36
votes
We don't lock people in cages
I'm a bit behind the news cycle, but I saw the first images of the families being separated on the news last night. I'm aghast. I'm just so utterly confused. Not addressing the issue of immigration or even the splitting up of families...
We don't fucking lock people in cages.
(Sidepoint: I know prisons exist, but this is a very different situation.)
You yanks sure do love your rose coloured glasses.
You've been locking people in cages since before you were a country.
But wait you say, you stopped that after you had that big war over it?
Think again.
Those who believe this could only happen to 'non-citizens' should read that last article very closely. US citizens with Japanese heritage were taken to concentration camps. And yet even with the Karate Kid educating us all on it, people still don't want to remember, and here it goes happening again. And without even a war to justify it.
Not to mention that whole row about the latest camps being put on the list wasn't the creation of the US's list, that's been there for a whiiiiile
The sooner people stop thinking their country was perfect and it will go back to being perfect as soon as you get rid of cheeto benito are 99% of the problem. They are the same people who thought electing Obama was all the effort they needed to put in to fix what Bush did, to the point they didn't even bother to give him a blue congress to actually do anything. Figurehead politics...
I was going to say about the same thing, but you did it better, more eloquently and with more links that I would have. Good stuff.
I don't think this phenomenon is restricted to the USA, though. I'm a bit of a sucker for politics and whenever you see a country have a huge movement towards change, it usually peters out after an election and/or a coup, most people believing that their job is done. Unfortunately, history has numerous examples of this not being the case ever.
Oh hell no. I don't think there's a country out there who is innocent of pretty much anything I said. It's just the US seems to be one of the few that whitewashes itself on the regular. 'Land of the free' and 'American Dream' and 'huddled masses' and 'don't look over there, that's where we keep our poor people'.
We have a subset of my country (Australia) that tries to do the same, but consistently gets shouted down. Doesn't stop them pulling bullshit, but at least it's public bullshit with a public bullshit history.
Well, I'm from Brazil, so we're pros at doing it. I can't even count how many times I've seen it done in my lifetime. Hell, we don't even acknowledge that slavery was a terrible thing, most people have no idea what the conditions were, what the slaves were submitted to, etc.
But I do see, and agree with, your point. No one does it and then tries to project that rose-tinted version upon the others like the US. "Land of the Free" has always been my favourite. I lived there for 5 years and I've never seen so many people have so little freedom and still believe that moniker...
I don't think OP is under any delusion that the US was perfect, but would rather work toward a more perfect union rather than look at the past and say "well, we've always been a bunch of shitters, guess that's all we'll ever be."
I read this as "this should not be who we are, we're better than this" rather than "we've never done this shit before, it's not us."
Yeah, I am not from US but the shit you sometimes pull off is so beyond unbelievable, I don't even know how to react.
I am just hoping public revolt will quickly put things in their places. I don't want US to set an example of possible detention policies to other developed countries
Unfortunately, a large part of the US population (45% and growing according to the current approval rating) are absolutely loving this. These immigrants are murderers and rapists. They are not human. They deserve to be locked in cages.
And its not just white rural "redneck" America that feels this way. I know lots of Hispanics that are just as racists against other Hispanics. Its so fucking hypocritical. Hispanic immigrants that came here 40 years ago, bashing on Hispanic immigrants trying to come here today.
Curious where you got the 45% number, all the polls I've seen have put approval for the "family separation" policy much closer to 25%
Pretty sure the 45% is referring to Trump's approval rating.
Seems like an over-simplification, considering this is one of the rare issues that divides Republican support
Current presidential approval ratings.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
I'll also add this: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Sure, lots of immigrants are cancer but the problem is that you lock up or split INNOCENT families. there is more harm than good done this way, it is inhuman
I'm pretty sure that when @DePingus said
he was being sarcastic (is that the right word?) quoting how some citizens react towards immigrants.
Totally. Thanks for having my back! I was trying to highlight one way in which immigrants are dehumanized in the media. Which makes it easier to split up their "litter" (see there, more dehumanizing sarcasm) and put them in cages.
I don't even want to post this because I'll be made to look like I'm defending the current administration, but...
This whole mess is much more complicated than it's being portrayed.
If you (child in tow) go to one of the border crossings and plead for asylum you will be detained while your application is reviewed - but the chances of you being separated from your child are next to 0%.
The Trump administration has declared a new "zero-tolerance" policy of prosecuting every immigrant arrested for illegal entry, a practice that is separating parents from their children. Asylum-seekers who turn themselves in to border inspectors usually do not face such a fate.
If you cross the border outside of one of the legal checkpoints you have broken the law and you will be detained in a criminal facility while you are processed and your children will be separated from you. This is because you can't be certain what kind of (possibly violent) people are being held in the detention facility. You can still apply for asylum at this point but the whole process is now protracted by your detention in a system that currently has a backlog of over 600,000 cases The coyotes don't tell them that.
ICE was created by fearmongering that terrorists would penetrate our borders during the Bush years. Another of many overreaches as a result of 9/11 - and the creation of a security industrial complex. Democrats voted right along with its creation.
The current policy on people crossing the border illegally isn't much different than it was under Bush. Obama was the outlier. He chose to reduce the charge for border crossing to what was effectively a misdemeanor and claimed to focus on real violent offenders -but that wasn't really the case. This caused a flood of immigrants from Central America. Applying for asylum became a fallback position if they were caught.
I think we'd be better off going back to the immigration system we had before ICE - maybe even streamlining the immigration process. It would also be nice if sanctimonious Democrats would stop using this as a way to grill Trump when any other Republican's policy would likely be the same and they had a big part in creating this system. It would be even better if we legalized marijuana to reduce the influence of organized crime and stopped with all the imperialism in Central America that has led to these people thinking this is a better option than their current situation.
This comment is extremely well put. I was struggling to find the energy to write something along similar lines to this. You saved me the time and emotional turmoil.
Topics like this, put in the way this one has been, make me extremely anxious. That's not a trait I wear well. I think that people's (often genuinely placed, though sometimes motivated or enhanced by partisan interests) outrage tends to drown out any ability to make meaningful progress to addressing the situation beyond immediate measures, and the horrible underlying features that allowed a system to take shape go largely unaddressed.
I mean, literally, the last time we had an outpouring of rage like this, it was also largely from the left, also focused on the kids, and it concerned school shootings. It masked the debate on DACA (which also involves kids and now young adults) that has left so many young people who are wondering whether they can even go to college in limbo, having to put their lives on hold. And all because people can't seem to keep their attention focused for longer than a housefly.
So my feelings are quite mixed.
You made this text post expressing your opinion in ~news instead of ~talk. Was that deliberate?
It was deliberate but it took me a while to decide between the two. I figured conversation inspired by current events may as well go in ~news and ~talk would be more for random topics.
I'm going to move it to ~talk. You didn't do anything wrong though, there aren't really any rules/guidelines yet, and I think it was a reasonable decision. I'm working on multiple updates to the "new topic" page right now and will try to add this sort of info in there as well.
I would instinctively expect ~news to be mostly link-posts to specific external articles, and something like this to be in ~talk.news, for what it's worth.
The "rant" tag is helpful though, perhaps along with something like "opinion" or "discussion".
This is down to personal opinion. I think there are valid reasons to imprison people. None of the ones you listed above though. Only violent crimes.
when you live in a free country you have to understand that if you break the law you give up certain freedoms and go to jail. people understand whats at stake when they break the law and have to deal with that. illegal immigrants should fully understand this.
The far bigger issue in my opinion is that so many people in America think crossing the border "illegally" is some kind of horrible crime. No one has been able to justify to me why this should be considered wrong.
Nations have the right and responsibility to control their borders and the entry and exit of people and goods. I think we need major changes to how we handle it in the US, but there are basic goals that are fine.
Customs, contraband, human trafficking, disease control, economic management (work visas/vs tourism), even just raw statistics are all valid concerns.
I think it should be a lot easier to enter the country legally than it is now, but starting your relationship with a new country by breaking a law ignores all those issues and sets you off on the wrong foot.
It should be noted, however, that "asylum seekers" are not "illegal entrants" just because they didn't go through a checkpoint. Seeking asylum is legal and supposedly has a standard protocol the nation is supposed to follow to handle them.
Many of the parents are seeking asylum, which is a legal way to enter the country. These families are being separated for what amounts to a misdemeanor offense or no offense at all, which is what makes the administration's actions so egregious. They would also lie to parents about where they were taking the children, saying that they were going to be given a bath. Here's a decent article I found on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family-separation-and-zero-tolerance-at-the-border
My understanding is that a lot of these cases aren't illegal immigrants, they're asylum seekers. Seeking asylum isn't a crime, and neither is entering the country you're seeking it in, according to the 1967 UN Asylum Protocol, to which the US is a signatory. Here's a quick enloopifying article for you.
A very important point is that there is no process to reunite families which, even if you think splitting them up in the first place is OK, is definitely not OK. That alone is horrific.
Just as an aside, I'm not sure what degree of locking kids in cages away from their families you think is the right amount of "blown" because for me it's basically none at all. There are ways to handle this situation without doing that. The choice isn't "allowing illegal immigrants" or "locking up children" - because for one asylum seekers aren't illegal and for another I find it very hard to find a justification for "locking up children" and splitting up families who are just trying to survive being the best choice in any situation. One would hope a civilised society would do pretty much anything to avoid doing that, rather than explicitly choosing to which is what's happening now. In the UK we have holding centres which are pretty awful but they at least keep people together until the asylum process can be dealt with.
I know seeking asylum isn't always legitimate but we do have that whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept that we like to work with. And again, even if their claim is false, that's no reason to split up families before that claim has even been investigated. As I said, there are ways to solve that problem that isn't putting kids in cages.
Keeping families together allows an expedited process where the whole family can go through immigration court together to determine if there is any merit to their asylum claims. Splitting them up makes that impossible due to some different US laws. It costs about $15/day to use electronic monitoring to keep track of these people while they wait for their court date. It costs about $600/day to hold a child in these cages. This policy being enforced this way just makes no sense.
Per your last sentence, many of us call that sort of thing "evil".
I don't agree with you at all. It is undeniably evil. Allowing yourself to commit vast human rights violations doesn't suddenly become not evil because you have "apathy" towards a group.
Your statement enables this kind of behavior in my opinion because you refuse to take a stand where there is obviously a great wrong being committed.
It's only a deterrent if:
1.) People know - which the administration is doing nothing to communicate to people in South/Central America that the policies that haven't changed in living memory are changing.
2.) It's worse than where they're coming from - which the places these people are fleeing are really bad environments for children. A rational person could still decide that making the trip and being separated from their children is a better alternative to having them be forcibly recruited into a gang, or raped by gang members, or any of the myriad situations these people are fleeing.
So even the best justification for this policy doesn't really hold up.
So fix that loophole, don't punish people for taking advantage of a loophole the same govt has known for ages and has done nothing to fix. And, especially, don't punish them via the worst possible way imaginable.
Don't know if you have kids, but the thought of getting somewhere, my kid being taken from me and then spending X amount of time with zero news is nightmare inducing. And I imagine that's a trauma that sticks for a long time.
Migrant seeking asylum says his toddler was taken away at the U.S. border
Detained, and separated from his 1.5yr old son.
You've probably heard this isn't a new policy, that's a lie. I saw some talking head on CNN arguing with the anchor about this being the norm.
This started 5 weeks ago when AG Sessions, and Steve Miller changed the policy. Crossing the border used to be a misdemeanor. If someone requested asylum, children were kept with their families and processed.
5 weeks ago Sessions announced a no-tolerance policy which took away any ability to process asylum seekers and instead of a misdemeanor, all border crossings are now a criminal offense, and has ordered children to be taken from their mothers arms, many of which will never ever be reunited.
That is the worst part, the government blaming the previous administration and PEOPLE BELIEVING IT.
The current govt controls the Executive (obviously), both houses of the Legislative, and the same party has nominated the majority of the members of the Supreme Court. Saying "we can't do anything" and having anyone believe it is baffling and shows just how little people can think critically these days.
Shit, a friend I used to consider intelligent even said Bill Clinton was to blame. Dude's been out of power for almost 20 years! And yes, I did call said friend a complete idiot and tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why he should never ever EVER repeat such a stupid statement. He proceeded to defend that position and claim I didn't understand the issue. Sigh.....
Why would you expect him to be open to your viewpoint when you insulted him to his face?
It was not said as an insult, it's lost in translation, unfortunately, but it was most definitely not an insult and he didn't take it as one.
Previously, in the same conversation, he had said I was probably retarded and the same thing was true; it was just a hyperbolic figure of speech.
Fair enough. If the dynamic you two have means you can do that, more power to ya.
It's not so much the dynamic as much as the way in which we use the language. It's a weird thing to try to explain, but Brazilian Portuguese lends itself to that sort of thing nicely, without any harm being done (unless you change the tone a bit). It's not an uncommon practice, by any stretch.
Please consider paying greater attention to what's happening in our country. What's going on is not at all normal and deserves our time.
Please consider the fact that not everyone on the internet is American.
I'm not American, and I'm a student, so it's not really been on my radar.
People should spend their attention how they want. If that means ignoring current events, so be it. It's not up to us to force them to take a position.
This is something I would expect from Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler but not from the US
Want to post this in a comment as it's more response than an amendment of my post.
I'm not American, I meant we as in sane humans. Countries will have different immigration policies and different political systems but this is about treating people with basic respect and decency. This supercedes what land mass we live on or what political beliefs we hold.
Someone smarter and more socially aware than me please give some advice. What can be done about these kind of things which seem to be happening with increasing frequency...
https://itsgoingdown.org/anti-ice-vigil-grows-into-occupation-in-portland/
I just wanted to share this here - I posted it later yesterday evening and it was mostly buried by the morning, so I think it could have easily flown under the radar for a lot of folks.
There is a real grassroots movement against this practice that is quickly forming, and even people very far removed from the border have the opportunity to contribute.
This family separation policy is shameful. Young children are being separated from families and put into dangerous positions. I hate thinking about it, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't a lot of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse happening to these kids, either by their peers (or within a few years) or the officers watching them.
It's detestable and I can't believe we've put in people at every level of government that support these policies.