Last week, I wrote Paul Ryan Is Losing Control of His Caucus Over DACA about a revolt among House Republicans over DACA and the Dreamers. A discharge petition signed by two dozen Republican House members may compel votes on immigration bills that are supported by the Democrats. Watching that turmoil, Roll Call stresses that the divisions are really about what kind of legal immigration we want to have in our country.
At first glance, the Republican Party’s latest bout of immigration infighting appears to orbit around one key disagreement: Should so-called Dreamers be given a path to citizenship?
Look a little closer, and it’s clear the rift goes far beyond Dreamers. What Republicans are struggling with is a fundamental dispute over the core values of the U.S. immigration system and who may benefit. And the same disagreements that have previously doomed the prospects of a deal threaten to do so again in this newest round of negotiations in the House.
“The future of legal immigration is the sticking point,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the center-right National Immigration Forum. “There’s a Republican in the White House who wants to end immigration to the United States as we know it. There is not a majority of Republicans in Congress who support that position.”
Lately, I’ve been appalled to see ordinary citizens expressing support on social media for a policy of separating asylum seekers from their children. In many cases, they simply don’t know that it’s legal to show up at the border with your family and ask for asylum. But, when instructed about the law, a typical response is to side-step that and offer excuses.
What’s clear is that there is substantial support for “ending immigration to the United States as we know it.” If it’s legal to seek asylum at our southern border, then that’s a problem that should be corrected. Until then, however, using the extreme deterrent of separating children from their parents is seen as a good way of dissuading people from seeking entry.
All efforts to appeal to decency fail. Ask them to imagine the emotions of a three year old who has lost his or her parents, and they just shrug. Whatever the president says it will take to keep those people out, that’s what they’ll get behind.
I don’t know what the percentages are, but this sentiment is robust enough on the right that I’m uncertain it’s true that “there is not a majority of Republicans in Congress who support” dramatically curtailing legal immigration. What they feel in their hearts doesn’t count for anything if they’re too fearful to vote that way.
What’s more certain is that there are enough Republican dissenters that, joined with the Democrats, there is majority in Congress that is opposed to the president’s views.
The Republicans like to operate the House with the so-called Hastert Rule, which states that no bill will come up for a vote unless a majority of the Republican caucus supports it. The discharge petition is the only way to overcome that practice, and that’s why it’s gaining momentum.
As CNN states, the fireworks will begin tomorrow when the House reconvenes.
The reason the GOP cannot rally around bills of their own making is because their base, led by their president, is so hostile to non-whites that just wants to build a wall around the country and keep everyone out. The entire concept of asylum is offensive to them if it involves people fleeing Central America or the Middle East.
This is a restoration of a virulently racist and callous version of America we had hoped to leave in the past, but fortunately there is still not a majority in Congress that’s willing to go back to the bad old days.
“but you also had people that were very fine people–on both sides.”
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decades of paid subversive propaganda masquerading as free speech results in a GOP that can not decide if reinstating chattel slavery is a good thing or a bad thing.
You write:
I think not, SirLurksAlot.
I have no quarrel with your “…decades of paid subversive propaganda masquerading as free speech…” statement, but I think that much of the RatPub organization…as well as large parts of the DemRat group…know damned well that “chattel slavery” comes in second every time in terms of effectiveness to unconscious slavery. There is simply less chance of uprising if the slaves think hat they are not slaves at all, just free citizens having a hard time making it. There are still uprisings, but the police can handle them, and the angriest simply wind up in prison.
A police state that people believe is not a police state is the easiest one to run.
Bet on it.
AG
Very good, I like it very much.
“This is a restoration of a virulently racist and callous version of America.”
How can something be restored that was never dismantled in the first place?
In my own Rust Belt hometown, Economically Anxious Working Class Whites Abandoned By Democrats (TM) harbored the same resentments and hatred of n@$*ers, sp#$’s, and g$$@s when the mills were rolling three full shifts with OT at a union wage while the Fed’s subsidized the balance of their middle class lives.
We have to stop pretending this all started with the closures and layoffs of de-industrialization in the late 20th century.
I’d argue we’re in a period similar to the 1920s. When, after decades of Whiteness Is Under Attack! propaganda (everything from arguments for the Park system to Prohibition had roots in A Defending Whiteness platform) and eugenic pseudoscience, America’s White Supremacist element used fear of such world events (WWI, but especially the Russian Revolution) to exploit the affects of unregulated immigration funded by Wall Street Robber Barons who paid the freight to flood our industrializing nation with cheap, non-white (as defined at the time) labor to seize control of our government and govern very similar as to now (President Harding and Teapot Dome were during this period).
Today’s White House, and the Freedom Caucus, want another Reed-Johnson Act level immigration reform and Republican voters want the greatest Confederate Monument of them: the Border Wall.
BINGO!
I quite agree. I used to live in Youngstown, OH, which has – ironically – now become somewhat famous. Or at least it now seems to be trotted out at election time to show something or other.
Eh? In the way back machine, Youngstown was economically vital for the reasons that you elaborate. Lotsa steel, lotsa auto plants, lotsa other manufacturing. Good blue collar jobs with mom staying home (nice home, too) raising the kids, who had enough money to go to college (at least to the local university or even further afield).
It was an incredibly racist, bigoted, sexist, homophobic, you name it place. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Sure, the offshoring of well-paying manufacturing jobs did a number on these locations, or at least those that weren’t able to turn their economies around in some way or fashion.
But my experience is that the racism & bigotry is about the same as it ever was.
As usual, the Wall is nothing more than bright shiny object of distraction from how Trump, CONgress and the wealthy patrons have engaged in ripping off the proles for decades now, all while blaming it on “the other.”
ICE has engaged in draconian tactics with undocumented people (workers or otherwise) for decades. It has gotten worse. Yet and still: show me good examples of where EMPLOYERS have been busted for knowingly hiring undocumented workers so that they can pay them below minimum wage to work in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
You won’t be able to show me hardly any (if any at all) times where employers have been busted.
Yet these mopes are easily duped to blame it on the undocumented workers, not the employers.
It’s all so frustrating and sad, but there it is.
The comparison to the 1920s is apt.
It’s hard to see very much evidence that white America has much sympathy for continued immigration–legal, illegal, green cards, essential workers, whatever. A few of the white nativists may want to keep “their” migrants, ones who they can see are making a difference in their (rural) communities. But as an abstract concept, they now reject it as “harmful” to (white) economic prospects, and will not be convinced otherwise, most especially via moral or ethical means.
As you note, white sentiment (certainly on the right) now ranges from enthusiasm to indifference over coerced separation of children from parents as a way to “deter” one (legal) route for (non-whites) to enter the country. So the intentional infliction of severe emotional distress (in small children!) is now quite acceptable, just as actual torture is now commended. And these are people who would (hilariously) maintain that they oppose(d) Nazism or slavery! In reality, they seem frankly delighted by the tactics of Trumper’s GICEtapo, who operate with complete freedom everywhere. It does not appear that the plutocrat funders of the “conservative” operation have put their foot down, to the extent they need more workers for the Reserve Army of the Unemployed.
Dems in 2016 ran a professional, high resource prez campaign of a “Stronger Together” melting pot: pro-immigration, pro-inclusion, pro-pluralism, pro-diversity. The spiteful white electorate rejected it and its sentiments wholesale. Hard to see any way forward on this issue, as the “debate” was lost–at least as matters under our failed constitution. At the bare minimum, whatever ripples are supposedly occurring in Ryan’s Repub House of Paralysis, the White Party as a whole is hostage to the sentiments of white people, by definition. While the rightwing mindlessly crowed about Obama(!) somehow “dividing” the nation, we are now seeing what REAL division in a pluralist society looks like—but this is the kind of division the vicious white electorate likes!
The way forward? Crosses — but small ones! — burned — but without major media coverage — only in selected collar counties, in certain carefully chosen Midwestern swing states, but nowhere else.
Modern voter information technology should make it reasonably simple to figure out just where, how big, etc.
So there is a way forwards for Democrats after all.
Democrats need to loudly proclaim a clear, delineated immigration platform.
As we saw with the latest poorly constructed “shock” poll (https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/580037717/what-the-latest-immigration-polls-do-and-dont-say) this issue is ripe for conservative push poll ratfucking going into 2018 if progressives are nebulous about what we’d do.
They have agreed to put foreign national children into federal detention facilities. What is the plan? Put them in federal prisons when they reach 18, deport, or is it off the forced labor camp. Note there is no 800 number to call for any parent, grandparent, sister, brother, aunt/uncle, or a cousin to call and find out how to return child to family. Every GOP senator and rep should be asked to explain their plan.
And even if they could keep out everyone from the South and the East, then they’d want to bar Western types who aren’t…Norwegian…enough.
But the norwegian are socialists and androgynous! No good no good!
About a year ago I read an economic piece about economic growth. Wages and the economy are “stuck”in a low range and both are insuffienct to keep people happy and let them enjoy what their parents may have had, like education and annual vacations. It is this along with the obvious rising inequality of the elites that tends to anger white people. At one time those white people ran the economy and called the shots. Now there is a feeling of helplessness and inability to deal with the future. Mom now must work making life a good deal harder. And the cost of health care and college are out of sight.
The only ways out of this are few. Productivity is one way but the opportunity is fast going the way of factory jobs. And whatever productivity there is is gobbled up by our betters. The NYT ran a piece a week ago showing the annual compensation of the CEOs of major corporations, it is very many many times the average wage. Another way is to reduce that inequality and increase benefits, call it the Sanders way. But that is not selling and so Shumer brings us the ” Better Deal”. Heard much about that lately? Wonder if he gives speeches to Wall Street big shots. After all fuck Sanders, right? We now got Howard Schultz I hear. Oh wonderful.
Immigration is another way to increase growth, simple numbers of people. In this connection I believe I read where our birth rate is falling. Anyway racism and our betters block the way forward. Ever hear about a job guarantee? Old idea that could eliminate unemployment.
I saw a picture of a sign in the New York subway on Facebook. It suggested that if you were racist, to take the subway via the directions given to Kennedy Airport and buy a one way ticket a long long way away from NY. Good advice.
. . . for you. Try reading what you wrote imagining you’re a nonwhite American reading it (this is called “empathy”):
Right. Because these are only problems/issues faced by white people!
Need I say more? Seriously, could further explication of what’s so very wrong with that really be needed? It’s a problem if white people no longer “r[u]n the economy and call[] the shots” (even though the notion that we don’t is mostly nonsense)?
I’m white! And I’m offended and appalled reading that!
Not politically correct I agree but true nonetheless.
. . . problem you can perceive in that, that’s arguably even more appalling and offensive.
Nobody here has yet stated the obvious. The GOP is conflicted about immigration because … well, it has nothing to do with their hearts, Booman. Many industrial and agricultural sectors depend on low-wage immigrant labor (legal and illegal).
They are afraid of their base but they are also afraid of their donors. That’s why they are conflicted.
It’s quite a sad statement on humanity itself that any significant number of people can be alright with, or justify, or turn away from children being taken from their parents. The long-term trauma for those children will create mushrooming issues for decades to come but that’s just a practical reason not to adopt inhumane policies. The only decent reason we shouldn’t behave cruelly is because it’s cruel.
It’s possible to have such policies only if one doesn’t see the humanity of the people who are suffering. If one somehow defines them as the other, not fully human and not deserving of compassion.
But it’s not just racism. It’s a fact cited by Joseph Stalin, a man I don’t generally turn to for sage advice but in this case he was spot on. One death, he said, is a tragedy. One million is a statistic.
Same principle here. If the screams of the terrified three year old aren’t caught on camera, if we don’t see it with our own eyes, to many it may as well not have happened. Few could carry out the policy but many are perfectly capable of justifying it and burying their heads in the sane regarding the inhumanity. Sadly, a lot of those folks consider themselves religious.
Here’s where, as a religious person, I turn to teachings around hypocrisy. Jesus spoke of it. The Qu’ran is heavy on it too. In fact, it’s where the Qu’ran gets firey. Around hypocrites who claim to be religious but are anything but. People misread those quotes because they speak of the importance of being islamic. But islamic does not refer to a religion. The word islam is a verb which means to surrender to the will of God. It’s speaking of those who are not surrendered to what’s right, what’s just, what’s merciful and kind. Just as Jesus never spoke of Christianity, Mohamed didn’t speak as if he was founding a new religion. He was pointing at principles already in existence. The Religion of Islam would not have been capitalized because it’s not the title of a faith. It’s simply the path of surrender to principles that hold that God is, above all, kind, loving, forgiving and beneficent. Principles that require one to help those in need.
People turn away from God when God is misused to oppress and justify inhumanity. We should turn away from misuses of religion but there’s a tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater.