ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE INVOLVED.

I just read a twitter thread that pointed out that DNA testing could be used for reunification purposes, and it's the only thing that's made me feel faintly hopeful for reunification, suddenly. That there is actually a method available, once we seize the means of production.

12.30pm

Sitting in the White House cabinet room, Donald Trump announced he will sign an executive order to end family separation.

Oh thank god. I'm sure it will still be awful for asylum-seekers but at least that one thing will be mitigated.

He hasn't done it yet. I'd wait to see what is signed.

I'm not sure exactly what, but I'm sure it isn't impossible for him to do something that would "end family separation" and be worse.

Looking like the order would be out of compliance with a standing federal settlement on detention time of (unseparated) children.

Because that way he keeps doing it and it is somebody else's fault.

I just read a twitter thread that pointed out that DNA testing could be used for reunification purposes, and it's the only thing that's made me feel faintly hopeful for reunification, suddenly

Not sure "Let's institute a DNA database of immigrants" is trigger for hope, personally.

Good point. But maybe if it were done as a charity project through 23andme? A one-off thing for THESE babies who need their mamas?

107, 110: One thing I've heard of recently for changing that incentive 'town depends on prison for jobs' is giving incarcerated people the vote while they're in prison. My brother is working on that project. Man, that could really change rural politics.

It seems like the play is that the Republicans will use the excuse of "fixing" this problem to enact an immigration bill that's substantively terrible in many areas. Or what, I think, Spike predicted a few days ago. The "executive order" will be linked to thay effort. I say "it seems" because events are moving too fast to know what's going on without being obsessive about it, but the move seems to turn the lemon of locking-up-innocent-toddlers-looks-bad into terrible repressive immigration law lemonade.

165 Calls for a level of subtlety this administration and congress have consistently failed to manifest. Have any concessions been demanded, much less extracted, for this EO?

Yes. Or at least they are preemptively denouncing Democrats for not really wanting to help children if they don't vote for whatever bill the Republicans put out.

I'm seeing on Twitter that Michael Cohen resigned from the Republican Party because of the caging of children.

On a related note, until today Michael Cohen was the RNC's deputy finance chair. I had no idea he held in official position.

Yes. And it got almost no notice from the presss.

He also through in a dig at Trump.

"As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching," Cohen wrote. "While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips."

Did he resign from the party, or just the post?

I too am surprised he hadn't left the post willingly or un before today.

It looks to me like he just resigned from his post.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-cohen-resigns-rnc-committee-post/story?id=56033406

160: Yeah, that's what I thought.

This is the fear that leftists have that liberals will go back to ignoring things when the next president is a Democrat, whether that be immigrants or wars or whatever https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2018/6/20/17479756/family-separation-democrats-immigration-border-security-obama-trump?utm_campaign=dylanmatt&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&__twitter_impression=true

One of the ways we hope to prevent that is for liberals to realize what they were not paying attention to during the Obama administration. That may help people realize there is suffering to prevent, even during Democratic administrations. There will be immigrants to defend, BLM marches to attend, and arms sales to Saudi Arabia to be distressed by.

So the Washington Post and the Guardian are both reporting that Trump signed an executive order this afternoon "reversing the policy" of separating families at the border.

Anyone care to take a stab at what this actually means?

165

That looks to be the case. A major worry is that people will buy into the narrative that Actually There Are Many Good Republicans Who Abhor Trump and this will basically vanish in peoples' minds by midterm elections. I also worry that, since the outrage has been generated largely because of family separation, many people will go back to simply tolerating the abhorrent status quo once Republicans take children out of tiny cages with each other and put them into tiny cages with their parents. This has been the Trump playbook since about 2015 -- he sets the expectations for himself all the way down at "holocaust" and then capitalizes politically when he exceeds it by accelerating all of the horrible trends that were already in motion with ordinary Republican evil.

Anyone care to take a stab at what this actually means?

It means they detain the families together until the courts say they can't, then he throws up his hands and blames the judges and the Democrats.

This is a good quick link. I think Dara Lind is the best immigration-beat reporter.

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17485488/executive-order-immigration-trump-families-together

178

Strong disagree. Dara is good but no one compares to Melissa Del Bosque of the Texas Observer.

My favorite immigration reporter is whoever is mock David Brooks the best.

"This is the fear that leftists have that liberals will go back to ignoring things when the next president is a Democrat"

I admire your blithe optimism that a) the next president will be a Democrat and b) that there will be a next president.

Do you have a saying, in the US, about bridges, the act of coming to them, the act of traversing them, and the desirable chronological juxtaposition of those activities? We do, but it might be just a UK thing.

'is mock'?

I think the article in 174 is a totally correct argument, and sure, pressure groups should keep up the pressure regardless of who is in power. But what's missing is that fighting a Republican president on immigration issues is also a means of moving Democrats to the left on immigration issues. Asylum/refugee/immigrant issues are no longer backburner issues for Democrats and are no longer easy to waffle on, precisely because they've become a partisan dividing line. And that's true even if it's also 100% true that a hypothetical unified Democratic-party government (inshallah) will not pass immigration reform that is at the far end of the good spectrum of possible immigration reform.

The militarism example he cites is actually pretty instructive in the other direction. Was Obama way more interventionist/militarist than some of his supporters on the left, including me, would have wanted? Yes. Was he also way less militaristic/interventionist (and was the Democratic party on average) less militaristic/interventionist) than the median Democrat of the 1980s and 1990s? Also yes, and precisely because opposition to the Iraq War was central to Democratic politics in 2004-2008.

tl;dr immigration policy is now a partisan issue on which the Democrats have almost certainly permanently moved to the "left" but the marginal Democrat vote in a unified Democratic government will still definitely not be far left enough and need to be pushed further by activists. Since we're a long way off from there take advantage of a moment where people are unified to solidify the sense of positive immigration reform as a priority.

Eh, having written that I feel bad for participating in this conversation. Who gives a shit about bloviating over this. We can talk more when there's less shit to do.

"If it's a problem for you, we can abuse children more discretely. Trump Pence 2020."

184: Is there a simple list of a few things I can do? I asked about a template for writing to my Congresscritters. Can anyone recommend one?

That helped nothing, but it make me feel better.

"we can abuse children more discretely"

"No more abuse en masse; from now on it's one-on-one."

Discreetly too.

Apparently, there was a protest in Pittsburgh today. I was about 100 feet away while it happened. In my defense, I didn't know it was happening and I was eating a cheese burger.

63, 84, anyone that doesn't know that Obama was imprisoning familes, separating children, and so on

https://twitter.com/Jamie_Maz/status/1009535804685856770

This Senate report is particularly awful https://t.co/OE6pQk4W98

Just a hint for good behavior: there are tons of people here, including but not limited to me, whi know a lot more about immigration policy under Obama and Trump, and what was or wasn't bad about either, than you do. So your show, in this forum, is pointless. But that's maybe already way too much assumption of good faith. Go out and prove you're doing something helpful other tgan discrediting the "left" or go somewhere else.

The next person who suggests that we weren't aware that Obama's immigration policy was shitty gets punched in the fucking face. The best defense anyone here ever offered was that maybe increased enforcement would lead to a grand bargain down the road (which like all grand bargains with the Republicans, never came).

Shhh. This comments section has been cultivating an air of being too irrelevant for trolls to even bother.

185: "Some older Republicans will be against it, on the basis of optics; they prefer the suffering they cause to be quiet and distributed, like people dying for lack of adequate health care."

195: For those who don't click links, that goes to a very prescient fa comment from February of last year.

He can't quite toot his own horn.

I knew Obama was bad on immigration with all that tactical reasoning, but it didn't inflame me as it probably should have, and don't remember knowing about family detention.

Our immigration policy has been inhumane in an absolute sense not since Obama or Bush but roughly the 1890s or so, whenever the Chinese Exclusion Act was. Relative to other widespread sins sanctioned or even mandated by American government and society, like Jim Crow and proxy wars in Asia and Central America and for-profit health care, our immigration policy is small potatoes. Trump's immigration policy is small potatoes relative to lots of less controversial things that are currently going on, like the drug war.

It's still gratuitously cruel and abusive. It accomplishes no good ends and lots of bad ones. It was also 100 percent his decision. We might never know if he wanted to do something even worse until the adults in the room stopped him, and other Republican leaders might do similar but not identical things, but still, this is definitely the Trump Administration's decision. And yet, they've defended it with particularly ridiculous lies, their partisans are happy to parrot them, and the executive order ostensibly reversing course is nearly worthless.

Bringing up either Obama's failings or the Platonic ideal of immigration policy is off-topic at best. No offense intended, Trivers, people go off-topic all the time around here. Bass, though, it's harder to give the benefit of the doubt.

The $39 ZARA jacket the first lady wore as she boarded a plane to visit immigrant families in Texas read: "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?"

Hard to believe, but this seems to be true

https://twitter.com/meridithmcgraw/status/1009870197820481536

Lots of immigrants don't speak very good English. Maybe she didn't know?

201: I think the better defense is that it was in back of her so she didn't see it.

It's still better than the "Let Them Eat Cake" sweater that Pat Nixon wore to the soup kitchens.

Or the "It's good to keep a hard man down" t-shirt Nancy Reagan would always wear to the ED clinic.

Or the "Kill Whitey" dashiki that Michelle Obama wore to the inauguration ball.

199 You are right we shouldn't be discussing right now the unnecessary suffering of immigrants during previous administrations that will continue in future administrations. You are also right that we shouldn't be discussing right now the bipartisan consensus and actions that created the architecture for the current situation.

Ok I'll stop now.

202 Or she let Stephen Miller chose her outfit for the day.

202 Or she let Stephen Miller chose her outfit for the day.

You are also right that we shouldn't be discussing right now the bipartisan consensus and actions that created the architecture for the current situation.

I think this really captures the non-negotiable demand that the Ineffectual Left must do everything it can do to ensure, in a democracy, the political failure of the left.

Right now, we have a situation in which there is a strong political push in favor of a leftist goal: Family separation, as Trump practices it, must be stopped.

That's a clear winning issue for the left, and therefore, must be reframed into a losing issue. But how? In your words, you need to identify a "bipartisan consensus" on this issue that you can oppose, and thus guarantee defeat.

I think the Ineffectual Left is going to fail on this one, and the left will succeed. But as Trump and the Ineffectual Left say, this is really the fault of the Democrats. We'll see how if you folks can make that sale to the public. I don't think so.

The great thing about the Ineffectual Left is it is, by definition, ineffectual. If there's an issue in which it can succeed, it will find another issue.

Yes, yes, I know. The Ineffectual Left arguably provided the decisive push that gave us Bush and Trump by helping reframe the debate to focus on the moral failures of Hillary and Al. But seriously, the Nutty Right did all of the heavy lifting there. The credit belongs to them.

I enjoyed 203-205.

To cavil while children were being ripped from their parents arms was immoral. I like you, HB, but I'm disappointed you allowed the discussion to be derailed. As I referenced in 68, we need to be smarter about links provided in bad faith to R/u/s-s/i/a/n propaganda mills. #bebetter

75, not 68

197: It's more like it's the kind of thing you don't want to have predicted - though I never imagined they'd round up children alone - and especially not if you haven't done as much as you could have to try to prevent it. I've donated to RAICES but as a single person who could do more outside of work, I really need to start actually doing more.

Someone posted in comments about get out the vote organizations. Does anyone remember where that was? Unless I change jobs before then, I really could take time off to help with that in the run up to the midterms. Not months, though.

I like you, HB, but I'm disappointed you allowed the discussion to be derailed.

Snort!
New to town, stranger?

215: standmixers -> swimming is just the same as caging children -> "ObamA WaS teH bAD!1!"?

I was listening to an NPR story about family separation, and they had a representative from a local charity called Bethany Christian on. They are looking for foster families for "migrant children." They have about 60 right now and "expect many more." The charity, like many here, is tightly connnected to the DeVos family. I'd thought the charity seemed a little icky for a while - they seem to have a goal of putting international adoptees with white Christian families - but I am now sure that none of the kids who go through that charity will ever see their parents again.

I wouldn't have pegged Betsy DeVos as one of the most dangerous members of the administration, but that family's limited local evil has really been allowed to flourish.

This is why we fight: https://www.univision.com/noticias/inmigracion/un-largo-abrazo-y-llanto-incontenible-el-reencuentro-de-una-madre-guatemalteca-separada-de-su-hijo

217: See, now, I really think it is worth raising hell about this, in public and often.