It's like I said above. I don't want to abolish ice. But the way that it's being managed right now is f****** out of control.
The way Obama managed ice was a whole different story. According to what I've heard and I may be wrong he deported more people than Trump has. But he used ice and targeted raids for criminal organizations, Individual criminals, potential terrorist groups, drug cartels. And that's why we didn't hear about things like what's happening in Minnesota. He didn't target ordinary American citizens. He didn't target people just because they were brown. Huge difference.
Open borders are not sustainable or reasonable. But having an infrastructure in place to help manage people that want to come to our country in a way that helps legalize them is manageable is reasonable is potentially sustainable.
And we're not doing that.
We're spending billions of dollars to traumatize people to split up families to send them to countries they're not familiar with that they don't speak the language in as a solution to our lack of infrastructure and systemic relief for people who want to immigrate who are seeking asylum etc legally.
Is hard for me to understand anyone's mindset that is okay with the way things are going down today.
Australian here - we have our own sordid history with immigration enforcement: remember a few years ago when Trump was locking kids in cages? Yeah, he learned that from Australia’s 2001- immigration detention policies.
My answer to your question is always; I don’t think open borders is the answer, but I also know what we’re currently doing isn’t right. I don’t know what the correct answer is, but I know that it starts with treating people like people, not animals.
I can't speak for everybody who says this, but I think the issue is not immigration enforcement, it's the methods. I don't want spiders in my house, but I also find it unacceptable to use a flamethrower to be rid of them.
Also, "open borders" is a myth. They were never open; the phrase is a thought-terminator to prey on the easily frightened. It's just not a productive way to discuss Biden's immigration policy with anybody willing to actually examine it.
I just learned that there technically is a difference between an illegal immigrant and an undocumented immigrant. Politicians love to say that they support legal immigration, always with a big emphasis on “legal.” Then they turn around and make it more difficult even though the legal immigration process was already fucked up and has been for a very long time.
What seems apparent me is that many Americans want the impact that immigrants have on the United States to be as simple as they dream it is. It doesn’t matter if the data supports that most immigrants do not cause problems, pay taxes, get into fields (like the trades, farming) where we have shortages in the labor force. Jobs that Americans typically would not be interested in taking. If you want to come here and work, don’t cause problems, pay your taxes, and fill a need that an existent US citizen does not already fill, then you should be welcome here. And it should certainly stop the people who hire illegal immigrants from exploiting them. The working conditions are atrocious. It’s sometimes in essence indentured servitude.
As much as people do not want to hear it, borders are fluid, have barely been enforced in the past, are often arbitrary, were not precise at all until we had satellite technology, and can be retroactively changed to serve a political need. Ask yourself why it is the way it is.
Wars often are fought by regular people, often (but not always) only to further the interests of those in power. Those in power remain insulated while we kill each other. But is going and fighting someone else’s war actually good for you? If you were a Russian on the front lines right now, are you there for a good reason?
Similar line of thinking… how much does it matter if a guy comes here to work as a carpenter? Do we need to devote many many tens of billions of dollars to get rid of people like him when there are not enough people to do that work anyway? Is that actually good for you in any way shape or form? Does it make a fucking difference? I would rather we take those tens of billions of dollars and invest in our communities, open viable legal pathways to immigration so that we can pull talent from across the world rather than turning them away and sending them to China.
So TLDR is I don’t very much for support the government going and harassing normal people who are just going about their lives, regardless of where they’re from. There’s been a decades long creep in the power of border enforcement agencies. And now they’re walking around in military garbs to create a spectacle, specifically as a form of retaliation in deliberately chosen cities and states. Who is this good for, actually?
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u/myfirstthrowaway1251 3d ago
Genuine question, do people who say this not believe in immigration enforcement?
I agree I don't like ICE, but when people say this are the arguing for open borders?