Regardless, if you target the top-10 countries where illegal immigrants come from (representing 9.7 million souls), you’ll find the real story:
81% Catholic
93% non-White
I’m not talking solely about birthright citizenship. I’m talking about people who are married to U.S. citizens (either native-born or naturalized), but since a draconian law passed in 1996, cannot become U.S. permanent residents based on those family relationships (or any other normal route to legal permanent residence) without facing (depending on the past history) a three-year, ten-year, or permanent bar from the U.S.
Gotcha. Misread your point - my bad.
A President is someone who enforces existing laws. An emperor makes it up as he goes along.
Well, I see a lot of 1st Amendment-protected speech in your answer. Could go either way I guess, if Trump really does seize power and focuses on mass deportation like he says he will.
I see your point. “While it is happening.” Of course it starts with talk. But talk can be beaten with talk. I think 2016 America has more to bring to bear against the kind of threat Trump represents than 1930s Germany. For one, propaganda simply isn’t the same when everybody has a smartphone. Too many channels of communication, just doesn’t work the same. This can’t be underestimated.
Plus Trump is losing in pretty much every poll. If he loses, this doesn’t go away but the US does not go on a mad Mexican witch hunt either.
Why doesn’t it go away? Well, evangelicals. They don’t quit.
Well, yeah, it is hard to believe those things will happen here because they are wholly unprecedented. Even if Trump gets elected, do you really think he will have Congress and SCOTUS arrested? How does that work?
It almost certainly doesn’t work, because the Army wouldn’t play along.
We won’t see tanks firing into the Capitol, the way they did into the Russian Parliament, because the tank commanders have too much respect for the constitution.
There’s still a huge danger if someone like Trump got into the White House. He could cause a hell of a lot of lower-level damage, issuing executive decrees, firing department heads, dismantling the EPA by single mandate, repudiating treaties, and other ugly behavior. But the Supreme Court is very unlikely to be arrested.
Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof. Trump would do great harm…but once his term was over, he’d leave office without trying to seize personal power. And then we could rinse out the Augean Stables he’d leave behind, and “make America great again.”
I think it starts with a narrative: we have weak, corrupt leaders who only follow the whims and wishes of a money-making-above-all class (which, conveniently does not include Trump himself or any of his rich cronies/allies and all of their previous donations) and who need to be kicked out of Washington and replaced because they (and Obama) are the one thing standing in between a weak, declining, poorly-respected America and a great America. You just need some way to communicate this message to the masses, a network of communications, if you will. Some kind of multimedia network, including both old media like television and new media like blogs, that Trump would have very close connections to through his immediate advisors.
Ok. So how likely do you think it is that the Final Solution to Immigrants in the USA will be implemented, even assuming Trump is elected POTUS?
24 hours ago, I would’ve totally dismissed these ideas. Yah, the Right has a somewhat airtight echo chamber with a lot of people glued in, but it is a minority audience and team Big Picture still has a couple months to pick off individuals one-by-one from that herd with facts and reason. This ain’t 1930 propaganda- anyone can reach pretty much anyone!
But then I learned about the particular way the Philippines have gone nuts. You know, the country with the leader who called Obama a ‘son of a whore’? Yah, via the democratic process they have unleashed death squads in their own country to murder drug dealers, drug users, corrupt cops, and other nasties. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte went on national TV last month and told the general public kill drug dealers and I’ll give you a medal Well, all this DIY justice has resulted in over 2000 deaths so far, including accidentally murdered children, with no end in sight.
Democracy? Yes. Pinging the fucked-up-o-meter? Definitely. I don’t know how desperate things are in the Philippines that such a thing would garner popular support, but damn, I sure hope Trump loses and we never find out how far he is willing/able to take his agenda.
Precisely. Which is why using the Holocaust as a comparison to his deportation plan is not Godwinizing.
Our President isn’t a king. He doesn’t have the authority to simply enact something like this. It’s part of our checks and balances system. Only Congress could authorize something like this and there is zero chance they would, no matter what fantasy you spin for a theoretical Trump victory. This is the equivalent of saying that if Sanders got elected he could just, by fiat, wave aside student loans and change us to a single payer health care system. Those are things that the President simply doesn’t have the authority to do by himself.
In order for the US to actually do something like what you are fantasizing about it would take a sea change at a fundamental level. You’d need not only all of the Republicans on board with it (which is unlikely) but a good percentage of Democrats as well (which is ridiculous). At most, I could see a crack down on actually enforcing the laws already on the books, but to implement them you’d need to substantially increase the budget of the border patrol and port authority, and that’s another non-starter.
And, of course, all of this is pretty much moot since Trump is losing pretty badly right now in all of the key battle-ground states. Even if by some miracle (or disaster more likely) he managed to squeak into office, however, this along with his ridiculous wall are simply not going to happy.
The way things are now, it wouldn’t/couldn’t happen. The populace wouldn’t stand for death camps.
Only if We The People became fully convinced that illegal immigrants were a major source of crime, and there were real high crime rates that people were suffering from, could we be tricked into blaming them for it and taking drastic measures.
Before you can “blame the Jews” there have to be problems to blame them for.
Agreed, but, seriously, things in the Philippines were vastly more messed up than here…and they have a long history of dictatorial Presidents with personal control over the military. Trump wouldn’t have this kind of power and support.
I am sorry for the confusion. I was using “Final Solution to Immigrants in the USA” as a euphemism for Trump’s immigration plan, the subject of the OP. My motive for framing it that way was to be on board with JohnT that, yes, I also think ‘disappearing’ 11 million people, even if they are not ultimately murdered, is a Hitleresque project.
Alas, clarity was lost.
This is exactly ICE’s mission. Would you say they are Hitler-esque for doing the job we hired them to do?
For clarity’s sake, here is the mission statement of those evil Nazis a.k.a. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents:
Oh! Beg your pardon. I missed the context.
I’m actually of the opinion that, if mass deportations started, there would be some kick-back against it in the form of civil disobedience. I remember the Sanctuary movement, giving shelter to people targeted by Ronald Reagan’s deportation programs. People protected others from being sent back to countries where they risked being targeted by death squads.
I think we’d see something similar today if Trump started to try to deport hundreds of thousands of ordinary non-criminal people who’d been peacefully in residence, even illegally, many since they were infants.
I can see the Anne Frank web blog already … perhaps Anna-Marie Frank
It’s an expansion - there’s nothing that states that their mission is to find people currently living in this country and remove them. Read it again.
- Dangerous Aliens
- Those who enter illegally (note the present tense of this verb)
Nothing about seeking out illegals who are already living here.
Again, operationally, you need to explain to me how this expansion is different than the Holocaust. Because you can’t. The ICE is dealing with criminal illegals or newly-entered illegals.
Cite on that last: https://www.ice.gov/removal-statistics
Trump is proposing a massive expansion of this agency, both in terms of staffing and it’s stated mission. To jump from 260,000 deportations a year to the 2.5 million needed will, again, require a final solution on the scale of Hitlers.
So your claim is incorrect. Again.
I’m not saying there are going to be ovens. i’m saying Trump’s plan scales with Hitler’s on an almost 1:1 basis.
On the other hand, everybody avoids the question of what would happen if our ships full of refugees were met with a coalition of South American naval vessels. Or the Mexican Navy. Or simply denied permission to dock.
This is incorrect. I think we can both agree that they’re removing people from the country. Your post said it was ~230K last year. They’re certainly not finding people living in other countries and removing them, so what’s left? People currently living in this country.
And I’m not sure why you think it’s going to jump to 2.5 million per year. I don’t think Trump’s ever said that, but I’m standing by for a cite. Something that includes the phrase “2.5 million per year”.
I think you’re wrong about the timing of his plan. I don’t think he’s ever said, “this is all going to be done in X years” or “we’ll catch them all and deport them in the next X years”. So … cite?
Has Trump actually got a plan for anything. At all?