The nazification of the United States has begun. Miami-Dade is going to start jailing suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant.
Here's the problem: if I get picked up by the police and they suspect me of being in the country illegally, how am I supposed to prove them wrong? I'm a citizen, so I don't have a green card. I happen to have a passport because I do a lot of international travel, but I don't carry it around with me; it's too bulky. And not all citizens have passports. The only identification I carry with me regularly is a drivers license, and because I'm from California that does not prove I'm in the country legally.
Of course, I'm pretty sure no one is going to suspect me of being an illegal immigrant, because I'm a white guy and I drive a nice car and I don't go to the disreputable parts of town. But my civil liberties should not depend on such things. I should be just as confident of not being deprived of life or liberty without due process of law even if my skin is brown and I speak with an accent and I drive a ratty truck and my name is Juan. But you can be pretty sure that the detention cells are not going to be full of white people, they're going to be full of brown people. That is the problem.
Locking people up simply because they can't prove they're in the country legally whenever a cop demands it is a clear violation of the fourteenth amendment, which says in part, "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Note well that is says, "person", not "citizen."
Look, I get the frustration that people have with illegal immigration. It sucks when you follow the rules and you see people cutting in line. But locking people up without warrants is not the right answer. A lot of things are easier in a police state. But the United States is not supposed to be about what is easy, it's supposed to be about what is right. And this ain't right.
Crying Wolf Again
ReplyDelete@Ron
>The nazification of the United States has begun.
Your hyperbolic exaggerations harm any point you're trying to make, rather than help it.
It's also wrong on the facts. The de-nazification of the United States has begun, as the laws will be enforced as written, rather than arbitrarily enforced by a charismatic despot.
>Here's the problem: if I get picked up by the police and they suspect me of being in the country illegally, how am I supposed to prove them wrong?
If the police arrest you for reckless driving, how are you supposed to prove them wrong?
That's done in court.
If, incidental to your arrest, they suspect you of being in the country illegally, that would also be worked out in court.
>Of course, I'm pretty sure no one is going to suspect me of being an illegal immigrant, because I'm a white guy and I drive a nice car and I don't go to the disreputable parts of town.. . . Locking people up simply because they can't prove they're in the country legally whenever a cop demands it is a clear violation of the fourteenth amendment,. . ..
Cities aren't required to setup patrols to pull over brown people and demand to see "their papers."
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) requires local governments to cooperate with Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency.
>But you can be pretty sure that the detention cells are not going to be full of white people, they're going to be full of brown people. That is the problem.
The detention cells will be full of a lot of Canadians and europeans. A lot of illegal immigration occurs when foreign visitors overstay their visas.
Yet is it problem if the detention cells are full of brown people -- if the majority of illegal immigration is coming from countries with a lot of brown people? Isn't their skin color just an ancillary characteristic of their illegal presence in the country?
>Look, I get the frustration that people have with illegal immigration. It sucks when you follow the rules and you see people cutting in line.
You think it's all about fairness to immigrants who are following the legal process?
How about . . .
1. the prevention of human trafficking
2. maintaining the national character by limiting the immigration rate to that of the assimilation rate
3. only accepting immigrants that we expect will benefit our country
4. having low social service costs, so that residents are burdened by high taxation
5. obeying the law
> If the police arrest you for reckless driving, how are you supposed to prove them wrong?
ReplyDeleteIf the police arrest me for reckless driving without probable cause I can sue them for violating my civil rights. What constitutes probable cause for suspecting someone of being in the country illegally?
> Yet is it problem if the detention cells are full of brown people -- if the majority of illegal immigration is coming from countries with a lot of brown people? Isn't their skin color just an ancillary characteristic of their illegal presence in the country?
This is a classic fallacy that conservatives make all the time. If all A's are B's it does not follow that all B's are A's. If all terrorists are Muslim (they aren't, but let's suppose) it does not follow that all Muslims are terrorists. If all illegal immigrants have brown skin it does not follow that all people with brown skin are illegal immigrants.
So once again: what constitutes probable cause?
> You think it's all about fairness to immigrants who are following the legal process?
No. It's about following the Constitution. I'm all for enforcing the law uniformly and in accordance with the Constitution. That means that before you arrest someone for allegedly being in the country illegally you need *probable cause* or an arrest warrant.
BTW, if you really expelled all the illegal immigrants the U.S. agricultural economy would collapse. We depend on illegal immigrants for cheap labor. People are going to scream bloody murder when they suddenly have to pay $10 a pound for tomatoes.
BTW2, there are more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. They are 3-4% of the entire population. There are twice as many illegal immigrants as there are Jews. Getting rid of all the illegal immigrants is going to be twice as hard as it would be to get rid of all the Jews. As a practical matter there is just no way to do it without (at best) a shit ton of collateral damage to civil rights.
ReplyDelete>. What constitutes probable cause for suspecting someone of being in the country illegally?
1. You ask them if they are here legally, and they say "no."
2. You look them up in a database - it lists them as not legally present
3. the suspects girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband rats him/her out
4. the suspect has forged documents
>This is a classic fallacy that conservatives make all the time. If all A's are B's it does not follow that all B's are A's. If all terrorists are Muslim (they aren't, but let's suppose) it does not follow that all Muslims are terrorists
It's not a conditional probability - P(A|B) vs P(B|A) - argument.
It's a population argument. Say 54% of illegal immigrants are from brown countries. Would it surprise you that 54% of all detainees for illegal immigration are brown?
>BTW, if you really expelled all the illegal immigrants the U.S. agricultural economy would collapse.
Irrelevant. Follow the law.
>BTW2, there are more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. They are 3-4% of the entire population. There are twice as many illegal immigrants as there are Jews. Getting rid of all the illegal immigrants is going to be twice as hard as it would be to get rid of all the Jews.
They can self-deport. If they made it in here, they should be in even better shape it get out of here.
Oh, and one more thing:
ReplyDelete> hyperbolic exaggerations
We'll see. My grandparents were holocaust survivors and before they died I interviewed them about their experience. One of the things that haunts me is how familiar their description of Hitler's early days seems now. People were saying, "Oh, he doesn't really mean it. Things won't get that bad." Well, they did get that bad. So while I don't expect Trump to be anywhere near as bad as Hitler, I cannot help but be mindful of how badly wrong the same prophecies were in 1933 and might be again. Given my grandparent's experience, I'd rather err on the side of sounding the alarm too early and too loudly than too quietly and too late.
Cost
ReplyDelete>We'll see. My grandparents were holocaust survivors and before they died I interviewed them about their experience. One of the things that haunts me is how familiar their description of Hitler's early days seems now. People were saying, "Oh, he doesn't really mean it. Things won't get that bad." Well, they did get that bad. So while I don't expect Trump to be anywhere near as bad as Hitler, I cannot help but be mindful of how badly wrong the same prophecies were in 1933 and might be again.
Did they vote in the German referendum of August 19, 1934? This is the election gave Hitler abosolute power.
Did you grandparents provide testimony to the United States Holocaust Museum? Do you have it? Can you share it? The museum has the testimonies locked down except for researchers (with good reason to have this restriction). I would like to read it if you're willing to share it.
>Given my grandparent's experience, I'd rather err on the side of sounding the alarm too early and too loudly than too quietly and too late.
A kind of a for politics.
Yet such an approach is not cost-free. What is the cost of it? What harm can you cause by it?
You might also consider that the United States was one the three allied powers that crushed Nazi Germany out of existence. Descendants of people who fought a civil war to end slavery. Descendants of a people who started a revolution due to the Stamp Act of 1765. Do you really think we'd give away our freedom so easily?
@Publius: I see comments from you coming through on my feed that are not showing up here. Are you deleting them, or is there something going wrong?
ReplyDelete@Publus: I figured out what was going on: Blogger was marking your comments as spam. Apparently this has ben going on for a while. I found "spam" from you going back as far as November. I went back and manually marked it all as non-spam so hopefully this won't happen again. Sorry about that.
ReplyDelete> Did you grandparents provide testimony to the United States Holocaust Museum? Do you have it? Can you share it?
ReplyDeleteNo, I interviewed them myself and recorded the interview. It's about an hour long, and it's mostly in German so unless you speak German it probably wouldn't do you much good. Also, I'd want to go through the whole thing to make sure there's no personal information about other family members that shouldn't be made public.
> Descendants of people who fought a civil war to end slavery.
And descendants of people who fought (and lost) a civil war to preserve it.
> Do you really think we'd give away our freedom so easily?
"Our" freedom? No. "Their" freedom? Absolutely. In a heartbeat. And therein lies the problem: the disagreement is never over whether we should preserve "our" freedoms. The answer to that is always yes. The disagreements are over where one should draw the line between "us" who deserve to have our freedoms preserved and "them" who don't. Donald Trump moved the line to put green card holders and anyone with brown skin who doesn't carry a passport with them at all times on the "them" side. *That* is the problem.
ReplyDelete>Blogger was marking your comments as spam
That would explain some of the recent behavior I was observing. I would post - it would say it would succeed. It could even show up in the RSS feed. But then it was gone.
Blogger also doesn't like "-" dashes in URLs. If there is a "-" in any URL, one will get a "Bad Request" error. We searching on the problem isn't very satisfying - some old forum posts on perhaps it's the choice of how comments are collected (pop-up vs. whatever), perhaps some interaction with the Captcha, or a client issue. Gotta love those links to forum posts from 8 years ago discussing the problem, but no solutions.*
Wordpress, anyone?
* The only links that even less useful are any link into the Microsoft Answers site. Never, ever a solution to a question that was posed. Although saying that now, I think there is 1 solution - which I posted, after figuring it out from somewhere else.