I just left a similar comment about my local Fry’s in California. They replaced all the employees, who had been knowledgeable and helpful, with people who knew absolutely nothing about the products. I thought maybe it was just at our store, shame to hear it happened all over.
They replaced all the workers at our local Fry’s with people who knew nothing about the products, weren’t friendly, and often spoke little English. It was odd. I don’t know that it happened at all Fry’s our just ours.
But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.
Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.
Trump ran on an explicit promise to bring down grocery prices on day 1.
Grocery prices have continued to climb.
Absolutely nothing he has done could remotely be said to be aimed at bringing them down.
He has also instituted massive attacks on the power of labor, and on the offices that report on things like the unemployment rate.
"The economy" is not just the stock market; unemployment numbers literally cannot be trusted coming from Trump's BLS; and an inflation of 2.7% is, in fact, fairly high (it's 35% higher than the "target" rate of 2%).
Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.
If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
Isn’t the VP generally the shoe-in nominee? Vance lacks charisma and gravitas, but he only has to be better than the Democratic candidate. For every Bill and Barack, the Democrats have also given us a Kamala, Hillary, and Al. Never underestimate their ability to pick a loser.
The question is about deporting illegal immigrants specifically, i.e. people who are in a country in violated of its immigration laws.
I think the main benefit is the same as with any law: if you have a law with no consequences for the people who break it, you don’t really have a law. If we don’t have immigration laws, we have an open border and with an open border, we can’t regulate the rate at which people enter the country. This rate can easily exceed the amount that the country reasonably accommodate, which negative impact on housing, healthcare, welfare, transportation, civic cohesion, and education systems.
Immigration law is standard around the world, with deportation being the standard response to people who violate that law. The more interesting question here is how you think a modern country will function and continue serving the needs of its citizens when it stops enforcing its immigration laws.
What if a law only has consequences for the people it's intended for?
Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?
Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
>Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
To ensure that people go through the checkpoint in the first place? For instance, the point of airport security checkpoints is to make sure that no terrorists get on planes, but if there's no penalty for you jumping the fence, why would people even bother going through the checkpoint?
And all of this is ignoring the other purposes of immigration policy, eg. preserving jobs or whatever.
So the is implication is that we should get rid of airport checkpoints, because our actual goal is to catch terrorists? What about speed enforcement cameras? The law might be that you drive 20 in a school zone, but isn't our goal to actually stop dangerous drivers? Actually, why even bother stopping dangerous drivers? The actual thing we care about is stopping accidents. If you're doing street racing at 4am, who's going to get hit?
So what are you trying to imply then? As we seen with airport checkpoints and speeding cameras, it's clearly okay to punish behaviors that aren't directly harmful, so why is it so baffling for you that Americans want enforcement actions against people who entered the country illegally?
For the sake of argument we can assume the only point of the US immigration regime is to stop baddies from coming in, so yes the goal is "stopping serial killers". However, for the reasons I outlined, that doesn't mean we should disband serial killer checkpoints, or refuse to punish people for skipping serial killer checkpoints.
> I think the main benefit is the same as with any law: if you have a law with no consequences for the people who break it, you don’t really have a law.
How do you feel about ICE raiding citizens homes without warrants? How about door to door raids?
If ICE cannot even follow the 4th and 5th amendments then they should be jailed themselves.
Administrative warrants aren’t legal court issued warrants, we’re have three branches of government for a reason. As far as the law of the land goes these ICE officers are violating most of the Bill of Rights.
Boss, they already require judicial warrants. They're blatantly violating constitutional rights. Do you think we have constitutional rights or not? Do we have laws or not?
Great, since we are all in agreement, let's see if we can put it clear terms.
Administrative warrants are civil in nature and do not give authority to enter a house or any private space. Using them as such is in violation of the fourth amendment.
Why? Deportation is a reasonable response when a person violates a country’s immigration laws. That is the standard around the world.
Alternatively, you have an essentially open border, which obviously can lead to unmanageable waves of immigration that strain a country’s housing, healthcare, schools, welfare, and other resources, among other effects.
Disruption to peoples’ lives happens when we have administrations who arbitrarily decide not to enforce the immigration law (e.g. the previous administration). It sends mixed signals to potential immigrants, and leads to the outcomes we have today when we decide to resume enforcing our laws.
>Disruption to peoples’ lives happens when we have administrations who arbitrarily decide not to enforce the immigration law (e.g. the previous administration).
"US deportations under Biden surpass Trump's record"
> obviously can lead to unmanageable waves of immigration that strain a country’s housing, healthcare, schools, welfare, and other resources, among other effects.
I don't agree that this is "obvious". Immigrants bring important social and cultural capital. Who do you think is building a lot of the infrastructure in the US? The people putting a strain on the system are actually the aging baby boomer generation.
I have many other reasons for supporting open immigration that are less transactional, but the suggestions that immigrants "strain" our infrastructure is incorrect.
Immigrants do bring important social and cultural capital. But nobody here is arguing in favor of no immigration.
The standard among countries all over the world is to regulate the flow of immigration via immigration law and deportation of people who violate that law.
How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react not strain the system? I saw this firsthand in schools and hospitals where I grew up, and there are numerous examples throughout history from around the world of the disruption it can cause.
The US is not like many countries in that it was formed by illegal immigrants, and not just immigration, literal genocide and land theft of the indigenous people.
That being said, all immigration policy is out of date. The world is connected now and the policies are an anachronism.
> How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react
I don't agree that this is reality. Our system is not under strain from immigration. It's under strain because we spend our money on the military instead of improving infrastructure. It's also under strain due to wealth inequality and corporate friendly policy. None of which has anything to do with immigration.
I’m hoping the world grants everyone citizenship to the state of Israel. Most of us are children of Abraham statistically anyway. And, think of all the benefits and economic development.
Not sure what point you were trying to make, but if it was about inconsistency on the Left, you could’ve picked better examples, like give all Americans citizenship to Greenland, or give all Russians citizenship in Ukraine.
The first message is “don’t open the border.” People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else. If there weren’t videos of thousands of people streaming across the border every day during Biden’s presidency, we wouldn’t be dealing with Trump 2.0 today.
Second, don’t announce to the world you’re limiting your VP search to Black women, or any other Constitution-violating hiring criteria. Americans are tired of identity politics. And you’ve done a disservice to your running mate because they’ll be labeled as a “DEI hire” instead of the best person for the job.
Third, don’t nominate an idiot as your running mate.
Fourth, don’t force the idiot running mate on the world as a presidential candidate because you hid the president’s cognitive decline until the last possible moment in a humiliating live TV debate.
It was visible on the polls prior to the election itself (and the damage). It's on the Democratic party they didn't read it. (voted Hillary as if it changes anything in WA)
The message sent, perhaps more accurately, was that the USofA electorate fully bought into the Trump / Project 2025 framing of the "problems" facing the USofA.
eg:
> People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else.
And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records.
Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry.
His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness.
All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
Sure, recent past administrations enforced border protections and prioritized deporting immigrants with criminal records. And that’s irrelevant.
The Biden administration did neither. They took active measures to strip the Customs and Border Protection Agency of its scope and authority through executive order from their first day in office. Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
This wasn’t policy they campaigned on or announced. It wasn’t something the American people wanted, and it polled terribly even among Democrats. But they did it anyway.
Conversely, Trump had the voter’s mandate to secure the border when he entered office, but he’s managed it so poorly, created terrible optics, and has Democrats marching in the streets in every major U.S. city in support of illegal immigration. The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.
This appears to be a partisan statement subject to data source and bias. eg:
The Biden administration took office amid heightened debate in some circles over the merits and tactics of deportations, yet it is on track to carry out as many removals and returns as the Trump administration did.
The 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of fiscal year (FY) 2021 through February 2024 (the most recent data available) are on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations carried out during the four years President Donald Trump was in office. These deportations are in addition to the 3 million expulsions of migrants crossing the border irregularly that occurred under the pandemic-era Title 42 order between March 2020 and May 2023—the vast majority of which occurred under the Biden administration.
Combining deportations with expulsions and other actions to block migrants without permission to enter the United States, the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration (5 million in its second term).
> Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
Their policies or global events? Either way the sheer number of recorded border ecounters speaks to them being out and about and actively encountering people on the border ... when thought about, that's hardly a bad thing - it sounds more as if they were getting the job done.
To be clear, I have zero interest in debating this aside from noting it's hardly clearcut.
> The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.
They are indeed superlative propagandadists, on this we can agree ...
they are, however, in a view from afar, falling well short of actually making middle North America great again, gutting essential infrastructure maintainance, etc. etc.
But few will ever know given they've also gutted many of the means of tracking the state of the country, the state of the environment, the activities of their administration.
Counting deportations is half the equation. If Biden was deporting roughly as many people as Trump, but there are 4X as many people crossing the border, it wasn’t good enforcement. Look at net illegal immigration to get the impact, and it’s estimated the number of illegal immigrants increased by 3.5 million people during Biden’s term.
You say "illegal immigrants" to describe people that had border contact, made application, and were allowed into the USofA as "as yet documented" applicants.
People that, for the most part, committed no crime, made no attempt to hide, paid taxes, ran businesses, and employed others.
Yes, Obama increased deportations, and deported people at a faster rate than Trump. But that’s completely irrelevant when we’re talking about the Biden administration, who did not continue this policy, who reversed it, who allowed an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants through his executive orders and policy set by Mayorkas, with many millions more granted asylum status with reduced vetting. This was not reported by the news media until it inevitably reached crisis level.
The very fact that Obama deported more immigrants, and Trump is deporting fewer but with riots in the streets should clue you in to the effect that media has over you.
> The very fact that Obama deported more immigrants, and Trump is deporting fewer but with riots in the streets should clue you in to the effect that media has over you.
Whoa. To refresh my memory, how many American citizens were shot by ICE under Obama? How many cities were threatened with Insurrection Act occupations? Maybe deporting people doesn't require such actions, and "the effect that the media has" is highlighting how ridiculous these behaviors are.
edit: more data https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re... . I sincerely hope you will re-adjust your priors based on actual data (some of it from the current administration!) as opposed to what you hear on the radio or television.
During Obama’s presidency ICE wasn’t dealing with protestors actively interfering with day-to-day operations in cities throughout the country. Remove the protestors, and the probability of a civilian getting shot goes to ~0. Of course dozens of non-citizens died during those years.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with your data. The first doesn’t even cover Biden’s term, which again, is what I’m talking about. The second is extremely disingenuous because doesn’t take net illegal immigration into account. Even if Biden deported a similar number of people as Trump, he let far more people in: the net number of illegal immigrants in the country during Biden’s term is estimated to have risen by 3.5 million people.
> When is the last time you questioned your priors?
Every day, friend.
> During Obama’s presidency ICE wasn’t dealing with protestors actively interfering with day-to-day operations
What do you think the difference is? What do you think your most reasonable opponent might say? In a dispassionate analysis, who do you think is correct?
No, but they they were somewhat accurate representations of the median American voter (note here VOTER is the key) - less so than Trump, given what he’s been able to get away with.
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