The leading reason to oppose immigration is racism. But people are embarrassed to admit it. Nobody opposes anything because it’s illegal.
You can force anyone to admit they don’t care about what’s legal by simply asking what if we changed the law?
I both love and hate asking this question to anti-immigration chuds.
100% of the time, the first answer is “Well it wouldn’t be legal, we need laws to keep people out.”
And then you go “Okay but what if they DID legalize it, would you be accepting or not?”
And then it’s 45 minutes of arguing with someone about what a “hypothetical” is and what it means to imagine something, because they don’t actually have an answer, the choices are to say they will oppose the system and oppose the government or that they would be fine if the law changed, either way makes them look bad by their own flimsy values, so they will stick to spinning around the definitions of words and what’s “real” or not.
Shouldn’t that be an easy question to answer though?
If a supermajority left-wing government changed immigration law to free and unrestricted passage across borders, making anyone who sets foot on US soil is legally a resident if they wish and further entitled to a pathway citizenship if they want it, then that would be the law and must be followed.
Anyone would still be free to run their campaign on changing immigration law back, or to something else. Economic and societal performance under that hypothetical law change would determine if a supermajority of “change immigration law to XYZ” then gets elected to do that.
There is always a possibility that putting no or too few limits on immigration causes irreversible damage to a country before course correction can happen, but the same is true for extreme polarization and unresolvable political divide.
I used to have that perspective too.
In my older age I’m completely in favor of an entirely borderless world. I know that’s unrealistic in our lifetimes but I understand a lot more now about how much of our actual division and fear of “flooding people” in one direction or another is entirely socially constructed and cemented by capitalism, so while I know that we currently live in a world of borders, my firm belief is that people should be free go where they want, and governments need to learn to respond. Got too many people flooding in from country X? Lets go see what’s happening in country X that’s making people leave and fix the situation. The only time you should look at your neighbor’s plate is to make sure they have enough.
When you say that you don’t want “too many” people from other places, you’re saying that your own value as a person is higher than theirs, that your culture is more important, that you’re too scared to adapt to change that will happen anyway. And yeah, this has become policy now so here we are.
I am less and less compromising on this attitude too, because in my decades, every time we cede too much ground to conservatism, their fear and anxiety towards change turns the compromise into walls and barbed wire all over again.
I am not going to expect us to get that world overnight, but I will always advocate for fewer immigration controls and greater international support and partnerships, even if we go back to how it was in whatever years when the markets were flourishing and you could enter a country with a smile and a nod, I still will push for us to tear down barriers between building much larger communities.
So yeah, we will have borders and checks and security and all that lip service to logically unnecessary systems from thousands of years, but I think we need to keep the end-goal of not needing it as our collective, shared value.
A huge factor in my change from my conservative upbringing was when I escaped the family cult compound and got my first job working in a warehouse with a lot of illegal hires. I learned spanish, I had my lunch sabotaged with chili peppers, I got in insulation-foam swordfights with guys my age who were here in the US working 12 hours a day to support their families and start new lives.
I made friends, I learned spanish, I laughed and cried with my fellow humans from far away places.
My boss was a right-wing narcissist who enjoyed torturing these folks with withheld pay and criminal working conditions, and would sometimes call immigration services himself as punishment. I remember coming to work and people I knew were suddenly gone.
edit: the final straw was watching innocent people die in a war the US started for made-up reasons. (This one was Iraq, the second one.) Not just the civilians that were getting blown to pieces by ooh-rah US power while FOX news cheered on, but also I had friends who went to that war and came back in bags, or couldn’t deal with the things they saw and ended their own lives. The lack of compassion from the right was outright evil. This isn’t the first dance we’ve had with evil in the US. I’ve been falling further and further to the left ever since.
“Kidnapping people, separating them from their family, locking them in prison and then exiling them from the country? That’s a horrible thing to do! Unless of course they happen to have not done some paperwork correctly and were born on the other side of this line we drew in the dirt, then its just common sense.” /s
Hell even if you did all the paperwork correctly, as an asylum seeker you would have a small window of 5 years where.
- If you leave the US your process is cancelled.
- If you don’t show up to the 3 random court calls in time your process is cancelled.
- Court takes place in the USA.
- You are not a legal citizen in the USA until you finish all the courts.
Additionally.
- You aren’t allowed to have a job until you pay a fee and wait 6-12 months for the EAD.
- You still pay taxes and can’t vote.
It always seemed obvious to me that the real criminals here are the owner class who are exploiting undocumented immigrants. They didn’t want to give amnesty because that would mean they would have to follow rules such as minimum wage, etc. They have a business incentive to keep these people “illegal”. Of course these people overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Also, if conservatives don’t want refugees here, perhaps they could stop supporting US interventions in Latin America? Oh, and why not do something about climate change too because that will create even more refugees?
I’ve had people complain to me about how many Puerto Ricans there are in the area… my friend, you realize that Puerto Rican are Americans and that is because of imperialism right? The people of that island likely didn’t ask to be colonized by Spain and then ceded to the US.
So they’re trespassing? Jesus has something to say about that
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
FTFY:
Depends on how they’re seeking it. Plenty of people seek a better life through hurting others.
And not many of those are immigrants.
But they’re here illegally? Sounds like it’s time to legalize immigration, then.
In the UK and we talk about people smugglers like we don’t have a navy that could provide the transport ourselves
It’s all racism, all the way down, everywhere people are moving across our imaginary lines on the dirt.
Lots of people are deeply, childishly afraid of being surrounded by people who look and talk different, and that teeny, undeveloped personality flaw has had catastrophic consequences on our whole species, leading to some of the worst atrocities humans have ever committed.
And as the climate changes and weather becomes more extreme, crops will be harder to raise, clean water will be harder to find, and more and more people are going to move further towards milder climates and more developed nations out of desperation. I shudder to imagine how we’re going to treat these people broadly.
Calling it all racism is a thought-terminating cliche. Not all groups of humans have the same societal values, and that is not intrinsically tied to race. It is economic in origin. There certainly are racists like you describe, but they are most likely a vocal minority.
The wealthier a society becomes, the more picky it can afford to become. Personal autonomy can be selected for easier when hand to mouth subsistence isn’t taking up 100% of your time. Things like Abrahamic religious laws arise from subsistence societies. This doesn’t make cultural friction any less real or impactful.
Women’s rights and abolition of child marriage is the result of privilege, but that doesn’t mean they are bad things. When “most” people talk about integration, they are broadly talking about adoption of those values.
To your final point, sadly a mass reduction in habitable land will almost inevitably result in reciprocal population loss. Probably violently through wars of conquest for the remaining resources.
I didn’t use it to terminate thought though, I explained the source of the position and what it means. That was half the comment. We don’t have a better word for it, it comes down to races.
Not all groups of humans have the same societal values
Yah, lets bring them in and help them get out of harmful values like child marriage by making it a less desirable outcome by making sure their needs are met and there’s no excuse to keep practicing things that harm kids. (And of course, make it fucking illegal like we do with a lot of other things. Do you think it’s just brown people from “over there” who traffic children and other horrible acts? Is it only people with “different societal values” who dedicate entire islands to raping kids?)
But if you really think if borders fell tomorrow your neighbors are going to be selling child-brides, you’re also deluded by the completely societal construct that is borders broadly.
Everything you’re scared of foreigners about is a fear that’s been placed there BY the borders, not the other way around. The lines aren’t protecting you from them, the lines are protecting you from valuing the lives of others as much as your own.
No, it’s clearly not “brown people from over there”. What you are describing is assimilation into your culture. That requires that the people immigrating want to assimilate and join “you”. Also, a subset of sickos within “Western” culture being pedos is not the same as a society that believes child marriage is normal (or preferable).
Fundamentalist Christianity (any denomination or offshoot) is generally a “white people” culture and is also fundamentally incompatible with Western liberal society just as much as Islam is or Hindu caste is etc, so no, it is not just a “brown people” thing. White Christians don’t need to keep practicing things that harm kids, but it is part of their culture so they still do. And they influence or attempt to set the law to conform to their cultural beliefs. That is the concern with non-assimilation and mass immigration of any kind, anywhere.
Wanda Sykes put it best:
"If someone broke into my house… and vacuumed?
*shrug* same time next week?"
Idk…you could pay me to do it. I’d just be “quiet quitting”.
Companies hire them illegally and nobody goes after them! Why aren’t we enforcing the law for them!? Until you are willing to go out into the fields and pick crops for poverty wages, or advance legislation to enable them to do it legally, STFU about illegal immigration…
Want to know what being “illegal” constitutes as? It’s a civil misdemeanor. That’s it. It’s a low offense. But the system is made so you either get ground to a pulp to get in or sneak in then deal with the system afterwards.
Based Cozmo frfr
(His creator is not very based tho)
Really? Huh, I hadn’t expected that, and I hadn’t heard. What happened?
Hartman is an evangelical grifter.
