Comment by cauch
14 days ago
A lot of people who support the current US government do not want the laws to be enforced, they just want to see people who look brown or foreigners to be deported, regardless of if they are in the US legally or illegally.
The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.
But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).
In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".
Where are you getting the idea that 10 innocents are being deported for every 1 illegal? Or that the "majority" of people supporting the crackdown would support that?
The information I can find suggests only a handful of cases, maybe a dozen, out of 600,000 or so.
I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?
I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.
This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.
edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".
(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)
If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be then I think you'd see more people speaking up, but there's not. People don't have to caveat their support of every policy with hypotheticals.
I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
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> I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?
The people who oppose don't care about the fact that illegal immigrants are continually breaking US law by continuing to be in the US, and often explicitly argue that laws restricting immigration into the US are immoral. There's no reason grounded in an ethic of general respect for the law why formal law-violation associated with the crackdown is more important than formal law-violation associated with the illegal immigration.
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@cauch: let me ask you this: how do you weed out the illegals besides asking for proof or citizenship or proof of a passport visa that you are in the US legally?
Really, you're going to go with "papers, please" ?
ICE is on record of requesting ID from _children_. I don't know if you're a parent, but my kids didn't carry ID until they were nearly adults. That's okay, though, because they're white. I don't like bringing race into this, but we're not seeing ICE ask white people for their passports.
I don't have a problem weeding out dangerous criminals, but flagging someone who had a parking ticket a decade ago is wrong. Additionally, removing TPS from groups and then subsequently deporting them up is wrong. Arresting individuals and deporting them when they are going through the proper legal avenues to become citizens is wrong.
How soon until other "undesirables" are targeted?
Did you carry proof of citizenship as a child? Do you carry it today? I don't, as my license is not a "real id" yet. They could scoop me up as I walk into Home Depot and send me off to god knows where tomorrow.
> Did you carry proof of citizenship as a child? Do you carry it today? I don't, as my license is not a "real id" yet.
Where I'm from, I am legally required to have proof of ID with me all the time. So basically used to never leaving home without it.
No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally? Just because they were good citizens is it OK to be forgiven for crossing the border illegally? How does that make any sense?
And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?
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Do what other civilised countries do?
What I don't understand is that ICE are clearly incompetent: they shoot the wrong guys, they keep claiming they arrested bad guys and it turns out they totally misunderstood and the persons in question are not who they thought they were. Even with Pretti, ICE declared they were there to arrest a known illegal with a "significant criminal history", but turns out the Minnesota officials have said it was not the case.
This is an usual strange situation: some people want to see "less illegal immigrants", and yet, they are ok with paying big money to pay incompetent people do an half-assed job.
Other civilized countries routinely ask for proof of citizenship or legal residency when people interact with their bureaucracies and deport people who are discovered by law enforcement to not be legally resident. This happens all the time in every civilized country and in many countries we don't consider civilized.
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People cannot live without money. A huge swath of illegal immigrants work for money. Wouldn't it make sense to target the individuals who are _hiring_ them rather than the actual laborers themselves? This logic seems to work perfectly fine when cracking down on drug use, but seems completely ignored when it comes to immigration. (Yes, I'm aware ICE cracks down on some employers, but it's obvious this isn't their primary strategy.)
Seriously, think about it. If _you_ were tasked with cracking down on the immigration situation, what would you do in good faith? Send masked goons to check every single individual's papers and rough up people who can't show them? Or just send men in suits to every labor operation and ask for their I-9s, at 100x less cost? It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that people even assume a shred of good faith from the current administration here. This is terrorism, not law enforcement.