Red_Dragon wrote: 
Words of wisdom from the dude.

Jesus.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-27/jared-kushner-s-felon-father-brought-two-fellow-inmates-into-company

This may be a problem for the current administration...

Flynn's talks with Russian ambassador point to larger problem

 kcar wrote: 
Careful when attempting to hold up a mirror for others to see themselves in. They may not like what they see.

Make that 7 "predominantly Muslim" countries + The Dominican Republic...

 kcar wrote: 
I really don't understand the situation in the USA. As far as I know for example Mexicans do not cause a lot of problems so why so much focus on the Mexicans?
Also I agree that immigrants have a minimal impact on the economy if you look at employment. On a yearly basis the refugees costs the Netherlands around 1.5 billion euro on a total of around 500 billion euro spending. Former refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa have a slightly negative impact on the economy because of for example social income and housing. It's hard to calculate but some say that the number is between 5-10 billion euro. That's a lot but just a fraction of the tax I have to pay. Healthcare for example is much more expensive.
Looking at immigrants from eastern Europe and Asia the picture changes to a positive impact on the economy. They 'take' jobs but on the other side they enlarge the total economy and also create jobs as well.

I'm sure that the far right in my country would not have had any impact if the great majority of the people from the middle east and north Africa would have been grateful for the social security and just tried to find a way in our society. I can make a long story about the situation in the Netherlands, but the summary is that the social impact of people from Islamic countries is generally negative. A major part of our version of the FBI and CIA are busy fighting islamic radicalization and terrorism. 60% of the heavy crime in the Netherlands is related to immigrants. Human trafficing, theft and fraud are typical eastern European hobbies. (But I have to say that the major part of the Eastern European immigrants are hard working law abiding citizens.) Drugs, robbery and violent crimes in general are the typical trade of people from North African countries. Around 40% of the former immigrants from north african and middle east countries are not dependend on a social income and generally have no criminal activity. The other 60% are the problem. (I proved these figures in the past with data from CBS) If you look at our most wanted list you really have to look carefully for a dutch name. The dutch police is losing its grip on criminals while the politicians claim that crime rates are going down. This situation is causing anger amongst the people that try to be good citizens.
Honesty from the politicians and a good plan to decrease the problems with immigrants would really help to get the far right politicians from the table.
Instead we get fear mongering from the media and politicians that our far right politicians are all facists and pictures from jews during WW2 are used to compare the current situation with the horrors from the past.
I think that's really sad and stupid that (islamic) criminal immigrants (they generally hate jews!) are compared to the non criminal, well educated, well assimilated jews from WW2.

 steeler wrote: 

Interesting post. I thought about pointing RPers to this NY Times column by Thomas Edsall while this thread was focused so heavily on illegal immigration, but forgot about it. The column points to research trying to explain why some groups in Europe and the US are so concerned by illegal immigration. It doesn't seem that illegal immigration has affected wages of native workers a great deal, but natives feeling economically insecure and threatened by rapid cultural change blame illegal immigrants for their own problems and seek out authoritarian leaders like Trump to fix things. 

Edsall quotes a research paper on this issue ( the indented words are quotes from the paper. Emphases are mine):

In effect, postwar prosperity in America and in Western Europe allowed many voters to shift their political priorities from bread-and-butter issues to less materialistic concerns, “bringing greater emphasis on freedom of expression, environmental protection, gender equality, and tolerance of gays, handicapped people and foreigners.”

Not everyone experienced this newfound economic security, however, and the number of those left behind has grown steadily. Those who do not experience the benefits of prosperity, Inglehart and Norris write, can see “others” — “an influx of foreigners,” for example, as the culprit causing their predicament:

Insecurity encourages an authoritarian xenophobic reaction in which people close ranks behind strong leaders, with strong in-group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and rigid conformity to group norms.

According to the two authors,

The proximate cause of the populist vote is anxiety that pervasive cultural changes and an influx of foreigners are eroding the cultural norms one knew since childhood. The main common theme of populist authoritarian parties on both sides of the Atlantic is a reaction against immigration and cultural change. Economic factors such as income and unemployment rates are surprisingly weak predictors of the populist vote.

...

Inglehart and Norris paraphrase “Strangers in Their Own Land,” the 2016 book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley, to show the importance of race in the alienation of many white voters from the so-called liberal culture:

Less-educated white Americans feel that they have become “strangers in their own land.” They see themselves as victims of affirmative action and betrayed by “line-cutters” — African-Americans, immigrants, refugees and women — who jump ahead of them in the queue for the American dream. They resent liberal intellectuals who tell them to feel sorry for the line-cutters, and dismiss them as bigots when they don’t.

My own two cents: for the most part, illegal immigration to the US over the last two decades doesn't seem to have been a significant direct threat to our economy, national security, culture or politics. Illegal immigrants don't seem to have much of a negative impact on the wages of low-skilled native workers and actually benefit wages of high-skilled native workers. Six states hold about 59% of our illegal immigrant population; CA takes the lead with about 25-30% of that population. As you noted, the number of illegal immigrants living in the country for 10 years or more has been rising, reaching about 66% of illegal immigrant population in 2014. Illegal immigrants made up about 5.1% of the workforce in 2014.

Maybe I'm being too relaxed about the matter, but it doesn't seem that illegal immigrants have had significant or even negative impact on our economy. IIRC, there isn't any indication that illegal immigrants have much impact on our national security. And I can't say that they have wielded much influence on our politics, although politicians have used them as a wedge issue. 

My guess is that many Trump supporters felt threatened by rapid cultural shifts in acceptance of minority groups (LGBTs, for instance, as well as illegal immigrants—see the rise of sanctuary cities as a sign of acceptance of illegal immigrants), and increased public anger towards police behavior. Republican politicians played on that sense of cultural besiegement and economic concerns caused by uneven recovery from the Great Recession to play up illegal immigrants as a threat to America, turning them into one of the major issues of the election. But illegal immigrants don't seem to actually have much impact on our country. 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
Or as someone else tweeted, "Teachers know they have to buy their own pencils."

So much winning this week in El Nuevo Pantano...
White House rebukes Kellyanne Conway for promoting Ivanka Trump products

Probably belongs in the "favorite movie quotes" thread, but anyway . . .

 

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death."

Roaming Charges: Big Boss Man

 black321 wrote: 
Who let all this riff raff into the room??

 pigtail wrote: 
Get em up against the wall!

 kurtster wrote:

 
This one isn't about the "establishment" point; that will come later — I hope.  I wanted to say a few things about your foundation point regarding our borders and sovereignty, and recognizing and enforcing the distinction between illegal and legal immigrants. My central point here is that I believe you are not recognizing all the complexities of the issues relating to illegal immigration (there, see, I have used the term! But, frankly, I do not see how using that term instead of undocumented aliens or some other phrase does much to solve any of the issues, anymore than using the term "Islamic terrorism" solves any of the issues pertaining to terrorism. It may make you and others feel better, but the hard issues remain to be solved; I view it as more symbolic than anything concrete, not that far afield from demanding that folk say "Merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays."  All this kind of stuff seems to fall in the minds of some under the increasingly popular umbrella term of "political correctness" that is being posited as some kind of plague and pox on all of our lives that must be defeated at all costs, lest our way of life perish. Well, that was a longer parenthetical than I intended. :) ).

You seem to want to frame the issue as one either believes in the sanctity of our borders or one does not, and I believe that is entirely too black-and-white.  Illegal immigration across the U.S./Mexican border has been going on for decades; unclear why it is viewed more of a problem now than in the past, but that is another debate (as I said In a previous post, I believe that the urgency of taking action now is primarily due to there being a blurring of security issues posed by terrorism and illegal immigration across the Mexican border).  But one thing we do know, and should be able to agree upon, is that there are millions, of illegal immigrants residing in the United States, and many of them have been here for many years; decades in the cases of a significant amount. Quite a few of them have raised families here, and are integral parts of their communities .  None of that erases the fact that they came here illegally, but it does raise questions as to what should be done about them — and what can be done.  There is the practical side of it, which is that there is no realistic way that our government is going to be able to find and deport them all.  We should be able to agree upon that.   

You have railed against "Sanctuary Cities," but those, too, come in shades of gray. Under the Constitution, protecting our borders, and combatting illegal immigration, is the responsibility of the federal government.  The states and local jurisdictions are not permitted to create and enforce their own immigration laws; we saw that underscored a few years ago when Arizona was enacting its own immigration enforcement laws. Additionally, and importantly for this discussion, the feds cannot force the states and local jurisdictions to enforce immigration laws. That is the legal end of things, stated rather simply.  Why would jurisdictions not voluntarily cooperate with ICE more in identifying and turning over illegal immigrants for deportation?  There are a number of reasons. I will offer up a couple main ones.  Frist and foremost, many illegal immigrants are integral parts of communities, and have been residing within them for a long time.  I can tell you that a jurisdiction would rather have those "residents" not be fearful of engaging with the local government, most especially local law enforcement, because of fear of being deported. We need their cooperation on a number of fronts.   It builds a stronger community. So, yes, we may be looking the other way on whether a resident is an illegal immigrant or not, but there are reasons for that.  You should be able to agree that there are competing concerns here.  Think of it this way:  We have statutes of limitation on most crimes; when the SOL has expired, a person can no longer be prosecuted for whatever offense he or she may have committed. Does not make them innocent; and one could certainly say that person got away with that crime. But there are reasons why we have SOLs.   There are competing concerns.  So, someone who came here illegally 20 years ago, and, by all accounts has been otherwise living an exemplary life here in America, is discovered to have come here illegally and never established legal status.  Should there be any weighing process involved in determining whether that person should be permitted to stay?  Or is the only thing that matters is whether he or she came illegally?  

That is rather rambling.  Let me say this.  I believe most people would have an aversion to turning in their neighbors, especially longtime and respected neighbors, upon discovering or suspecting they came to this country illegally.  One step further:  I believe most people would rather not live in communities where everyone is encouraged to do so.

 

 

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TRUMP SAYS HE HAS BEEN TREATED VERY UNFAIRLY BY PEOPLE WHO WROTE CONSTITUTION