If you do a quick search of threads I’ve started, you might note that I’m, shall we say, a tad concerned about how people are treated. Well, I’m especially concerned by how our government treats someone. It’s bad enough we still have far too many people who consider someone who happens to “look different” to be foreign, to not be American, to not “belong here” even if the target’s family has been in the US for generations longer than the bully’s family. As I just said above, this is bullying by Trump. His supporters love it because Trump’s targets happen to be wannabe bullies who want to bully those people. The ironic thing is that Trump isn’t actually helping the majority of his supporters; he’s helping “his own kind” (if you know what I mean).
Bullying, reestablishing the socioeconomic pecking order is definitely why a lot of people support Trump and Trumpism.
This will get worse. All of the ‘isms’ have a beginning; the question is where it ends, and what kind of harm is inflicted before people realize the madness. This policy is the gentler kind of racism. But something like “buy American” policies can easily turn into boycotts of stores and shops owned by, operated by, or with investment from foreign-born individuals. It can spiral out of control, a lot more easily than people now realize.
If it’s batshit then why is it part of a law passed by huge bipartisan majorities? Immigrants are not admissible if they are judged “likely to be a public charge”.
So you think anyone who has ever received any social welfare benefits at all, up to and including the ACA, qualifies as “likely to be a public charge”?
Coming soon to a Liberty Island near you:
The New Colossus (v. 45)
Not like that massive woman facing East
With long green robes that reach down to her toes
(Too bad that she should have so many clothes;
You’d think she’d show a little thigh, at least)
But I digress- protect us from the beast,
The mule, the raping, thieving, killing horde,
Who, from his shit-hole country tries to board
Our great White ship that bears us to our feast.
Hold back the so-called “refugees” out there.
Send me your oligarchs, flush with success
Whose deals with me are always more than fair,
Who buy my real estate without much stress.
While Fox and Friends all praise me on the air,
We’ll show my base that they can do with less.
They’re probably already designing the new statue.
As with anything Trump does, he does it in such an awful and stupid way that it’s impossible to agree with him on pretty much anything. But first, it’s not batshit crazy, even with Trump’s interpretation. it’s an entirely reasonable interpretation of federal law. Second, this law was basically unenforced, against the public will. One of many examples of immigration law being tough on paper to satisfy voters, and lax in practice to satisfy elites.
As a general rule though, most countries don’t just let poor people stay and collect benefits unless they are refugees/asylum cases. Poor people are only admitted to work, and only then if there’s demand for their labor. Immigration is for the national interest, and solely for the national interest. If you want it to be for the interests of foreigners, then advocate for that and we’ll vote on it.
So booting, or preventing citizenship, from every legal immigrant who has ever, in their entire time in the US, received a single social welfare benefit, including the ACA (for which getting insurance was mandated by law), isn’t “batshit crazy” in your eyes?
If so, then we have a different conception of “batshit crazy”. We’re not talking about “poor people” among immigrants. We’re talking about a much, much larger group. The vast majority of people I know who have received at least one social welfare benefit in their lives are not in any way “likely to become a public charge”.
I’d definitely change the standards myself: the immigrant in question should be consistently under the poverty line before benefits, and utilizes food stamps and/or Medicaid. ACA is a social benefit, but by design a social benefit one can only get from having a decent job. Trump shouldn’t have changed the Obama era regulation on ACA when it comes to figuring out if someone is a public charge.
But I’m not going to give Trump hell over this, because this is a natural pendulum swing from decades of poor or nonexistent enforcement of this law.
It’s not a “natural pendulum swing”. It’s bigotry. Trump and his team, and based on polling and analysis from those like Nate Silver, most of his supporters, have immigration views based on culture and ethnicity far more than economic concerns, or law and order concerns. It’s not a mystery here. It’s mostly bigotry, due to changing demographics, which largely would have changed similarly even if the broadly agreed bipartisan immigration reforms had been in effect for the last 20 years.
IIRC EITC would count here too. A household that makes over $50k can receive EITC.
Maybe we’ll start counter lower marginal rates as public assistance.:smack:
It’s that too. But don’t you think that deceiving the public for decades on immigration has a cost? You’ve got a popular law sitting on the books, unenforced, because the elites for a variety of reasons don’t want to enforce it. Naturally, a candidate makes an issue of this and gets elected and starts enforcing it. That’s how democracy works. If you don’t want Trumps, do what the people ask you to do and stop playing politician games.
And yes, a lot of laws are motivated by bigotry. We fix that by changing minds and changing laws, and where the laws are patently unconstitutional we go to the courts. What we do not do is pass bigoted laws to appease the rednecks, but then not enforce them and hope the rednecks don’t notice. I don’t think anyone has failed to notice the widespread use of welfare benefits by poor immigrants, even taking into account that immigrants as a group contribute more than they take. Even taking that into account, we can get rid of the ones who are taking more than they give, and then immigrants become even better for the country. Which increases support for immigration.
Yes – and I mostly blame Republicans for this. Democrats have been willing to sign on to this broadly agreed upon bipartisan immigration reform for years and years. It’s Republicans who have prevented it, no matter who was president. I wish the Democrats had managed to cram this into the brief period in which they had Congress and the WH, but they weren’t able to. The Republicans had far, far more time to accomplish this, and they chose not too, over and over again.
Oh, bullshit. Democrats intend to sign onto “reform” that has less enforcement power for the President than is currently on the books. It’s a game and conservative Republicans who aren’t in the pockets of companies that want mass cheap labor have quoted chapter and verse of that law to show how it’s all a scam.
For example, “they must learn English”. Nope. “they must pay back taxes.” Not really. “clean record”. Nope. “Biometric entry/exit systems”. Been in six or seven laws, never funded or implemented, not funded in the reform law either.
When Democrats and pro-cheap labor Republicans start telling the truth, we can have a good faith compromise on this issue.
Actual Democratic policy makers, in general, have been on the side of public polling – non-wall border security measures, path to citizenship, no further restrictions on legal immigration, no Muslim ban, etc. And when those bills have come up, they’ve generally supported them. Obama certainly would have signed such a bill.
If we want to get rid of Trump we don’t need a new law. We can use this one.
Just take the part where it says you can’t be a citizen if you’ve received money from the American government and cross out the word American.
There’s a few layers to this. The first is that what Democrats sold the bill as wasn’t in the bill. It was sold as a “tough” path to citizenship that wasn’t. Then there’s how the bill would be implemented in practice. Almost every “tough” part granted the President the ability to waive it. And things like border funding and biometric entry/exit were for later bills, as in, “we just won’t fund it like we didn’t fund it the last six times we put it in a bill.”
The “public charge” portion was also neutered, something no one bothered to tell the public.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it (or the word of the idiots in the “Freedom Caucus”).
We can go over the individual parts of the bill that were fraudulent, although it’s beyond the scope of this thread. But suffice to say the lack of trust on this issue is going to make it hard to get anywhere. So the laws we have are the laws we’re going to have for a long time. IT’s refreshing that many Democrats are actually running on a platform of basically no internal enforcement and asylum laws that apply to basically everyone in the world outside of the Prince of Monaco. We need honest debate on this issue and we haven’t been getting it.
Let’s cut the bullshit.
How the fuck are you going to get “honest debate” about anything when you have a president that gaslights us on a daily basis and a political party that covers for him? The time for honest debate isn’t now - it’s simply not possible. What needs to happen now is to get the fucking traitors out of office. We can talk about “honest debate” then, but not until then.
The problem with this is that the line isn’t “Takes more than they give” its “takes anything at all”. Given that the US government is subsidizing employers so that they can underpay their workers, a large portion of our economy is supported by workers who need assistance. To simply state that all such workers are a drain on the system and that we are better off with them removed from it, is undervaluing their contribution. They clean our houses, cook our food, pick our vegetables, process our meats, watch our children and fight our wars. Fortunately there so many of them they are simply interchangeable cogs, so we don’t actually have to value any of them. If one complains we just go and find another. In this way we can look down on them and pretend that we would be so much better if they weren’t there leaching off of us, not appreciating that without them actually doing the work that needs to be done, our economy crashes like a pile of sticks, and that we actually need them more than they need us.
ETA:In the rant above I am discussing the poor in general who seem to be disdained by the right, not just immigrant poor.