So because they fight human trafficking (which is undoubtedly a good thing), we should overlook people dying in their concentration camps and children being kept in inhumane conditions?
Is there some sort of scale we measure these things on where if you do enough good things you're allowed a certain amount of atrocities without intervention?
> So because they fight human trafficking (which is undoubtedly a good thing), we should overlook people dying in their concentration camps and children being kept in inhumane conditions?
Note that the investigatory group within ICE (Homeland Security Investigations) that is key to fighting human trafficking is almost entirely separate from the rest of ICE and has raised being part of ICE in the current environment, because of the backlashes the rest of ICEs practices have been producing, as inhibiting their work, because it reduces the willingness of people they need voluntary cooperation from to work with them, because “ICE”.
There are more than ten million illegal aliens currently living in the US illegally -- a great reason to not dismantle ICE.
The existing laws should be enforced, and they haven't been for decades. If the laws should be changed, then congress should work to change them. Allowing millions of people to evade the law because of feelings is not a solution.
> There are more than ten million illegal aliens currently living in the US illegally -- a great reason to not dismantle ICE.
No matter what your views on immigratiom policy are otherwise, I don't see how that's a great reason for preserving the present organization.
If you view the present legality as correct, it's a reason to have the enforcement function in a competent and effective organization that is broadly respected by the public, but that doesn't sound like ICE.
This policy has been one source of the controversial separation of family members from one another. Whether you supported previous admin policy or not is not really relevant, this is easily the most widely discussed component of the existing controversy.
This is one way in which the current administration has departed from previous ones, in a concrete policy based manner, and there are others. You can find all of this information online quite easily, and I would encourage you to do so.
edit: I'm going to disengage, but for anyone saying "What about Obama?" did you watch the last Democratic primary debate? Biden was asked directly if he would apologize for the policies of that administration.
what if my answer is yes? this line of questioning where somehow "obama did it too" is supposed to be the ultimate own for anyone left of Reagan confuses me.
do i get extra argument points for not liking ICE no matter who's sitting in the white house?
That's fair.. it's also fair that the US takes in roughly 1/5 of the world refugees, more than any other nation by a wide margin. And illegal crossings alone are nearly double those numbers this past year.
Quit calling them concentration camps. That's ridiculous and hyperbolic. No one forced people to cross the border illegally, whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death. Not even a close comparison. By your logic, all prisons are "concentration camps".
If you don't want them held until trial, what should we do instead? They are essentially prisons, because that is what we do with people who break the law.
> whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death
Those are called death camps.
A concentration or internment camp is where you stick people who you don't trust, so you can keep an eye on them. Prisons are essentially a form of concentration camp, but the key distinction is that you have to be found guilty of something to end up in prison. It's probably more accurate to think of a concentration camp as a long term jail.
> > whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death
> Those are called death camps.
I try to not engage in political discussions, but I'm going to strongly disagree with you. The popular definition (i.e. actual living language) of a "concentration camp" is "where people are killed" - for example, see Wikipedia page Auschwitz concentration camp.
I see where you're coming from. The problem is that German death camps are by far the most talked about type of concentration camp. Canadians and Americans had concentration camps for the Japanese, for example, where the conditions were significantly better. Even most of the German concentration camps were relatively humane.
One pattern I've seen, is that some people use "concentration camps" to refer to bad ones, and "internment camps" to refer to okay ones, and maybe that's a an okay distinction, but the reality is often a lot less black and white than our words would like to suggest.
I get that this is a sensitive topic and understand the association, but the first sentence on Wikipedia's Auschwitz page says, "The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps" The first section of the "Nazi concentration camps" wikipedia page ends with, "Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews in the ghettos by way of gas chambers."
Google gives the OED definition, "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."
While colloquially a lot of these terms are conflated, the literature seems to make a clear distinction.
> They are essentially prisons, because that is what we do with people who break the law.
If you cross the border to request asylum, doesn't matter if walking or by using a star trek teleporter, you are committing no crime. They are breaking no laws.
False. If you cross the border illegally you are a criminal, period. It is not suddenly legal if you subsequently request asylum and asylum may only be granted if entering at a legal port of entry, so these people do not qualify for asylum.
EDIT: technically, you are breaking a law, as it is a misdemeanor. Have you found any instances where this was prosecuted, following a successful asylum application?
It is NOT false. You need to be either at a port of entry or in the US to apply. You have one year to do so.
A port of entry is a place where one may lawfully enter a country. There is no law carving-out an exception to lawful entry for people who plan to eventually travel to a lawful port of entry.
So why don't we want to help ICE do their job? We can provide better living situations for people waiting for their case to be processed and better IT solutions to improve our ability to process cases.
Taking petty stabs at ICE (like making it harder for them to do CI/CD) seems pretty unhelpful.
Yet we have seen budget after budget blocked that would fund more humane facilities. If you care about stabilizing the asylum pathway, you have to be willing to fund it.
So said Mike Pence, and was later shown to be "not correct".
The only people who were being released were the ones which border authorities themselves deemed "low risk", and were released with ankle monitoring, and even then only released because we refuse to process them in anything approaching a timely manner.
>Short term they should be held in humane conditions, trials should not take months and instead take weeks at most, families should not be separated. It's not rocket science. Take some of the money you're burning up every day and spend it here instead (and on other things that improve the lives of people).
Current updated immigration detention facilities are on par with or better than most other developed countries. The problem is with the overcrowding. It's too bad that efforts to improve the efficiency of the system (and thus the crowding), whether it is furniture or tech like Chef is experiencing such counter-productive boycotts.
Over a year ago there was a plan to give current illegal residents a pathway to citizenship and build a wall to significantly reduce the now 100k+ monthly crossings -- it was opposed by the same activists now complaining of the consequences.
>Some of those conditions are the direct result of US policies and actions in Central and South America.
When it comes to matters such as these, being powerful is good and being weak is bad. Do you think their ancestors never took anything from any other group of people? Or if they did that they felt any remorse about it later?
> why is is the job of America to hold every displaced guy on two continents?
Because of this:
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It's the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. The US decided, long ago, that we'd be a haven for people of other countries who are being persecuted or who otherwise want a better life.
If we don't want to do that anymore, I suggest we tear down the Statue and replace it with a closed gate.
Besides that, we've been meddling in the affairs of Central and South America for decades with mostly-disastrous effect on their economies and political systems. Accepting refugees would be a small step toward acknowledging and working to right that wrong.
>It's the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. The US decided, long ago
The US absolutely never decided that, and certainly not at that time. That inscription was put there by wealthy New York liberals, and it certainly did not reflect the feelings of the majority of the people at the time. In fact in the decades that followed, the people of the United States instituted strong immigration restrictions, which by the way were specifically designed until 1965 so that they would not alter the national origin demographics of the country, so the American people at the time obviously did not want tens of millions of people from poor third world countries pouring in.
>Besides that, we've been meddling in the affairs of Central and South America for decades with mostly-disastrous effect on their economies and political systems.
Their ancestors before them went to war against other groups and took their land and resources. Something tells me they didn't feel particularly bad about it.
> Their ancestors before them went to war against other groups and took their land and resources. Something tells me they didn't feel particularly bad about it.
That's... not really relevant to the point being made.
At the end of the day, I'm tired of trying to advocate for the idea that you should care about other people. Especially if it doesn't cost you anything! Which, as it turns out, is actually the case for most kinds of immigration, despite what loads of unsupported FUD would like people to believe.
>That's... not really relevant to the point being made.
Of course it is. We don't owe them anything any more than they owe the victims of their ancestors' pillaging, which is nothing.
>At the end of the day, I'm tired of trying to advocate for the idea that you should care about other people.
Presumably you are discovering that people have their own problems to deal with, and don't always feel like being lectured about how they should put the problems of the rest of the world first.
>Which, as it turns out, is actually the case for most kinds of immigration, despite what loads of unsupported FUD would like people to believe.
It's actually not the case if you're a tax payer. More than 60% of households headed by an immigrant use some form of welfare.
That's money those taxpayers could otherwise have used to pay for their own children, and maybe could've afforded to have more.
It's also not the case if you're a low or medium skilled worker.
It is the case if you're a wealthy business owner who benefits from cheap labor or a highly skilled worker in a field that's not greatly affected by an influx in labor.
I agree with you in principle one-hundred percent. However, at the time that was written, there was one key difference: entitlements. Once the government started taking on the burden of providing a safety net, we lost the ability to admit every one. This was somewhat mitigated in the twentieth century by the sponsor system, but this is gone now, too.
I wish we could let every one come here and make himself successful, but I don't foresee entitlement spending ever gong any where but down. I don't take the position of limiting immigration for idealistic reasons, but because there is a limit on how many resources we have.
I'm not the OP, but I think that would at least be a closer comparison, although what the Japanese-Americans went through was still a somewhat worse transgression, as they were by and large citizens. It would also be a good reminder of what happens when you let the government infringe upon natural rights enumerated by the constitution.
I get that there is a legal and constitutional distinction between citizens and non-citizens, but the idea that a non-citizen is (ethically) less entitled to basic human rights simply because they're not "one of us" is just disgusting to me.
> That's debatable, but why is is the job of America to hold every displaced guy on two continents?
You have room and you're partly responsible for why they're displaced?
> Where do you propose to put 4,200 people in "humane conditions"? Who should shoulder the burden of that cost?
The shuttered Trump Plaza has 900 rooms according to Wikipedia, two bunk-beds to a room and that's 3600 people in that building alone. Finding room for the remaining 600 can't be that difficult I'd imagine.
The people of the United States should shoulder the burden of that cost. Tax the rich even 1% more than you do now and you could build a new Trump Plaza every year if you wanted to.
Sweden found room for 80,000 Syrian refugees that all arrived within a span of ~12 months (6600 people per month), and we're a nation of 10 million people.
The US is supposed to be the greatest nation on Earth. Figure it out.
Trump Plaza is supposed to be destroyed, the government could buy it and then not destroy it. Like I said, it's not rocket science.
You guys just don't want to pay for things. That's cool, but say that you don't want to pay for things instead of pretending that this is some unsolvable problem.
Is there some sort of scale we measure these things on where if you do enough good things you're allowed a certain amount of atrocities without intervention?