this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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“Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands." -Ronald Reagan
It's ridiculous how far right the USA has moved when it comes to immigration. Reagan was a scumbag overall but was right about this. Frankly it pisses me off that even the Democrats are so far right on this.
Of course Reagan meant [white] immigrants.
Agreed, and I think maybe we should remove the plaque from the Statue of Liberty as it clearly no longer applies.
Reagan was an idiot about a lot of things. His policies were often at odds with his rhetoric which was quite progressive for its time and place. If you listened to him though, he was not openly hostile to immigration. Neither him nor H.W. where on the scale of today's right.
https://youtu.be/YsmgPp_nlok?si=D5c5Bm5HRG1uw4jC
I really think the right of the 80s/90s is way different than todays right.
Woah your saying the right is suddenly anti-immigration now? That is really nonsensical and ignores a lot of history.
Clearly they aren't sending their best.
Dems, Rebubs as individuals aren't really anything other than drones that follow orders on what to think and what to get angry about. It's a systemic issue where money is injected into the fringes to piss the other side off and force a defensive posture and eventually conflict from fear.
Every idea that categorizes into left/right needs to be challenged at this point.
The left will never prevail
The right will never prevail
We must recognize and respond to what is really happening.
Both the left and right 100% worship at the altar of capitalism. What the people want doesnt factor into much except the votes every 2-4 years, which are heavily steered and give us little real democratic control of our future. Capitalism maximizes profits and couldnt care less whats good for society.
I'm not saying the left and the right are the same, but they work for the same bosses, and thats the rich, not us. You and I only really exist as abstract concepts to them, not as fellow humans. Our carefully curated votes are a means to an end, and that end is not whats good for the people of the country.
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
Once our votes are removed as trump said he'd do, we serve little real purpose to them. Why incentivize your workforce when you can make them live in fear and pay them less?
What left?
The democrats are not leftists lmao
As someone who has a lot of contact with the right, the conflating of illegal immigration with our past and present as a nation of immigrants is the point of the wedge and why this is so effective. Many conservatives I know are fully in support of legal immigration, and even expanding legal immigration as long as it is not done at the expense of existing Americans like with H1B slaves many tech companies want to import.
The left then paints them as racist for it, saying it is xenophobia and not support for rule of law and protections for vulnerable Americans. Many grew up taking a job cleaning bus station toilets and other jobs to make ends meet or get back on their feet that the left now says "Americans don't want", proving no actual jobs are lost. They, rightly or wrongly, see this as the lowest skilled Americans having jobs stolen from them, and see "Americans don't want these jobs" as "Americans don't want these jobs for that pay" pushing wages down using illegal immigrant labor.
The left enjoys telling business that if they can't afford to pay a living wage for their lowest paid jobs then they don't deserve to be in business, while at the same time decrying the cost increases to food and janitorial if those industries had to pay non-migrant workers enough to do those jobs. It is an easily exploitable hypocrisy that even allowed Brexit to happen.
It allows the Fox News crowd to be swindled more easily, and it allows actual racists to get away with more because the conservative masses can't hear the dog whistles, which is the point of dog whistles.
Then why do they oppose it? That's a contradiction. They oppose asylum seekers which is legal immigration. They oppose and make up fake news controversies about legal Haitian immigrants saying they are "eating the dogs." The actively want to make it harder to come into the country legally. Even for illegal immigrants, if we create a path to citizenship they would be legal, but they don't want that, they want to kick them out. The legal status of them thus does not matter to them, it's not their primary concern, they just want to get the immigrants out.
You need to explain to me how opposing legal immigration = supporting legal immigration. Resolve that contradiction for me.
There is only a "contradiction" because you are an extremist dogmatist who insists we should all fall on our knees and worship the free market like it's a god. Whatever the market says goes! Humans be damned! How dare you question the glory of the market??
No, there is no contradiction here because we can pay people a living wage and bring down price gouging. Your issue is because of the fact you are an extremist dogmatist who treats free markets like a religion where it is blasphemy to question anything private corporations do, you act like price gouging is just a fact of nature, like a natural disaster, something that can't be helped because it's just the will of all mighty market which we cannot question.
Again, no, some of us aren't religious zealots for free markets. We recognize that we can demand workers have higher pay and companies stop price gouging at the same time and there is no contradiction here. You can't wrap your brain around this because you think private corporations are equivalent to deities which we are not allowed to question, so if workers are paid higher and the corporations choose to offset this by raising prices, oh well, there's nothing we can do, you can't question the decisions of the great mighty oligarchs, whom we must fall to our knees and worship!
Yes we can. Grow a fucking spine you cuckhold.
Aren't conservatives the ones who say "guns don't kill people, people kill people?" Yet somehow this agency disappears when it comes to wages being lowered. Wages are lowered on their own, again, like a natural disaster, the free market is just something we cannot question and we have to accept whatever it throws at us. No, people lower wages. It is an active decision by private enterprises, the people who run them have human agency which you continue to pretend does not exist because you are a complete dogmatist who wants people to bow before them like gods. It is those people, human beings with agency who push down wages. Wages don't just magically go down on their own whenever your country has immigration.
I would ordinarily love to discuss several of your points as you seemed to request, chiefly surrounding legal immigration, asylum, labor pools, and the painting of all "conservatives" as a monolithic bloc that all personally believe what the worst parts of the Republican party espouse, but I can tell by the vitriol, name calling, and disparaging assignment of who you decided I am for pointing out my own observations of others motivations that this will be pointless. I hope you have a better day going forward.
"The worst parts" is literally the Republican party's major platform that they put front and center and is literally what they campaigned on? What on earth are you on about?
What's there to even "debate"? You can't change the mind of an extremist dogmatist. You cannot begin the discussion with wild claims about we aren't ever allowed to question any decision a private enterprise ever makes then honestly be like, "I just want a serious discussion 🥲." No, you don't, you come here to just preach your religious ideology, and you're upset some people don't mindlessly accept it without question.
I would really like to know where you get me being an extremist dogmatist, not questioning of private enterprise, and religious of all things? This is why I didn't want to attempt to discuss anything with you, because you are putting words into my mouth, assigning me values you think I hold, and accusing me of being upset about people disagreeing with me.
I want immigration reform, socialized medicine, UBI, free education, free child care, free student meals, and am an atheist who wants all religion as far from government as possible (supporting the Satanists doing the same shit Christians do to shine a light on that bullshit). I also enjoy political discourse because I don't think just slapping an Enemy label on those I don't seem to agree with won't do anything except create further balkanization. But please, let me continue to be your boogie man because I don't support open borders and said not all conservatives are slavering Nazis.
Never said anything about Nazis, I just responded to what you said, as well as put it in the context of the main thrust of the platform which their current party ran on and they voted for. No one accused you of being a "boogieman," you are just suffering from a victim complex desperately trying to invent conspiracies that never happened to paint yourself as some poor martyr. Just stop saying ridiculous things worthy of mockery. Not that hard. Be normal.
You call me a cuck, a dogmatic oligarchist, and a religious zealot, sprinkle in implications I'm too stupid to wrap my brain around the enlightened truth, and then call me a martyr with a victim complex for taking offense to you painting me as a bootlicking braindead conservative. Piss off back to lemmygrad, tankie troll.
Saying that we need low paid immigrants to harvest our fields and orchards to keep food prices low, while demanding that the US high school and college students serving that same food at McDonalds deserve $15 or $20 an hour is a hypocrisy, and the people working the fields deserve a living wage as much as the fast food worker. You are garbage if you think otherwise. Price gouging has nothing to do with importation of cheap labor, and you are deflecting the conversation with the best of them.
On the subject of price gouging though, since you are so keen, the 15 companies the control all consumer goods, along with the grocery monopolies need to be broken up like Bell or Standard Oil, and be forced to actually compete in a free market. Collusion laws need to be enforced and fines need to be punitive enough they aren't a cost of doing business.
Companies need to be fined the same way when found not using e-verify and exploiting illegal immigrants for manual labor in construction, meat processing, etc. Companies don't get to break the rules and just roll it into the budget.
Acting like the importation of an undocumented underclass that can be threatened with deportation if they step out of line doesn't depress wages in the industries they are being used in a asinine. Next you are going to say that outsourcing manufacturing from the US to China, and now from China to Africa and SE Asia doesn't drive down the prices for those goods because the labor is cheaper and has less regulations.
People crossing the border using smugglers to then claim asylum when caught is an exploitation of our legal immigration process, and they do it because it works. Legal immigration needs to be reformed, no shit, but the way to do that isn't to overwhelm it to the point of failure and then rebuild something from the pieces. This equivalency of illegal and legal immigration is one of the reasons why the Democrats lost to a piece of shit like Trump, treating the Hispanic vote like they are illegals. The worst part of the Republican party is the elected part, again no shit. Like holding your nose and voting for the lesser evil is exclusively for the left, and every Republican whole heartedly personally endorses everything on the Trumpublican platform.
Let's see if calling anyone you disagree with a cuck helps the Democrats win more elections, because calling them a basket of deplorables worked so well in 2016. I'll continue to vote for whomever best aligns with my own center-left ideology, and I'll keep talking to the conservatives in my personal bubble like human beings to try and bring them around to some of the progressive ideas
They are all just people. I don't care if illegal immigrants take my jobs (even though that isn't actually happening, it's fear mongering)
Everyone is just people, even if plenty of people don't seem to believe it or act like it unfortunately. You are correct that much of it is fear mongering, and there is a shit load of propaganda that uses this. There is also a thriving industry of "businesses" taking advantage of illegal immigrants to pay less than minimum wage and break every other labor law and OSHA guideline through the threat of deportation. The most effective lies have a kernel of truth in them. Everyone else also isn't as laze fair about competition for employment, and I can't personally fault them for that.
The best was to combat this is not to claim it's all fake news and tell people who are concerned about it that their internal motivations aren't what they think they are and instead it's because they are racists. Education doesn't work if you berate people, because defensive people aren't receptive to it.
All Empires are running immigration. Immigrants come to where the money is being spent. This isn't even just American history.
We're a nation of immigrants and we should cherish that. But at the same time you have to defend the borders. I don't know why this is so controversial.
Again, Republicans have a moronic idea with building walls, but Democrats have no ideas at all and even refuse to acknowledge the problem.
It's the same shit on so many issues.
I can’t help but notice you used the word “defend,” as if you’re talking about the military holding off an enemy advance rather than a policy of not letting desperate poor people move here.
Of course in the conservative world, that’s exactly the thought process. Dehumanization and bigotry are the first step of many policies there.
This can be flipped just as easily. I am noticing that you seem to be viewing the existence of borders in an inherently hostile viewpoint. Do you believe that this country, or any country, could survive if they let anyone and everyone on earth that wanted to come for any reason at any time and without any limits, into the country? Could Canada survive in its current state if 100 million Americans suddenly moved there? Could Tibet or Ukraine survive if millions of Chinese or Russian citizens moved there?
You appear to be implying that nations and national identity is inherently bigoted, which is exactly the thought process in some corners of the leftist world. Anarchy and destruction of existing society is the first step of many policies there.
I think instead of being hostile to people coming to the US for a better life, perhaps we could create faster pathways to citizenship. Allow them to work and pay taxes while processing, and allow them to have that better life, and to be invested in making the US a better place.
And nobody is saying just allow anyone in, we could still screen people (like we already do), but we could also treat them like people. This whole thing of making these people the enemy is FUD in order to allow the Right to control its base, and the Left now feels they need to do "border-Nazi-lite" because the Right has controlled the narrative on this for so long.
The immigration system needs a major overhaul, it should not take years or decades, and we should have expanded guest and migrant worker programs for agriculture and other seasonal jobs. A solution is needed for the current illegal immigrants as well, but prior blanket amnesty legalization has not lowered illegal immigration. The question is if giving those who came in illegally a legal status to pay taxes and work while getting a pathway to citizenship will result in more people following that route instead of the legal pathways because it is faster/easier. Processing millions of applications takes time and manpower, and will require a robust department to deal with that.
Yes, there is a lot of FUD, and no, they are not the enemy and shouldn't be treated as such. There are also those who do call for fully open borders and free travel for all, but it would be ludicrous to assign all Democrat voters with this anarchist, one world nation brush. Those who cross the border outside of a crossing and aren't caught by border patrol aren't being screened, and while this is honestly not a huge amount in comparison, it that allows the FUD to be driven even more successfully.