They like having a permanent underclass of brown people to perform their dangerous labor. What they don’t like is a path toward citizenship for them or their children. In a perfect converative world, they’d work until infirm or dead and then the whole family gets shipped back to where they came from.
I think that there is also an element of ‘I suffered through it. You should too!’ on behalf of those immigrants who are here legally. When Biden attempted student loan forgiveness, that attitude came out openly and often. ‘I had to pay off this huge loan by myself! These students should too!’ IMO This is rather like letting your toddler stick a paperlcip in an outlet because ‘Nobody stopped me from doing that at your age!’.
Yes, it sucks that you had to suffer through a long process to obtain US citizenship. If other immigrants don’t have to suffer through that process, that is a good thing.
Most people saying this already know what is going on. That crap is being put out just to stall/deflect.
I have reasons for not favoring loan forgiveness and this isn’t it - it’s because it benefits (future) high earners and does nothing to help people who did not go to college (who will statistically earn much less than those college graduates over their lifetimes) and will further widen the wealth gap. It’s extra benefit to those who are already on much better long-term trajectory.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I didn’t mean to say that everybody who opposed it felt this way. But, a lot of people did and were very open about it.
This is exactly what I’m seeing from the conservatives on NextDoor in my very blue city.
Whenever I point this out to them, they dance around it.
Woe that this thread isn’t in the pit. The policies the OP seems to want:
- a focus on small minority of immigrants who probably should be deported
- amnesty for undocumented immigrants who have been contributing society, or some other reasonable approach to the millions of undocumented immigrants already here
- comprehensive immigration reform to streamline the process thereby encouraging more immigrants to go through legal channels
Is the mainstream Democratic position for at least the last 20 years.
The GOP has railed against this. And in classic GOP fashion, have never had a workable plan to achieve the “zero illegal immigrants” policy that they’ve yearned for.
No plan for finding, legally processing, and humanely deporting millions of people. No plan for immigration reform. No plan for border security that remains in compliance with global treaties, federal law, or sane ethical considerations.
There is a simple approach, tried multiple times – crack down hard on employers. But this runs afoul of the GOP’s business interests. So now they’re doing the only other thing that makes sense – continue to scapegoat the immigrants themselves (rather than the systems, both governmental and economic, that have created this situation) and use gestapo tactics to strike fear and cause a mass exodus. At, mind you, the cost of American economic stability and global standing.
Anyone who voted R voted for this.
The working assumption of the unthinking Right is that we can deport “criminals” without expensive or time consuming trials. Just pick them up and send them “away”. Who cares how many crimes they’ll commit when they’re in some other country. Not our problem.
As noted by others between your post and mine, another article of deep-seated RW faith that is actually pure fantasy is that large numbers of professional criminals / gang members are coming here and can be trivially identified by tattoos or whatever. If ICE could just do mass arrests, these folks would be quickly identified and unceremoniously dumped on a jail plane to someplace else and be done with them.
Moderating:
I don’t know about the Pit, but it certainly belongs in P&E. Moving.
I think some Middle Eastern countries have a semi-permanent class of immigrant guest workers who are never able to acquire citizenship. I think some have more guest workers than actual citizens.
Part of the trick of maintaining a permanent underclass of guest workers is make sure none can bring a family with them. And keep them largely imprisoned on their worksites so the e.g Filipino construction workers building expensive highrises in Dubai never meet the Filipina housemaids who tend to the homes of the wealthy in the recently built highrises.
Obviously all of that has no place in a liberal pluralistic society. But the US Right doesn’t want a liberal or pluralistic society.
Trump is usually so truthful, I can’t believe that he lied about his intentions!
My father once told me that nobody in UAE works outside, because it’s too hot. But what of all the work that needs to be done outside? Oh, they hire people for that, so that nobody needs to go outside.
Part of the issue is, the Steven Millers of the world pitched and sold to Trump and other candidates a scenario of fixing things by expelling a million people a year. The candidates bought into that hook, line and sinker and ran on it, because they were willing to take it on faith, and some including Trump by all appearances DO believe, that there ARE tens of millions of criminal undesirable outsiders on the loose we could just pick up if we had the will to do it.
ICE contributes to this mess firstly by being obedient dogs and initially welcoming being “unleashed”, but also by (along with CBP and USCIS) having nobody display the professional ethics and guts to say, “NO Mr. President, Mme. Secretary, we DO NOT HAVE enough known-risk criminals and pending unenforced orders to lawfully process 3,000 people a day on a sustained basis. If the order is just bring in 3,000 bodies per day never mind how, fine, but know that it will make you look bad.” Or maybe someone did and just got canned on the spot for it.
POTUS finally had to issue an order to not go out after agriculture and hospitality workplaces, but all that means is now they will intensify the going after construction crews and people at their immigration case hearings. Because even now nobody wants to be the one to say “deportations by the millions!” was a dumb plan.
Then these conservatives you have spoken to are idiots. Trump was very clear what he planned:
Why would they feel betrayed? Or do they have the bizarre notion that there are more than 10 million illegal immigrants who are criminals (criminals for other than violating immigration laws)?
The most generous interpretation is that they believed (or convinced themselves) there was no way that Miller/Trump/P2025 were just pulling out of thin air that there were tens of millions of dangerous criminal aliens distinct from the people with irregular status but in the legit workforce or admitted under special forebearances – that they surely must have had some sort of reliable source for that claim.
That’s a pretty thin straw to grasp but one can imagine the notion that the Republican candidate would deliberately hurt the businesses and families of his own supporters just to make a reckless display of performative viciousness was hard to wrap their minds around.
Going back to the thread title, in that sense, yes, the “normal” conservatives as we once knew them, would be outraged by what’s going on, because at least they’d want it done with proper form, by the book, following a sensible plan.
None of that is relevant to conservatives, however. It’s easy to identify who "needs " to be deported; just look at their skin tone. There’s no need for the legal process, they are criminals just for existing with the wrong skin tone. And less than no reason to care about “humanely” deporting them; they aren’t really human in the first place after all, they’re members of the inferior, subhuman non-white races. The cruelty is the point, the process is supposed to be as brutal, dehumanizing and terrifying as possible. Deaths and breaking up of families ideally included.
And global treaties? “Ink on a page”. What does America, the Chosen Nation of God, care about the opinions of untermenschen?
Faux et al has been repeating for decades that the borders are uncontrolled and nobody but depraved gangsters are coming in. And doing so by the millions.
I can recall my Mom in Phoenix becoming terrified that all the nice Hispanic folks she was used to seeing were being overrun and replaced by depraved feral Savadorean MS-13 hoodlums.
Mom died in 2006. Limbaugh and Hannity were the ones who filled her head, starting in the late 1990s.
The onslaught of racist “open border criminal invasion” propaganda has been running for literally three decades = half an adult lifetime.
It’s an unfortunate truth that sometimes when Americans vote for something they’re not voting for what they think they are. A lot of Americans who supported the 18th Amendment were genuinely shocked when the Volstead Act didn’t allow for beer or wine to be manufactured and sold. These people really thought John Barleycorn, rum, and other spirits would be outlawed but good old beer and wine would be safe. Those people must not have been paying attention to the likes of the Anti-Saloon League.
I’ve only been paying attention to politics for a little over 30 years now, and in that entire time it seems as though the United States as a whole cannot decide how it feels about illegal immigration. We’re proud of our immigrant history but vilify undocumented workers and pretend they don’t play a vital role in some sectors of our economy. I would love an immigration policy that is humane, recognizes our need for immigrant labor, and makes it easier for them to work here legally.
An unfortunate truth is that when people are conditioned to lie to achieve a goal, they will lie to you. It has absolutely nothing to do with “right” or “wrong”, and everything to do with winning.