NM, re read
I don’t think we **should **hold asylum seekers in jail. I’ve never thought that.
Right, the reason I retracted that is because I hadn’t noticed that you expect asylum seekers to wait on the Mexico side. So you’re just abdicating responsibility. No, we shouldn’t hold them; that’s Mexico’s problem.
Sorry, I wasn’t aware that the US had a responsibility to take care of people seeking asylum. Is that common? When someone overseas requests asylum, do we immediately fly them over to the US and take care of them?
The grain of truth to the claim you made about the democrats is, well, exactly what I quoted in that Vox article: the words we use matter. They matter for how the debate plays out. They matter for how people see these camps. They matter for whether people consider them worth paying attention to to begin with. Hell, they matter for getting the democrats to pay attention, because, as I keep pointing out, a lot of them just aren’t paying attention. Warren is - although to my knowledge she hasn’t called them concentration camps, I’d be remiss to discount her consistent activism on this issue. AOC is. Beyond them…
A short, somewhat angry detour, if you would.
[spoiler]There really aren’t that many cases where “do the right thing” and “take partisan advantage of a crisis” are synonymous. “My opponents are doing something truly heinous with the explicit stated purpose of making people suffer” is one of those times. With that in mind, what even the fuck is Nancy Pelosi thinking? No, seriously, what even the fuck? In terms of game theory, it’s a terrible idea - Republicans are going to play the “dems are overreacting” card no matter what (and, indeed, no matter how right democrats turn out to be). In terms of actual policy, it’s disgusting and insulting.
So yes, I’m a little disappointed with most of the democrats in congress, in the same way a car one drops into the grand canyon is “a little scratched-up”.
[/spoiler]
The fact that historians are coming out and saying, “Yes, these are concentration camps, yes, we know about the comparison to Hitler, yes, we’re going to say it anyways” should make us very, very worried. It should be enough to shake things awake.
Here’s a short list of things that we shouldn’t worry about:
[ul]
[li]Republicans calling us hysterical. As said in my little detour: they’re gonna do that no matter what. Hell, a frequent pattern is that the left says, “Trump is going to do this bad thing for reasons X, Y, and Z”, the right says, “Pfft, hysterical liberals, at it again,” and then Trump, like clockwork, does the bad thing. (At which point republicans then say, “It’s not really the bad thing you predicted, it’s something different, you’re still being hysterical.”) Republicans constantly and consistently scream about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a catchall defense for literally any claim the left makes, and even if they didn’t, it would be a bad reason for us to hold back when the facts are on our side. [/li]
[li]Seeming pedantic. The accusation of pedantry is transparently bullshit here. You all have seen it throughout the thread - “Why are you so insistent on calling them concentration camps” is easily countered by pointing out any given bit of the material conditions on the ground and asking, “What would you have us call them, and why are you trying to minimize this?” This is not a losing argument. The words we use matter. “transitory detention camps” makes it sound like the administration is keeping a bunch of immigrants in temporary holding cells (implied here: safe, sanitary conditions) while they’re processed. “concentration camp” makes it sound like people crammed in wall to wall in unsafe, unsanitary conditions, dying of medical neglect, with no expectation of due process or Habeus Corpus. That matters, because the latter is a hell of a lot closer to the truth than the former, and people instinctively grok that.[/li]
[li]“They’re not concentration camps though”. They are. Barring some wave of historians coming forward and saying, “no, that’s not appropriate”, there really is very close to a unified front among the relevant experts: what we have here are concentration camps. They are not yet extermination camps, and hopefully it will never come to that. [/li][/ul]
If someone from Belarus flew into New York and claimed asylum, what do you think would happen? Do you think he’d be given paperwork and put on the next plane back? Do you think he would be put in a holding area until his asylum status came through?
By that argument why should Mexico be responsible for them? Most of these people aren’t from Mexico, they’re from other countries and just passing through Mexico.
Instead of being outraged at states, cities, and nutty politicians encouraging this flood of immigration with endorsement of de facto open border policies you all are outraged at the admittedly rough response. What did you think would happen when the numbers got very large? Permanent demographic change or a backlash? Well the west is providing a backlash.
Anyone else hearing an exasperated Oliver Hardy saying “Now look what you made me do!”?
Luckily, I never said Mexico should be responsible for them.
If they are flying into New York from Belarus, they already have a visa to be in the US.
Actually, people DO manage to stow away on airplanes even in this day and age of security theater. So no, not always.
…that isn’t **the **definition. Its a definition. There are plenty of others.
And that definition absolutely fits what is happening in the camps.
“a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.”
I’ve bolded the qualifiers it appears that you missed. “Forced labor” or “mass executions” are not explicit parts of the definition. And while it is “strongly associated” with Nazi Germany, it isn’t an essential part of the definition. So what we are left with is:
“a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities”
How does that definition not explicitly cover what is happening in the camps?
The one that you cited absolutely fits. It isn’t the experts that need to work on this.
All of the ones that I looked at have exactly the same qualifiers as the definition you cited.
LOL.
This thread has cited holocaust experts and Japanese-Americans who were interned by the American government who have been saying that yes, “this is a thing.” This isn’t political. Only one politician has spoken out on this.
I’m glad you agree.
Yes it matters.
Because like it or not you are guilty of the “linguistic trick” that you are claiming the people using concentration camp are guilty of. Calling them “transitory detention camps” is exactly the same thing as China rebranding Muslim concentration camps as either “re-education camps” or “transformation camps”. And Chinese authorities use exactly the same justification as you do. They literally are “re-educating people.” They are “transforming people.” Just like this. The Chinese authorities aren’t putting people in the camps on a permanent basis. They even let them go home once a week.
Its deliberate spin to make the camps sound “not so bad.” Its propaganda. Its Orwellian.
What you recall is irrelevant. And what you recall is pretty meaningless. It may well have been 90 days many years ago. But the system right now is so utterly broken that they were separating parent and child with no system in place to put them together again after the “process” was over. I don’t trust the system, and neither should you.
Asking you questions is not “making all that up.”
You asserted:
“See, folks go into them…and get processed pretty much as quickly as they can and sent back where they came from. And then, in many cases, try to come back again, and are detained again.”
My questions were:
“Are you just regurgitating government propaganda or can you back any of this up? How quickly are they being processed, and what are the conditions they are being held in? Are families still being seperated? Has the process to seek asylum changed?”
How quickly they are processed and the conditions they are being held in are absolutely relevant to your assertion. Here’s a story about a professor who accidentally stumbled across “migrants who said they’d been held outdoors for weeks as temperatures rose to nearly 100 degrees.”
“They told me they’ve been incarcerated outside for a month, that they haven’t washed or been able to change the clothes they were detained in the entire time, and that they’re being poorly fed and treated in general.”
When you say they are “processed quickly”: is it still “quick” if they are being held in an outdoor pen for 30 days without the ability to have a wash or change their clothes? Is this the process you were thinking of or maybe the process has changed and you just didn’t know it? My questions were absolutely fucking relevant to what you asserted.
It would be actually great if you could cite exactly what is going on at the borders right now. But you won’t be able too. Because despite your assertions we really don’t know what is happening. We don’t know where all the camps are. We only see what is happening in the camps in carefully orchestrated visits and even those visits reveal horror stories.
So yes, please, cite away.
Which ones in particular?
People have been FUCKING SCREAMING about the horrible conditions in the detention camps on the border for the last fucking year. Nobody was fucking listening to them. Nothing has changed in the border camps this week. The only thing that changed this week was the language used to describe them.
AOC has done more to bring attention to the issue than anyone else on the Dems side. In a single tweet she bought this issue back into the limelight.
Money isn’t needed to fix the problem.
Let me stop you right there.
Stephen Miller is fucking evil. He’s a white supremacist who hates brown and black people and almost everything that is happening right now can be laid directly at his feet.
Holy fuck. Do you actually believe this?
There was a system in place to “deal with the flood.” It was imperfect. Executive orders in 2017 changed everything. Incarcerations went up. John Kelly was directed to stop “catch and release.” New detention centers were built.
This wasn’t an accident. This was deliberate.
Border crossings are at a record low. " Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are at their lowest levels in nearly 50 years." You don’t need more facilities. You simply need to revert to what was being done before the Trump administration changed everything.
This is a manufactured crisis. The cruelty is the point.
I actually do have an idea. But you’ve made it clear you don’t have a fucking clue how much things have changed over the last couple of years, so I can only suggest you start paying closer attention.
Here’s the actual real problem.
The America you think you are living in and the America you are actually living in right now are two different things. I implore you to look more closely at what is going on at the borders. Because what you imagine is going on and what is actually going on are completely different things.
Ok. If someone stows away on an airplane and makes it to the US, I concede that we should take care of that person until his/her application is approved or denied. We should provide that person with $5000 a month in tax-free income during that period.
:rolleyes:
…that wasn’t a “definition.” That was a discussion on wiki on how "the term “concentration camp” today is sometimes conflated with the concept of “extermination camp” . Congrats on completely missing the point of what was on the link.
What do you mean by this? Of course money is needed. Can’t get toiletries, food, and additional space without money.
No it wasn’t. Perhaps you should read it again?
…of course money is needed. But money won’t fix the problem. The current administration argued in court that “shorter-term immigration detention did not require soap or toothbrushes.” Money won’t provide something the administration asserts that it doesn’t need to provide.
Perhaps you should read it again?
Then, in your opinion, what WILL fix the problem? What concrete, measurable actions do you think can be taken in order to fix the problem? Actions that don’t require money.
You don’tseem to realize that numerous countries don’t require a visa to visit the United States.