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Posted (edited)

Posting this in both DT and CR, very longcat Facebook post from a HS friend of mine who is a defense attorney and whose wife is the exact kind of US citizen who is being threatened by Trump's policies. Spoilering because quite long but worth the read.

Spoiler

HOW TO TALK TO, ABOUT, AND WITH YOUR LATINO FRIENDS DURING THIS TIME


Look, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. As an attorney, we are in dire straits in this country with regards to "immigration." Whatever you think about so-called "illegal immigration," the scope of DHS activities, ICE, and CBP has gone far, far beyond merely enforcing existing immigration laws against undocumented persons. As a matter of verifiable fact, the authorities are taking steps to DENATURALIZE citizens, end birthright citizenship, and according to the vice president, make citizenship in this country a matter of who your ancestors were, not whether you've met the legal requirements for citizenship. Stephen Miller does not care whether you were born here, born to US parents, or earned your citizenship with tests and long years spent under a visa or green card. Stephen Miller hates the color of your skin and will do anything he can to remove you from the country. 


This kind of blood and soil nationalism is infuriating, threatening, and maddening to white Americans who can trace their ancestry back to the colonial times. So... let's imagine, for a moment, how your Latino friends feel.


Those of you who grew up in the Southwest know that many Latin Americans did not cross the border; the border crossed them. As the US expanded westward, we took, bought, or recovered land by treaty from Spain and Mexico, turning many formerly Spanish subjects or Mexican citizens into US territorial subjects or citizens of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and so forth.


So it is wrong, at the outset, to treat Latin Americans as a class of "immigrants." Many of them have been living in the same area for hundreds of years more than the United States has expanded this far westward.


But others of them did come across a border once established in the 1800s. The problem is: the government sees no difference between these people. Whether they are Native American, European, African, Caribbean, or some mixture thereof in ancestry, all Latin Americans in the United States are painted with the same broad brush: they are Othered, they are held to suspicion of having come here "illegally," and they are subject to deportation.


Living as I have the past 23 years with a Latina, let me tell you the horrific things that get said to her: asking about her green card (she is a US citizen by birth), making jokes about "going back" or "deportation" (she has more right to be here than most Anglo Americans), or worse, the kind of smarmy self-regard that well-meaning centrists and liberals toss out to her.


[Wife's name redacted] has been told, "oh, don't worry, you're not the type they're looking for" or "it's OK, you're one of the good ones." Or worse, when she voices her very real fear that one power-tripping ICE agent could arrest her, detain her, and force her to prove her US citizenship over a challenge to "birthright citizenship" or even "denaturalization," people tell her not to harsh their vibes, that thinking about that ruins everyone's good time, and that she shouldn't be inflicting that kind of worry on people when it's not likely to happen to /her/.


And there is alot of understated, implicit racism in all of that. Many people forget that because Becky doesn't have an accent, is married to a white guy, and sits comfortably in the upper middle class that she's Latina. Among our white friends especially, she gets coded white because of her relation to me, her interests, and what we do. People rarely get to hear her speak Spanish (which she does well) or see her dance to Tejano and norteno music. You don't get to hear her talk to her family in Spanglish or celebrate Dia de Los Muertos or Diezyseis or other Mexican holidays (NOT Cinco de Gringo). And because of that, you often forget... she's as much a Mexican citizen as a US.


Her father was a Mexican citizen. Her mother is a US citizen. But she was born across the river, in Mexico. Her birth certificate is Mexican; we have a certificate of live birth recording her birth and status as a US citizen. So yes, the proposed changes to the 14th Amendment understanding of birthright citizenship (that we deny citizenship to children of two foreign subject parents born on US soil) would not necessarily affect her... but we've already seen them apply the same logic to US citizens by birth born abroad or born to foreign national parents. It is not a big leap from "denaturalize the children of foreign nationals born on US soil" to "reject the citizenship of US children born abroad to only one US citizen parent." 


And even if I could (because I'm not a bad attorney, and I know some excellent immigration lawyers) successfully argue that her case should be dismissed, that would still require her to spend nights, maybe weeks or months, in cruel conditions in ICE detention, cost us untold amounts of money in retainers or my lost time from work dealing with it, and leave us both scarred and traumatized by the experience.


And this is something we have to think about every time we leave the house or when we travel. When Becky was coming back in through customs after a cruise this past April, I sat in trembling anxiety until I heard that she cleared customs. And again, we are fortunate enough that we have CLEAR and Global Entry, but all it would take is one power tripping customs agent to pull her aside and then I'm on a flight to Miami to try to get her out.


So please, please, please, when you're discussing the political situation regarding immigration (and I think I have curated my FB list enough that most, if not everyone, agrees with our political position on this) understand that it is very real for some of your friends. And for those that are Latin American, don't do things like call them one of the "good ones" (implying that others, or even most Latin Americans, are "bad ones" or not good) or suggest that having the financial resources necessary or being covered by the white privilege of a partner or friend will do any good.


All you need to do is look through the news to see that masked ICE goons are indiscriminately assaulting and arresting anyone they deem sufficiently suspicious of violating immigration laws, e.g., having more melanin than the average American. You can be as white-passing as you want, if an ICE agent sees your last name is "Rodriguez," prepare for additional scrutiny.


And sadly, judges and local law enforcement are not doing enough to reign them in. If you live in a comfortable blue state where your governor is taking steps to reduce ICE's power and exclude their operations, I envy you. For those of us trapped in red states, there's a very real fear that a trip to the mall to buy clothes could end up in handcuffs or worse.


A little sensitivity is going to go a long way. And understanding that there's a special dimension to trauma to your Latin American friends goes even further. It won't hurt us to be careful with how we speak and examine the concepts and language we employ, even if unintentionally, for how that language comes across and who our audience is.

 

Edited by Brian Fantana
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Posted
29 minutes ago, Foosters said:

The next conservative on DT who offers even the weakest pushback to this type of stuff will be the first. Given their silence, one can only assume that they fully support actions like this. 

But, but, but .... we're not racist!!

Veteran and US Citizen disappeared

I may get negged to oblivion for this, but here goes.  When some undocumented person commits a crime, is released, then commits another, bigger crime and rapes/kills someone's wife/daughter, the vocal conservatives will scream for stricter immigration laws.  When a situation like you posted happens, the vocal liberals will scream oppression.  I think the vast majority of people (not just posters) feel that both instances are tragic, and hate that they both happened.  The ideal balance between lawlessness and oppression doesn't exist.  There will be instances like these for both extremes to scream about.  Some people don't scream about either, despite the fact we aren't happy about either, because we don't want to be as insufferable as all the other screamers.

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Posted
1 minute ago, SurlyGator said:

I may get negged to oblivion for this, but here goes.  When some undocumented person commits a crime, is released, then commits another, bigger crime and rapes/kills someone's wife/daughter, the vocal conservatives will scream for stricter immigration laws.  When a situation like you posted happens, the vocal liberals will scream oppression.  I think the vast majority of people (not just posters) feel that both instances are tragic, and hate that they both happened.  The ideal balance between lawlessness and oppression doesn't exist.  There will be instances like these for both extremes to scream about.  Some people don't scream about either, despite the fact we aren't happy about either, because we don't want to be as insufferable as all the other screamers.

Can you quote statistics on total number of repeat violent offenses committed by illegal residents? It’s a racist trope to scare the more moderate rubes just like migrant caravans headed for the southern border that strangely come in 2 to 4 year cycles.
 

And don’t talk about conservative extremists: this is the mainstream republican viewpoint. Hell it is active federal government policy signed off as ok by the highest court in the land. We are with judicial consent renditioning people to countries they are not from who are known for committing torture and war crimes. Everyone should be screaming about this
 

 

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Posted
18 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

I may get negged to oblivion for this, but here goes.  When some undocumented person commits a crime, is released, then commits another, bigger crime and rapes/kills someone's wife/daughter, the vocal conservatives will scream for stricter immigration laws.  When a situation like you posted happens, the vocal liberals will scream oppression.  I think the vast majority of people (not just posters) feel that both instances are tragic, and hate that they both happened.  The ideal balance between lawlessness and oppression doesn't exist.  There will be instances like these for both extremes to scream about.  Some people don't scream about either, despite the fact we aren't happy about either, because we don't want to be as insufferable as all the other screamers.

Id agree that conflating the systemic and intentional violation of due process because of skin color (they've publicly stated that's their policy) with criminal acts committed by private citizens is a neg worthy take.

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Posted
22 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

I may get negged to oblivion for this, but here goes.  When some undocumented person commits a crime, is released, then commits another, bigger crime and rapes/kills someone's wife/daughter, the vocal conservatives will scream for stricter immigration laws.  When a situation like you posted happens, the vocal liberals will scream oppression.  I think the vast majority of people (not just posters) feel that both instances are tragic, and hate that they both happened.  The ideal balance between lawlessness and oppression doesn't exist.  There will be instances like these for both extremes to scream about.  Some people don't scream about either, despite the fact we aren't happy about either, because we don't want to be as insufferable as all the other screamers.

That's a lot of words to say, "Stop expecting me to stand up for what's right."

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Posted
1 minute ago, Scheiss Meister said:

That's a lot of words to say, "Stop expecting me to stand up for what's right."

The words were trying to say that a lot of people thing both things are wrong.  But you do you.

Posted (edited)
3 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

The words were trying to say that a lot of people thing both things are wrong.  But you do you.

But they are equal neither in degree of wrongness nor in societal impact, and you seem to be trying to draw a logical equivalency

Edited by Sawbonz
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Posted
3 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

The words were trying to say that a lot of people thing both things are wrong.  But you do you.

Ah, the both sides gambit...real high-character stuff there.

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Posted

Yeah, people commit crimes, immigrants lawful and unlawful, are people, therefore they commit crimes.

There's no evidence that they commit crimes (other than unlawful entry) at any higher rate than native-born citizens.

The idea that they do is 100% propaganda.

This whole thing stems from 9/11.  We got scared of Muslims.  A lot of Muslims started filtering through Europe as refugees and for other reasons.  That somewhat unrestrained immigration scared a lot of people.  Hence the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, abroad and here at home.

We don't have all that many Muslims immigrating here, and they're fairly controlled.  But we have plenty of other brown immigrants, and some cynical fuckers realized that this was the new enemy, the new Soviet Union.  So here we are.

Anti-immigrant sentiment led to nationalism led to populism led to Trump.  

 

Posted
13 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

The words were trying to say that a lot of people thing both things are wrong.  But you do you.

At a certain point you are either deliberately ignoring the glaring differences or fundamentally incapable of understanding. But in either case, you've demonstrated that further engagement will not help you, and the only reason anyone should respond is if they're in a public forum and you need to be made an example of for the onlookers who, unlike you, aren't deliberately ignoring or incapable of understanding how "both things" are not meaningfully comparable.

Thing One:

43 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

some undocumented person commits a crime, is released, then commits another, bigger crime and rapes/kills someone's wife/daughter,

Releasing people who have served their sentences or have posted bail is not an abuse of state power.

The policy "failure" is one that could only be "fixed" by changing the rules of "releasing" people who have committed less serious crimes so that the rules operate under the assumption that undocumented people are predisposed to commit a "bigger crime" that can only be prevented by keeping them in jail. They ignore the thousands of immigrants who aren't predisposed to commit crimes either because they're racist or because they are profoundly misinformed.

Thing Two:

43 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

a situation like you posted

1 hour ago, Foosters said:

Veteran and US Citizen disappeared

A clear and unconstitutional abuse of state power. The policy failure here is obvious, as are the blatant racism and the grotesque historical parallels to ethnic cleansing projects. These abuses are the obvious consequences of appeasing the idiots who "scream about" Thing One by indulging the assumption that undocumented people are predisposed to commit crimes. The thousands of peaceful immigrants (and non-immigrants that aren't white) who are being rounded up are being collectively punished for crimes that a tiny fraction of immigrants committed.

Moral of the Story

Anyone who juxtaposes these "things" and says "both are wrong" looks like a fool. Learn the difference between an ethnic cleansing project beginning with widespread abuses of state power and anomalous crimes being signal boosted by racist media figures. Be on the right side of history.

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Posted
12 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, people commit crimes, immigrants lawful and unlawful, are people, therefore they commit crimes.

There's no evidence that they commit crimes (other than unlawful entry) at any higher rate than native-born citizens.

The idea that they do is 100% propaganda.

This whole thing stems from 9/11.  We got scared of Muslims.  A lot of Muslims started filtering through Europe as refugees and for other reasons.  That somewhat unrestrained immigration scared a lot of people.  Hence the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, abroad and here at home.

We don't have all that many Muslims immigrating here, and they're fairly controlled.  But we have plenty of other brown immigrants, and some cynical fuckers realized that this was the new enemy, the new Soviet Union.  So here we are.

Anti-immigrant sentiment led to nationalism led to populism led to Trump.  

 

 

George W. Bush tried to do comprehensive immigration reform, including a guest worker program, but Lou Dobbs's nightly screeds riled up the far-right and killed it. A bunch of far-right representatives in the House then tried to pass some reactionary bullshit bill, which kicked off a bunch of protests in the mid- to late aughts. Around that time, the canard of "prayer blankets" for Muslim terrorists found in the desert got thrown into the mix to maximize the fear-mongering. Then, you tie in the current president's racist accusations that the then-current president wasn't actually a citizen, along with all the other racist conspiracy shit about him being a Muslim, and you've remade an entire party into a bunch of reactionary retreads, wholly consumed with an anti-brown bias.

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