SurfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
For convenience, here's the text of the post by said Director of Communications at United Ways California:
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking that the ICE raid in Mississippi was justified because the 680 men and women apprehended are undocumented, and therefore in your eyes they are here “illegally” and we “have the right to enforce our laws,” you should know the following:
The owner of the business in Mississippi who hired all of these undocumented persons uses a social security number verification system and he is the one who supplied his own workers with the fake numbers and fake documentation they needed. The employer is guilty of perpetrating fraud and identity theft but he is not being charged with these crimes.
Further, the owner of the business was facing charges of sexual harassment and assault by several brave immigrant women who came forward to share their stories. The federal government knows this but they are not bringing charges against the owner of the business for this reason either.
Last, the employer was found responsible of wage theft in the amount of 3.8 million dollars. Again, brave workers came forward to talk about unpaid hours of work and illegally docked paychecks. And they proved their case. But as you might have guessed the federal government is not charging owner of the business with any wrongdoing here either.
The White House is not directing the Department of Homeland Security to make an example of this business owner by fining him and/or charging him because he is a major donor to the Trump presidential campaign.
If you thought that the swamp was being drained you are sorely mistaken.
But wait it gets worse.
The White House flew in the national director of ICE ahead of the raid in Mississippi and imported 600 ICE agents not stationed in that area. All of this constitutes an unprecedented expense of our taxpayer dollars.
And based on all available evidence the reason the White House and Department of Homeland Security justified this expense was they knew that they would receive viral media coverage by choosing to execute a raid of this scale in the wake of the El Paso shooting.
The Trump re-election campaign has already spent $17.2 million on digital ads. 2,200+ of these mention an “invasion of illegal immigrants.” And by rounding up 680 workers in the most public and publicized way possible the White House has, as it did with the 4th of July military parade, made the conscious decision to buttress and complement its campaign expenditures on our dime as taxpayers.
ICE did not select this raid site randomly. This worksite had been on their radar for a year. They knew with a great deal of anticipation that this raid would happen at this time. And that’s how they were able to get 600 agents shipped in and that’s why the national director was on the ground.
And yet they did not notify any child welfare agencies ahead of time.
They knew they were rounding up workers with kids who punch a time card. They knew they were not getting gang members or people who travel from place to place and are difficult to track. They knew they were going to take moms and dads away from their children (many if not most of whom are US citizens) right before the first day of school.
They knew they were going to leave children orphaned by conducting this raid but they never did anything at all to try and help those children.
And if all of that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach then consider the fact that there is no immigration court in the state of Mississippi. Immigrants in detention are not entitled to lawyers. They don’t get phone calls. If they lived in any other state their family members trying to find them would know which courts to call.
Anyone rounded up in Mississippi will likely end up in court in Louisiana or Tennessee. But there’s no way of knowing for sure.
So again, you are taken at work. But your boss goes home and nothing happens to him. You can’t speak to or see your kids unless someone along the way possesses enough humanity to help you do so. Otherwise you have no lawyer assigned to help you, and you are not entitled to use a phone even to make a collect call. Because you’re not entitled to the same rights in the immigration court system as you are in any other court system, and your family doesn’t know where you are, or when your hearing is, chances are you’ll be deported.
If you don’t have family in the area who will fight to keep your kids, they will become wards of the state. They will end up in foster care. And they’ll be scarred for life. All because Donald Trump chose to steal your tax dollars and mine, and use them for his re-election campaign.
And if you still don’t care because you’re so wretched and broken that you think your ignorance of immigration law justifies your belief that people need to “get in line” despite the fact that there are 185 visa types and each one has multiple “lines” and wait times. If you don’t know or don’t care that a Mexican with a PhD cannot win a Green Card in a lottery and will wait 23 years to be reunited with his family, while a Belgian high school dropout with a juvenile criminal record can win a Green Card in a lottery and reunite with his family in 3 years. And that these are the broken immigration laws you want to enforce when you chant “build that wall” and “send them back,” then please by all means enjoy that Make America Great Again hat made in China. And please by all means go fuck yourself.
It all sounds v plausible but I am v leery of social media posts.
Agbiz has exploited undocumented immigrants for decades and decades. Every time there's a raid to arrest the workers, for some reason the people who have knowingly employed them and paid them under the table never get busted, not for employing them and not for all the worker's rights abuses they've committed because they intimidate the undocumented workers with threats of deportation if they try to speak to any authorities about abuse.
Agbiz has exploited undocumented immigrants for decades and decades. Every time there's a raid to arrest the workers, for some reason the people who have knowingly employed them and paid them under the table never get busted, not for employing them and not for all the worker's rights abuses they've committed because they intimidate the undocumented workers with threats of deportation if they try to speak to any authorities about abuse.
We could massively reduce illegal immigration if we prosecuted employers. But we never consider that. And the yokels who vote Republican to "get rid of illegal immigrants" never, ever notice.
I wouldnt be surprised if the employer was the one who called ICE in hopes of silencing further work complaints and trying to mess up the existing lawsuits.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
I wouldnt be surprised if the employer was the one who called ICE in hopes of silencing further work complaints and trying to mess up the existing lawsuits.
That's certainly the way that story read. Equally deplorable that it was the white houses attempt to squash the el paso story.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Since immigration judges are part of the DOJ they can't speak out for their selves. So they have their union which can speak for them, and has often criticized the Trump administration for uh... obvious reasons. Barr has now decided, maybe they shouldn't have their union.
The New York Times: The Justice Department has moved to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, a maneuver that could muffle an organization whose members have sometimes been openly critical of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
They don't crack down on the bosses because the bosses are not immigrants or minorities dude. It's that simple. There is no incentive to fuck with the system except if you really hate immigrants and minorities.
The system is not some nefarious make-wealthy-people-rich scheme, it's just "how we deliver food cheaply to people", which is the reason basically no one, top to bottom, is trying to rock the boat. Except, again, the racists.
The system is very much exactly that. This isn't some "market realities" economics 101 shit. There isn't some neutral law of economics that says rich people don't get punished for breaking the law.
This isn't about nobody wanting to rock the boat because it would increase food prices and nobody wants that, it is about those in power maintaining the system they've built in order to maximize profits and exploit workers as much as they can.
These raids are part of the system. The threat and occasional carrying out of arresting these workers is part of how it works. The racists aren't actually rocking the boat.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
This thread details how completely fucked up that raid was, including that it seems as though they scheduled it deliberately for after the El Paso shooting to get media attention, and that the business owner is guilty of a lot of shit, isn’t being charged, and oh hey is a big Trump donor:
(Thread is based on a FB post by an employee of United Way.)
Honestly you can't read this and then come to the conclusion that this isn't a make-wealthy-people-richer scheme. It seems to be the whole point of it.
It's 100% getting rid of the workers that reported them. They will probably be replaced with more undocumented workers and this time there will be the message of you report us we report you.
They don't crack down on the bosses because the bosses are not immigrants or minorities dude. It's that simple. There is no incentive to fuck with the system except if you really hate immigrants and minorities.
The system is not some nefarious make-wealthy-people-rich scheme, it's just "how we deliver food cheaply to people", which is the reason basically no one, top to bottom, is trying to rock the boat. Except, again, the racists.
The system is very much exactly that. This isn't some "market realities" economics 101 shit. There isn't some neutral law of economics that says rich people don't get punished for breaking the law.
This isn't about nobody wanting to rock the boat because it would increase food prices and nobody wants that, it is about those in power maintaining the system they've built in order to maximize profits and exploit workers as much as they can.
These raids are part of the system. The threat and occasional carrying out of arresting these workers is part of how it works. The racists aren't actually rocking the boat.
American History past the end of the civil war is Rich bastards going "How the fuck do I get my slaves back."
I think that might be what comes down to the difference between my view on it and Shryke's view earlier. I know Jeffe said he didn't see much difference between our two points, but I think, if I was to distill my point down it was an attempt to illustrate the double think that happens within American White Supremacy for the capitalist class. The belief in white people as a superior race, and the idea that America should thus only be for whites. But at the same time, they understand that most white people aren't going to truck with the shitty wages for their shitty jobs. So they do what they did since this country was founded: get brown folks to slave their lives away under them, and god help them if they step out of line.
Whereas, if I understood Shryke correctly, his view is that this is more akin to an emergent property in a race to cut costs and deliver as much food as cheaply as possible, and then the racism kicks in when racists get sufficiently unhappy and then brown folks get hurt because of it.
But I think there's a significant risk in attributing this to some sort of naturally occurring market forces dynamic when every time you look into this stories it seems a very clear evolution in the system of American slavery attempting to adapt around the 13th Amendment; the white supremacy was baked in at every level, and it is ultimately a contradictory and self-defeating system meant to empower those at the top and create a disposable labor pool made up of those whom white supremacy has labeled to be lesser.
Lanz on
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
Capitalists often gleefully align themselves with fascists. Capitalists used forced labor during World War 2 in Germany, for example, and the Koch brothers are wealthy due in no small part to the fact that their father opened and operated several key oil refineries for Hitler's Germany. Fascism is capitalism in its formative stage and we're seeing the pupal stage now before our eyes.
These camps WILL start forcing these people to work on "work release" programs where they're being paid like 20 cents an hour. I know this because that's exactly what we do now. Some states don't have to pay their slaves, excuse me, inmate workers at all. Some states can also force labor under threat of discipline, legally. They're already housing detainees in private prisons, probably generating stunning profits for those companies. The expansion of private prisons and the sudden focus on detaining immigrants in them is absolutely no coincidence.
Someone is making a lot of money over this whole thing, and it will never stop until that gravy train loses its steam. That's capitalism, babey.
By the way these raids on poultry plants are nothing new. The chicken processing industry has been preying on immigrant communities for decades, underpaying them and forcing them to work in inhumane and atrocious conditions, then simply calling an anonymous tip to immigration authorities if anyone has anything to say about it. Or when your workers are getting sick and injured because of the gruelling conditions. Just ship em out and hire some new ones! It's not as if that's a goddamn nightmare horror show!
That said there is a bitter, dark humor in that about a page ago, we were settling on the idea that there wasn't some conspiracy behind the raids, just a natural confluence of racists being racist.
Except then half a page later we found out it was a conspiracy to fuck over the immigrant workers who stood up to their bosses, complete with planning with the Trump Administration for maximum cruelty.
This thread details how completely fucked up that raid was, including that it seems as though they scheduled it deliberately for after the El Paso shooting to get media attention, and that the business owner is guilty of a lot of shit, isn’t being charged, and oh hey is a big Trump donor:
(Thread is based on a FB post by an employee of United Way.)
Honestly you can't read this and then come to the conclusion that this isn't a make-wealthy-people-richer scheme. It seems to be the whole point of it.
That said there is a bitter, dark humor in that about a page ago, we were settling on the idea that there wasn't some conspiracy behind the raids, just a natural confluence of racists being racist.
Except then half a page later we found out it was a conspiracy to fuck over the immigrant workers who stood up to their bosses, complete with planning with the Trump Administration for maximum cruelty.
No one said there was no conspiracy behind the raids. The comment was about why the owners are never targeted. Specifically:
it would be far more effective to stem immigration by applying massive fines to those who employ undocumented workers than it is to try and round them all up and deport them. If the jobs dry up, they'll stop coming.
This has always been true. It's true right now while Trump is enacting raids to advance his agenda and the owners are trying to shut up workers pushing for more rights. But it was true during the Obama admin too. And the Bush admin. And the Clinton admin. And so on and so forth. None of this is new beyond the extra theatre and extra shittiness of the Trump admin. You can find no end of stories like this if you've been following this stuff for the last decades.
And it's always the same because no one is actually interested in disrupting a system that delivers cheap food. Immigrants want the money and are willing to do the work and the bosses want cheap labour. It's exactly the same across the entire agricultural industry. There has never been any serious effort to do anything about that system and that's entirely independent of who is running various levels of government. The attempt to attribute all this to some sort of deliberate white supremacist agenda misses the ways in which it continues basically unnoticed regardless of who is running the show. If you really wanted to do something about the system, you'd go after the jobs that are the reason people cross the border to work. But they don't because that's neither the point of the attacks on these immigrant works nor the goal of the various levels of government overseeing this stuff.
In the same way trying to attribute this to rich people is just passing the buck. It's trying to avoid the way in which everyone benefits from and maintains the system. You see this in all sorts of other business. From clothing to shoes to just, like, all of Wal-mart or the like to electronics manufacturing. It's international, it's long-standing and the truth is that while there are groups agitating over these issues most people just go about their lives cause they need shoes and cloths and food and all that shit being cheaper is always a good thing. This isn't a conspiracy to make rich people richer, it's just capitalism. Cheap labour -> cheap prices and a lack of interest in picking a fight to stop that.
The agricultural industry runs this way because it's cheap. The owners don't get targeted because there's never been a real interest in stopping the whole thing. All you actually get are occasional blips, usually as this or that state passes some shitty racist new regulation or law and the usual result is a bunch of people lose money. The white supremacists want the non-whites out but the owners want to just make money from the cheap labour. But the basis of, for example, the entire Republican party is a bunch of rich people attempting to use racism to forward their agenda. But there's some blips along the way because racism has never been particularly self-aware as any examination of immigration policy will demonstrate (eg - like how the growth in the latino population of the US via illegal immigration is in large part because of attempts to make it harder for foreigners to get into the US)
If the next Democratic president nukes ICE from orbit it's still doubtful there will be any sort of attempt to restrict the demand for cheap immigrant labour.
Pretty much everything about the tangents about the nature of racism in the food and ag industries are getting pretty off topic. There's some good discussion to be had, but it belongs in another thread.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
You know, carefully not saying things like "the Trump family is a bunch of cheap abusive assholes" and "we're all a bunch of hypocrites" and stuff like that.
You know, carefully not saying things like "the Trump family is a bunch of cheap abusive assholes" and "we're all a bunch of hypocrites" and stuff like that.
This would be a bigger story if Trump hadn't fully divested himself from his business, and therefore isn't reaponsible or able to make decisions about staffing requirements.
Oh.
Wait.
I mean the opposite of that.
Glad Republicans seem to fully embrace Trump’s abuse of the emoluments clause. Cause it shows as a party they no longer have ANY fucking credibility on the issue of corruption.
We know that most were in that boat already, but with the silence from every one of them (former Republican Amash excepted), they're all the same on this issue.
We know that most were in that boat already, but with the silence from every one of them (former Republican Amash excepted), they're all the same on this issue.
Amash is a pretty clear example about why they are silent. If they spoke up they wouldn't be Republican anymore.
So, I'm not gonna read the full 800 pages to find out
But if I'd successfully managed to apply for the unemployment I was paid into while living in the US, and received that money, would I no longer have been able to apply for another residency visa?
(For the record, I was laid off, not allowed to legally apply for unemployment until after I'd left the country, and then calls to the Virginia state unemployment department were blocked from out of country, it was very cool and resulted in never being able to claim those funds)
So, I'm not gonna read the full 800 pages to find out
But if I'd successfully managed to apply for the unemployment I was paid into while living in the US, and received that money, would I no longer have been able to apply for another residency visa?
(For the record, I was laid off, not allowed to legally apply for unemployment until after I'd left the country, and then calls to the Virginia state unemployment department were blocked from out of country, it was very cool)
My understanding is yes, you'd be done.
Practically speaking, are you white?
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
So, I'm not gonna read the full 800 pages to find out
But if I'd successfully managed to apply for the unemployment I was paid into while living in the US, and received that money, would I no longer have been able to apply for another residency visa?
(For the record, I was laid off, not allowed to legally apply for unemployment until after I'd left the country, and then calls to the Virginia state unemployment department were blocked from out of country, it was very cool)
My understanding is yes, you'd be done.
Practically speaking, are you white?
Practically, white and female and Canadian, so presumably I could squeak by, but even then my second visa application the week of Trump's inauguration was nightmarish and terrifying and involved threats of being accused of immigration fraud for no reason, and comments from the CBP officer about how Trump was gonna burn NAFTA, so!
(John Washington is a writer and translator The Nation and The Intercept, among others.)
ICE and CBP have been writing down lies instead of the actual answers given by asylum seekers, and immigration courts are hellscapes that make it nearly impossible to challenge those lies that, once recorded, will be considered more credible than what asylum seekers say afterwards. Read the article.
Hmm. Felony murder rule anyone? As much as I'm uncomfortable with the thing, these assholes are killing people so put em away, burn it all down, and salt the earth.
(John Washington is a writer and translator The Nation and The Intercept, among others.)
ICE and CBP have been writing down lies instead of the actual answers given by asylum seekers, and immigration courts are hellscapes that make it nearly impossible to challenge those lies that, once recorded, will be considered more credible than what asylum seekers say afterwards. Read the article.
I'm not even shocked by this. It's just like "Oh yeah, now that you mention the idea, of course they've been doing that. Why wouldn't they?"
They could honestly come out with a story that people are not really being deported but are being dumped in the ocean like in handmaidens tale and I wouldn’t be surprised at this point. Angry sure but not surprised.
I mean hell thats only a tiny step down from dumping a Christian that doesn’t speak Arabic and has schizophrenia and insulin dependent diabetes into Najaf.
Is there actually a threshold of depravity where people show up at the camps and interfere with them/take them apart, or stage massive economy-fucking protests, or a general strike, or something?
I'm kind of afraid that even people on the overall left don't care enough about immigrants to take action, even non-violent action. Even if someone stumbled over a mass grave in the next 17 months.
Is there actually a threshold of depravity where people show up at the camps and interfere with them/take them apart, or stage massive economy-fucking protests, or a general strike, or something?
I'm kind of afraid that even people on the overall left don't care enough about immigrants to take action, even non-violent action. Even if someone stumbled over a mass grave in the next 17 months.
Is there actually a threshold of depravity where people show up at the camps and interfere with them/take them apart, or stage massive economy-fucking protests, or a general strike, or something?
By the time the Republicans are emboldened enough to openly shoot immigrants or whatever, we will all be unable to do anything because of the fascist takeover.
Is there actually a threshold of depravity where people show up at the camps and interfere with them/take them apart, or stage massive economy-fucking protests, or a general strike, or something?
I'm kind of afraid that even people on the overall left don't care enough about immigrants to take action, even non-violent action. Even if someone stumbled over a mass grave in the next 17 months.
the problem is probably the exact same one that decent folks faced in germany in the 30s
most people have shit on their plates. I would absolutely protest the hell out of the camps. Loudly and heroically. Who's going to take care of my kids while I'm away? Who's going to make sure my house doesn't get taken away? Pay my bills? A million other things. There would be massive protests except for most people can't afford to in every sense of the word.
By the time good people realized their situation in Germany, the choice was to keep quiet or join the Jews in the death camps. Many did the latter, but it didn't stop the death camps (though the risks people like them took did save many Jewish people.)
By the time good people realized their situation in Germany, the choice was to keep quiet or join the Jews in the death camps. Many did the latter, but it didn't stop the death camps (though the risks people like them took did save many Jewish people.)
What was actually being done to Jews wasn’t even really public knowledge in Germany up until the end of the war (though plenty of people probably guessed). There were camps and ghettos that were supposedly there so the Jews could be held until the end of the war, when they would be “deported and resettled”. The Nazis even made fake videos of Jewish children playing in play grounds and Jewish people hanging out at the beach and the like.
By the time good people realized their situation in Germany, the choice was to keep quiet or join the Jews in the death camps. Many did the latter, but it didn't stop the death camps (though the risks people like them took did save many Jewish people.)
What was actually being done to Jews wasn’t even really public knowledge in Germany up until the end of the war (though plenty of people probably guessed). There were camps and ghettos that were supposedly there so the Jews could be held until the end of the war, when they would be “deported and resettled”. The Nazis even made fake videos of Jewish children playing in play grounds and Jewish people hanging out at the beach and the like.
There are accounts as well that as Allied forces began to encroach on some of the camps, the Nazis would up and move everything and everyone they could and move them to camps not about to be surrounded by the Allies.
The impression that was left was they really did not want anyone knowing what they were doing in the death camps.
Also reminder: before they decided to murder them all, the Nazis original plan was to resettle them in Madagascar, which from descriptions of the plan sounded like a giant camp the Nazis planned to oversee while granting an illusory sense of self determination (the Nazis, of course, would have held the actual power)
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MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
There is at least one person who tried, and died, to do something about it. Currently the situation is that ICE and CBP will kill you for direct action. These camps are heavily armed and have the legal authority to keep people out.
The only ways these camps shut down is either taking legal control of the system and shutting them down, or a mass action that is likely to see many, many people killed.
Currently the people trying to do something are going with the former. Its very easy to ask where the line is for the American people, but very different to walk towards the guns.
I'm not trying throw any shade here, at any camp. Just a reminder that these are heavily armed federal agents and that direct actions have already resulted in direct consequences.
Is there actually a threshold of depravity where people show up at the camps and interfere with them/take them apart, or stage massive economy-fucking protests, or a general strike, or something?
I'm kind of afraid that even people on the overall left don't care enough about immigrants to take action, even non-violent action. Even if someone stumbled over a mass grave in the next 17 months.
Posts
The owner of the business in Mississippi who hired all of these undocumented persons uses a social security number verification system and he is the one who supplied his own workers with the fake numbers and fake documentation they needed. The employer is guilty of perpetrating fraud and identity theft but he is not being charged with these crimes.
Further, the owner of the business was facing charges of sexual harassment and assault by several brave immigrant women who came forward to share their stories. The federal government knows this but they are not bringing charges against the owner of the business for this reason either.
Last, the employer was found responsible of wage theft in the amount of 3.8 million dollars. Again, brave workers came forward to talk about unpaid hours of work and illegally docked paychecks. And they proved their case. But as you might have guessed the federal government is not charging owner of the business with any wrongdoing here either.
The White House is not directing the Department of Homeland Security to make an example of this business owner by fining him and/or charging him because he is a major donor to the Trump presidential campaign.
If you thought that the swamp was being drained you are sorely mistaken.
But wait it gets worse.
The White House flew in the national director of ICE ahead of the raid in Mississippi and imported 600 ICE agents not stationed in that area. All of this constitutes an unprecedented expense of our taxpayer dollars.
And based on all available evidence the reason the White House and Department of Homeland Security justified this expense was they knew that they would receive viral media coverage by choosing to execute a raid of this scale in the wake of the El Paso shooting.
The Trump re-election campaign has already spent $17.2 million on digital ads. 2,200+ of these mention an “invasion of illegal immigrants.” And by rounding up 680 workers in the most public and publicized way possible the White House has, as it did with the 4th of July military parade, made the conscious decision to buttress and complement its campaign expenditures on our dime as taxpayers.
ICE did not select this raid site randomly. This worksite had been on their radar for a year. They knew with a great deal of anticipation that this raid would happen at this time. And that’s how they were able to get 600 agents shipped in and that’s why the national director was on the ground.
And yet they did not notify any child welfare agencies ahead of time.
They knew they were rounding up workers with kids who punch a time card. They knew they were not getting gang members or people who travel from place to place and are difficult to track. They knew they were going to take moms and dads away from their children (many if not most of whom are US citizens) right before the first day of school.
They knew they were going to leave children orphaned by conducting this raid but they never did anything at all to try and help those children.
And if all of that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach then consider the fact that there is no immigration court in the state of Mississippi. Immigrants in detention are not entitled to lawyers. They don’t get phone calls. If they lived in any other state their family members trying to find them would know which courts to call.
Anyone rounded up in Mississippi will likely end up in court in Louisiana or Tennessee. But there’s no way of knowing for sure.
So again, you are taken at work. But your boss goes home and nothing happens to him. You can’t speak to or see your kids unless someone along the way possesses enough humanity to help you do so. Otherwise you have no lawyer assigned to help you, and you are not entitled to use a phone even to make a collect call. Because you’re not entitled to the same rights in the immigration court system as you are in any other court system, and your family doesn’t know where you are, or when your hearing is, chances are you’ll be deported.
If you don’t have family in the area who will fight to keep your kids, they will become wards of the state. They will end up in foster care. And they’ll be scarred for life. All because Donald Trump chose to steal your tax dollars and mine, and use them for his re-election campaign.
And if you still don’t care because you’re so wretched and broken that you think your ignorance of immigration law justifies your belief that people need to “get in line” despite the fact that there are 185 visa types and each one has multiple “lines” and wait times. If you don’t know or don’t care that a Mexican with a PhD cannot win a Green Card in a lottery and will wait 23 years to be reunited with his family, while a Belgian high school dropout with a juvenile criminal record can win a Green Card in a lottery and reunite with his family in 3 years. And that these are the broken immigration laws you want to enforce when you chant “build that wall” and “send them back,” then please by all means enjoy that Make America Great Again hat made in China. And please by all means go fuck yourself.
It all sounds v plausible but I am v leery of social media posts.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
We could massively reduce illegal immigration if we prosecuted employers. But we never consider that. And the yokels who vote Republican to "get rid of illegal immigrants" never, ever notice.
That's certainly the way that story read. Equally deplorable that it was the white houses attempt to squash the el paso story.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The system is very much exactly that. This isn't some "market realities" economics 101 shit. There isn't some neutral law of economics that says rich people don't get punished for breaking the law.
This isn't about nobody wanting to rock the boat because it would increase food prices and nobody wants that, it is about those in power maintaining the system they've built in order to maximize profits and exploit workers as much as they can.
These raids are part of the system. The threat and occasional carrying out of arresting these workers is part of how it works. The racists aren't actually rocking the boat.
Honestly you can't read this and then come to the conclusion that this isn't a make-wealthy-people-richer scheme. It seems to be the whole point of it.
American History past the end of the civil war is Rich bastards going "How the fuck do I get my slaves back."
Whereas, if I understood Shryke correctly, his view is that this is more akin to an emergent property in a race to cut costs and deliver as much food as cheaply as possible, and then the racism kicks in when racists get sufficiently unhappy and then brown folks get hurt because of it.
But I think there's a significant risk in attributing this to some sort of naturally occurring market forces dynamic when every time you look into this stories it seems a very clear evolution in the system of American slavery attempting to adapt around the 13th Amendment; the white supremacy was baked in at every level, and it is ultimately a contradictory and self-defeating system meant to empower those at the top and create a disposable labor pool made up of those whom white supremacy has labeled to be lesser.
These camps WILL start forcing these people to work on "work release" programs where they're being paid like 20 cents an hour. I know this because that's exactly what we do now. Some states don't have to pay their slaves, excuse me, inmate workers at all. Some states can also force labor under threat of discipline, legally. They're already housing detainees in private prisons, probably generating stunning profits for those companies. The expansion of private prisons and the sudden focus on detaining immigrants in them is absolutely no coincidence.
Someone is making a lot of money over this whole thing, and it will never stop until that gravy train loses its steam. That's capitalism, babey.
By the way these raids on poultry plants are nothing new. The chicken processing industry has been preying on immigrant communities for decades, underpaying them and forcing them to work in inhumane and atrocious conditions, then simply calling an anonymous tip to immigration authorities if anyone has anything to say about it. Or when your workers are getting sick and injured because of the gruelling conditions. Just ship em out and hire some new ones! It's not as if that's a goddamn nightmare horror show!
Except then half a page later we found out it was a conspiracy to fuck over the immigrant workers who stood up to their bosses, complete with planning with the Trump Administration for maximum cruelty.
Late stage capitalism at work again
Which, to be clear, doesn't excuse or justify exploiting workers.
(If there's discussion to be had here I can spin off a GST.)
No one said there was no conspiracy behind the raids. The comment was about why the owners are never targeted. Specifically:
This has always been true. It's true right now while Trump is enacting raids to advance his agenda and the owners are trying to shut up workers pushing for more rights. But it was true during the Obama admin too. And the Bush admin. And the Clinton admin. And so on and so forth. None of this is new beyond the extra theatre and extra shittiness of the Trump admin. You can find no end of stories like this if you've been following this stuff for the last decades.
And it's always the same because no one is actually interested in disrupting a system that delivers cheap food. Immigrants want the money and are willing to do the work and the bosses want cheap labour. It's exactly the same across the entire agricultural industry. There has never been any serious effort to do anything about that system and that's entirely independent of who is running various levels of government. The attempt to attribute all this to some sort of deliberate white supremacist agenda misses the ways in which it continues basically unnoticed regardless of who is running the show. If you really wanted to do something about the system, you'd go after the jobs that are the reason people cross the border to work. But they don't because that's neither the point of the attacks on these immigrant works nor the goal of the various levels of government overseeing this stuff.
In the same way trying to attribute this to rich people is just passing the buck. It's trying to avoid the way in which everyone benefits from and maintains the system. You see this in all sorts of other business. From clothing to shoes to just, like, all of Wal-mart or the like to electronics manufacturing. It's international, it's long-standing and the truth is that while there are groups agitating over these issues most people just go about their lives cause they need shoes and cloths and food and all that shit being cheaper is always a good thing. This isn't a conspiracy to make rich people richer, it's just capitalism. Cheap labour -> cheap prices and a lack of interest in picking a fight to stop that.
The agricultural industry runs this way because it's cheap. The owners don't get targeted because there's never been a real interest in stopping the whole thing. All you actually get are occasional blips, usually as this or that state passes some shitty racist new regulation or law and the usual result is a bunch of people lose money. The white supremacists want the non-whites out but the owners want to just make money from the cheap labour. But the basis of, for example, the entire Republican party is a bunch of rich people attempting to use racism to forward their agenda. But there's some blips along the way because racism has never been particularly self-aware as any examination of immigration policy will demonstrate (eg - like how the growth in the latino population of the US via illegal immigration is in large part because of attempts to make it harder for foreigners to get into the US)
If the next Democratic president nukes ICE from orbit it's still doubtful there will be any sort of attempt to restrict the demand for cheap immigrant labour.
You know, carefully not saying things like "the Trump family is a bunch of cheap abusive assholes" and "we're all a bunch of hypocrites" and stuff like that.
This would be a bigger story if Trump hadn't fully divested himself from his business, and therefore isn't reaponsible or able to make decisions about staffing requirements.
Oh.
Wait.
I mean the opposite of that.
Glad Republicans seem to fully embrace Trump’s abuse of the emoluments clause. Cause it shows as a party they no longer have ANY fucking credibility on the issue of corruption.
We know that most were in that boat already, but with the silence from every one of them (former Republican Amash excepted), they're all the same on this issue.
Amash is a pretty clear example about why they are silent. If they spoke up they wouldn't be Republican anymore.
So, I'm not gonna read the full 800 pages to find out
But if I'd successfully managed to apply for the unemployment I was paid into while living in the US, and received that money, would I no longer have been able to apply for another residency visa?
(For the record, I was laid off, not allowed to legally apply for unemployment until after I'd left the country, and then calls to the Virginia state unemployment department were blocked from out of country, it was very cool and resulted in never being able to claim those funds)
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My understanding is yes, you'd be done.
Practically speaking, are you white?
Practically, white and female and Canadian, so presumably I could squeak by, but even then my second visa application the week of Trump's inauguration was nightmarish and terrifying and involved threats of being accused of immigration fraud for no reason, and comments from the CBP officer about how Trump was gonna burn NAFTA, so!
Mileage may vary, is what I'm saying
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(John Washington is a writer and translator The Nation and The Intercept, among others.)
ICE and CBP have been writing down lies instead of the actual answers given by asylum seekers, and immigration courts are hellscapes that make it nearly impossible to challenge those lies that, once recorded, will be considered more credible than what asylum seekers say afterwards. Read the article.
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I'm not even shocked by this. It's just like "Oh yeah, now that you mention the idea, of course they've been doing that. Why wouldn't they?"
I mean hell thats only a tiny step down from dumping a Christian that doesn’t speak Arabic and has schizophrenia and insulin dependent diabetes into Najaf.
I'm kind of afraid that even people on the overall left don't care enough about immigrants to take action, even non-violent action. Even if someone stumbled over a mass grave in the next 17 months.
History suggests no.
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By the time the Republicans are emboldened enough to openly shoot immigrants or whatever, we will all be unable to do anything because of the fascist takeover.
the problem is probably the exact same one that decent folks faced in germany in the 30s
most people have shit on their plates. I would absolutely protest the hell out of the camps. Loudly and heroically. Who's going to take care of my kids while I'm away? Who's going to make sure my house doesn't get taken away? Pay my bills? A million other things. There would be massive protests except for most people can't afford to in every sense of the word.
What was actually being done to Jews wasn’t even really public knowledge in Germany up until the end of the war (though plenty of people probably guessed). There were camps and ghettos that were supposedly there so the Jews could be held until the end of the war, when they would be “deported and resettled”. The Nazis even made fake videos of Jewish children playing in play grounds and Jewish people hanging out at the beach and the like.
There are accounts as well that as Allied forces began to encroach on some of the camps, the Nazis would up and move everything and everyone they could and move them to camps not about to be surrounded by the Allies.
The impression that was left was they really did not want anyone knowing what they were doing in the death camps.
The only ways these camps shut down is either taking legal control of the system and shutting them down, or a mass action that is likely to see many, many people killed.
Currently the people trying to do something are going with the former. Its very easy to ask where the line is for the American people, but very different to walk towards the guns.
I'm not trying throw any shade here, at any camp. Just a reminder that these are heavily armed federal agents and that direct actions have already resulted in direct consequences.
The only threshold were the nuremberg trials