Look, the point is that democracy should mean democracy. You don't like our immigration laws. I really don't like our immigration laws. They're still our immigration laws, we should fight to change them. Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.
The entire reason the last 20 years of effective nullification (by blue states ignoring them and even subverting them) is so pernicious is because it's just plain anti-democratic. If, like marijuana, most people were effectively in favor then this wouldn't be a serious issue, but the problem is that nullification undermines rule of law. It's hard for us to argue for a reasonable immigration system when, if we don't get the system we want, we literally just say "fuck it, just ignore the rules."
There is no more blue state ignoring immigration laws than blue states ignoring crimes like federal tax evasion. It’s not the state’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws or to help the federal government enforce immigration laws.
In fact, the Supreme Court actually said states had no standing to sue the federal government to enforce the law.
> There is no more blue state ignoring immigration laws than blue states ignoring crimes like federal tax evasion. It’s not the state’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws or to help the federal government
Local authorities often work with federal officials even though they are not obliged to.
And the difference is that drug dealing is a state and federal crime. Illegal immigration is only a federal crime. Has there ever been a state and federal partnership on federal tax fraud for instance?
I said in another reply that on Jan 6th of 2020, not electing Trump caused political escalation. Trump is going to find any excuse to escalate in Blue states - including sending the National Guard.
Mortgage fraud is a state crime and a federal crime as are banking laws. I’ve signed 5 mortgages (well actually seven including two refinances), they all include state and federal laws. Foreclosure procedures are under the jurisdiction of the state and sometimes the local ordinances
The state isn’t helping the federal government pursue IRS cheats.
I’ve offered multiple examples of states and municipalities working together with federal enforcement of FEDERAL laws. The idea that this isn’t enough to satisfy you is ridiculous.
No you didn’t. You offered examples of stares and federal law enforcement working together when there were state and federal interest. Think about it for one second. Why would the state or local government forbid their money and resources to help the federal law enforcement unless people were also breaking state laws?
Your example of banking laws is clearly in the federal and state interests.
No you didn’t. You offered examples of states and federal law enforcement working together when there were state and federal interests. Think about it for one second. Why would the state or local government use their money and resources to help the federal law enforcement unless people were also breaking state laws?
Your example of banking laws is clearly in the federal and states’ interests.
And in my state, it's actually forbidden. A recent PD press release over some ICE activity:
> [Department] was not notified of or involved in this enforcement action. By state law, city resolution, and department policy, [we do] not cooperate or coordinate with federal immigration enforcement.
> I said in another reply that on Jan 6th of 2020, not electing Trump caused political escalation.
No. Trumps inability to accept looses caused him to escalate. Not obeying the violent bully is not the cause of bullies criminal actions, bully being criminal is the cause.
From what I can see, sanctuary cities were acting within the law. Their only stance was that they wouldn’t spend precious time and resources verifying immigration status for schools, and city services. As these are paid for and voted on by city residents, that seems fair.
If states, and cities aren’t bound to help the federal government enforce every law, unless congress writes a law to say they must.
CBP and ICE always had the general authority to be more effective, but did not use it. As we can see from actions in this era, enforcing immigration law at all costs has draconian side effects on civil liberties, and general happiness and wellbeing.
While it’s true, the immigration issue has been marinating for a while, the current policy is not a good solution.
I’m not suggesting that nullification is against the law. It’s not. States have the right to ignore federal laws if they choose to. However if the states refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, and especially when they pass laws making cooperation illegal, it is for very obvious reasons likely to result in political escalation, as the feds will need to spend a significant amount of resources on statewide enforcement.
When you refuse to allow city and state law enforcement to assist federal agencies, don’t be surprised if federal law enforcement show up. It’s not even unprecedented, it’s just an issue of scale.
Ultimately, this is about democracy, and how refusing to participate when laws we don’t like pass, it is a recipe for extreme political conflict because it’s inherently undemocratic.
When it comes to cooperating with other entities, governments have to take a unified approach. Rather than have individual teachers deciding to question students on immigration status or not, they decided to not pursue the matter at all.
It seems fair. Immigration policy isn’t supposed to be enforced by local authorities to begin with. And unlike hiring a worker, there’s no easy way for people to verify immigration status. Finally, immigration offenses can be misdemeanors so spending effort in upholding hard to determine civil infractions seems unwise for local officials.
If ICE or CBP actually shows up and investigates, local authorities do help. Even in Chicago where the public is very much against it, the local police continue to cooperate with ICE … if nothing else just to shield them from protesters.
All sanctuary laws said is that local authorizes do not have to do thankless investigative work on people hundreds if not thousands of miles away from a land border with another country.
As someone who cares about democracy, I think it’s best practiced at the most local level possible, and if federal authorizes disagree with local policy they can override it via laws.
You just don’t see thus happening in many cases because local laws agree with federal ones, or are even more stringent. But this is a case where the locals could not, constitutionally, make a law (it has been tried, like in Arizona to have locals investigate legal immigration status but it’s been deemed unconstitutional).
For the record, I don’t think we a huge difference in opinion. I’m not surprised that ICE and CBP is out in force. I’m surprised it took so long, but think they could be more targeted, less brutal, and overall more competent.
Yea, I’d say we generally agree. Though I think noncompliance laws like sanctuary city laws are a significant escalation over just choosing a different allocation of resources.
My point is only that if the feds are going to go full agents in schools and shit, I think we ought to follow the harm reduction principles so people don’t actually get hurt when the violence kicks off. My concern is we’re nontrivially flirting with a genuine civil conflict.
If by “feel the same way” you mean “wouldn’t be surprised if random folks start getting charged with marijuana possession if the administration starts enforcing the laws on the books,” then yes.
I don’t “support” what the administration is doing, I’m just saying we’re actually on the losing side of the argument… and we’re actually flirting with real political violence with a losing argument.
If the states that have legalized some kind of marijuana uses wanted to (40 of 50 states), they could trivially actually legalize it.
There was “real political violence” because people wanted Trump to be president in 2020 and more recently a state lawmaker was swatted in Indiana because he didn’t go along with Trump’s redistributing demands.
In fact Romney said that some lawmakers were afraid to go against Trump because they were afraid for their families and they couldn’t afford armed security like he could. Is that really how we want to make decisions in this country?
You claimed that not acting or helping the federal government to enforce federal laws that in this case the Supreme Court has said is none of the states business would increase political violence. My contention is that anything the right doesn’t like will escalate to political violence if it is scene to go against Whsfs desr leader wants.
Do you think each person is responsible for enforcing federal laws? Like if you personally are not spending your own time and money to round up those in violation of federal statute then you're doing something wrong?
And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.
My point is about the laws themselves. If they were unjust laws, there is an argument for civil disobedience. They aren’t though, so civil disobedience here is just anti-democratic.
This is exactly the kind of logic that makes massive abuses of power possible. "Criminals" in this case is an arbitrarily defined category used capriciously by an uncaring and authoritarian government.
You could be a "criminal" tomorrow, if you look at the administration wrong.
They broke the law at the time they entered the country illegally. That they weren't held accountable before now is an error, but it's not like the administration changed any laws. They're simply upholding it as should've been the case all along.
So, is this what we are doing? Downvoting and non sequiturs that amount to deflection and whataboutism?
Not caring about democratic results — when human rights are not at issue — is a very dangerous precedent. I absolutely hate the current administration. They are not responsible you the laws on the books. They were successful last election, in some part, exactly because this is a very relevant political issue.
> I don’t downvote people that have a different opinion so it ain’t me
Totally fair. I’ve had a tough time with my good-faith, heterodox views on this issue lately.
>>they are not responsible for the laws on the books
>so in 26/28 when Blue people take over they are free to disregard all laws because they are not “responsible for it”?
No, my only point is that some seem to try to argue that “Trump is different because he is acting in bad faith,” and I generally agree.
The problem with that argument is that our immigration laws are decades old, and blue states nullification is also decades old. We’ve found ourselves dealing with federal enforcement of federal laws because of state nullification, we don’t like that enforcement — I don’t like that enforcement — but we could pretty much end all this escalation between blue states and the feds by just agreeing to enforce the laws on the books. No more flirting with literal civil war. Just dealing with the consequences of a losing position as humanely as possible, given the fact that it’s going to suck.
Then we can fight to change those laws democratically.
> we could pretty much end all this escalation between blue states and the feds by just agreeing to enforce the laws on the books
This is incredibly naive. You've got an academic point in the context of rewinding the clock back twenty years, sure. But as to the current situation?
Federal law-breaking forces are attacking citizens for simply exercising their first amendment rights to protest. Federal law-breaking forces are abducting people based on skin color and the declaration of a shoddy facial-recognition "app". Federal law-breaking forces are terrorizing entire apartment buildings by ransacking them in the middle of the night. Federal law-breaking forces are aggressively attacking people to seize control of situations that would otherwise be closer to even-party civil disputes (eg the woman who was violently kidnapped out of her own car because the jackboots crashed into her). Federal law-breaking forces are hiding their faces to avoid having their crimes documented and possibly facing justice.
This is all a much stronger form of wanton illegality - anti-Constitutional, organized, criminal, and aggressively violent transgressions - than people being here illegally. This is not terribly surprising, because all signs point to the immigration issue being nothing more than a pretext for unleashing fascist paramilitary gangs on American civil society - specifically fundamentalist red state militias hopped up on social media delusions and pathetic revenge fantasies, ultimately serving nothing beyond naked autocratic power.
So if you are earnestly concerned about the rule of law (and I agree we should be!), you should be focusing your current ire on those federal law-breaking forces. And no amount of "perhaps we did something to deserve this" navel gazing changes this.
> So if you are earnestly concerned about the rule of law (and I agree we should be!), you should be focusing your current ire on those federal law-breaking forces.
This is an easy way out... if you want to have a honest discussion you should read and address the opposing views. you are trying to oversimplify things like "states are nullifying federal laws" etc... you need to dig deeper that to see WHY that is - you think some State folk woke up one morning and went "shit, why don't we see which Federal Laws that are on the books we want to break today?" or you think perhaps there are other reason why we have sanctuary cities, what prompted that to begin with...? if you think someone just woke up and said "hell, why don't we just make this up for the heck of it...?" then maybe but none of this is all that simple...
So that implies you agree with the bulk of my comment, directly related to the point you made, and only had a problem with my rhetorical sum up?
Also it's not exactly "whatboutism" to make a point directly adjacent to the subject. The world isn't automatically-executing self-consistent boolean logic (eg you yourself said several comments back you sympathize with lawlessness for marijuana laws, because many more people do not support their existence). When appealing to a general concept like "the rule of law", it's important to look at the larger picture for what specifically is being motivated by such appeals and what isn't. Otherwise you're just allowing your own lofty ideals to be abused by those who would appeal to them to get you to acquiesce, while themselves operating from a much different place of not actually sharing those ideals at all. And that open hypocrisy is a strong theme of trumpism.
> And that open hypocrisy is a strong theme of trumpism.
trump would open the borders fully today if it meant he'd cling to power few days longer. also we saw what he was doing previously especially 2016-2020...
the 'red' doesn't care of about the law nor does it want to ever solve the immigration issue (or any other issue), only to make sure there's something to try and run elections scaring people with shit like 'migrant crime' and whatnot :) too funny...
> Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.
US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.
“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).
The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.
When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.
It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).
Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.
> They're still our immigration laws, we should fight to change them
It’s good advice, but a big hill to climb. The Dem politicians walk a fine line here. The influx of illegal immigrants is truly unpopular, not just with folks on the right, but also many in the moderate left and independents. They dems realize it’s a hot potato which is why you get a lot of immigration rhetoric to try and satisfy the anger, but don’t really get any effort to change any laws even when they held both branches and the presidency through 2021-2022.
Prior to 2016, both parties were pretty aligned on it, only when Trump made it a core issue did the parties start to diverge on the topic.
> The influx of illegal immigrants is truly unpopular
Does it apply to rich immigrants?
Not having housing, high medical bills, gun violence are unpopular. To blame poor immigrants is the scapegoat and many people think that kicking all of them out will solve the problems that they want to be solved. It will not.
The current state of things is that big corporations and the rich want immigration, they just do not want immigrants to have rights. The solution that they have found is to make most immigrants illegal so they have no rights, they can be paid below minimal wage and they can be blamed for being criminals so nobody looks at the rich while they literally rape minors.
I agree that is very difficult to change. But not because the average voter would not accept it, but because the rich are pushing for a narrative were immigrants are at fault of all the excesses of the rich.
I think if they are illegally here, it doesn't really matter. A rich illegal immigrant may not have the same social services strain as the poor do, but it’s still someone willfully breaking a law to gain an advantage. I am not sure how a society stays orderly if its laws are meaningless.
Plus my guess is if you are rich, chances are you are here on a legal path, because you can afford to do so and you have more to lose if you dont follow the law.
> big corporations and the rich want immigration
But I don’t think they necessarily want illegal immigration. They can certainly get around I-9 employee requirements by hiring contractors, but unless on site work is needed, why not just offshore and get it even cheaper and not have to deal with gray areas of legality by as a company trying to bypass immigration laws?
You can also call it undemocratic, not just because blue states are actively subverting them, but because the intent of the subversion is to create new voters and shift demographics into their favor.
I actually don’t think that’s relevant. I don’t think people vote for one party or another because of their race or ethnicity. I think assuming people vote along ethnic lines is honestly pretty idiotic, and I think the last two elections have demonstrated this as being entirely sensible.
Interesting that you imply I said anything about race. I didn’t.
Never mind that the reason people point out the last two elections is that they show statistical anomalies - which is by itself proving my point. The data is clear on this.
But further it runs counter to simple game theory.
If a Country, governed by Party A, enacts a law, prohibiting Nazis from immigrating, but Party B undermines that law in municipalities they rule in (by providing „sanctuary cities“, stopping law enforcement on such matters entirely, providing services including legal help for naturalization, and more things) basically stretching the timeframe as long as possible for illegal Nazis to be present in the country, so that they either become eligible Nazi voters locally (by residence status), naturalized Nazi citizens eventually or at least have Nazi offspring with a citizenship title – then obviously the Nazis are going to vote for the party that allowed that to happen (Party B), and against that party that tried to stop this (Party A).
And this will (decreasingly with each generation) be true for their Nazi offspring as well.
The entire reason the last 20 years of effective nullification (by blue states ignoring them and even subverting them) is so pernicious is because it's just plain anti-democratic. If, like marijuana, most people were effectively in favor then this wouldn't be a serious issue, but the problem is that nullification undermines rule of law. It's hard for us to argue for a reasonable immigration system when, if we don't get the system we want, we literally just say "fuck it, just ignore the rules."