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When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

newyorker.com

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Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#12
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>American exceptionalism Almost the entire North and South America has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

The US is historically unique in its ability to Americanize immigrants and lift them into prosperity. Birthright citizenship isn’t unique to the US, but the is a pillar of what makes the US unique.

Hmm, I think the other countries in the Americas have been pretty successful at integrating immigrants as well. The prosperous ones also offer opportunities for those immigrants. I think being the largest economy and being so influential is more unique among other nations.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#13
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>American exceptionalism Almost the entire North and South America has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

The US is historically unique in its ability to Americanize immigrants and lift them into prosperity. Birthright citizenship isn’t unique to the US, but the is a pillar of what makes the US unique.

Honestly, Canada is actually doing better than the US in assimilating and lifting immigrants into prosperity these days, because it has a more modern immigration system (having avoided legislative gridlock and populist backlashes, for the most part) coupled with birthright citizenship. Consequently, Canada has a larger proportion of immigrants than the US. It also slightly beats the US on most measures of human development.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#14
post #2

The British empire essentially deported many of its criminals to Australia. The USSR banished their radicals to Siberia... I’m sure others have done similar.

Yeah but none of those claim to be the "land of the freedom" and other platitudes as loudly as the Americans

This seems to be written in mean spirit, but is essentially true. America is supposed to be founded upon an ideology, and deserves scrutiny whether this ideology is upheld. (Incidentally, USSR, albeit not Russia, was also this way.) I'm not American, for example, and my sympathy for that country tends to be proportional to how much free and constitutional I find it.

The article is somewhat biased, but includes enough information to invite some reflecting on those problems. It paints an image of how many people might have been actually fearing a violent revolution, for example. It also shows how such fears can interplay with how law is executed.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#15
post #4

> In 1919, alarmed by the growing presence of “peoples of Asiatic races,” the Anti-Alien League called for a constitutional amendment “to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e., whites. Senator Wesley Jones, of Washington State, promised to introduce such a measure—a proposal not unlike today’s calls to end birthright…

Ireland didn't get rid of it, they restricted it and it remains very generous compared to just about everywhere else. One parent an Irish or British citizen, or with right to residence in either Ireland or Northern Ireland - there may well be other categories acceptable. They retain the island of Ireland extra-territorial limit too.

This, along with the grandparent clause, has the probably unintended consequence that something astonishing like a sixth or eighth of the UK is eligible for Irish citizenship.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#16
post #8

This kind of thing is why it's important to challenge the framing of people as "illegal"; citizenship is an administrative category, and abusive governments can find all sorts of excuses to end or revoke it.

This doesn’t make sense to me. Aren’t all laws then “administrative categories”, of those who commit or don’t commit the corresponding crimes? Breaking the law means, per definition, that someone has committed an illegal action. Calling someone an “illegal immigrant” is appropriate when the crime is immigration related.

when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc. - i.e. with the characteristics acquired by birth, not by choice - it gives rise to the reasonable doubt whether the law (or its application) is just or whether it is just an oppressive tool against a specific class of people.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#17
Amusingly, a question today is what to do with people who left their country to fight with the Islamic State? Take them back? Keep them out? Send them to re-education camps? Turkey has a lot of them, and they're not Turkish. Turkey wants to unload them. "There is no need to try to escape from it, we will send them back to you. Deal with them how you want." The UK doesn't want theirs back. France has decided to take theirs back. Sweden is taking theirs back but sending them to re-education camps. The US only has a few, so they can be dealt with individually.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#18
post #2

The British empire essentially deported many of its criminals to Australia. The USSR banished their radicals to Siberia... I’m sure others have done similar.

> The British empire essentially deported many of its criminals to Australia.

That's not really deportation. They were sent from one part of the British Empire to another. They remained British subjects.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#19
post #17

Amusingly, a question today is what to do with people who left their country to fight with the Islamic State? Take them back? Keep them out? Send them to re-education camps? Turkey has a lot of them, and they're not Turkish. Turkey wants to unload them. "There is no need to try to escape from it, we will send them back to you. Deal with them how you want." The UK doesn't want theirs back. France has decided to take t…

>what to do with people who left their country to fight with the Islamic State

having them piecemeal in prisons/camps/etc. around the world is inefficient and is basically letting the cancer to metastasize. These people explicitly refused to live in our societies/states, and de-facto had their own state. I think we should have left them to their own devices - a 10m high wall with machine gun turrets each 1000ft accompanied by 10m deep moat and 1mile width minefield around that patch of the desert in Syria and/or Iraq where those believers wanted to have their own kind of heaven on Earth (until we can send them to Moon/Mars - worked great for Britain/Australia). Shoot on sight anybody trying to cross out of that heaven. To each their own. Right for self-determination and choosing your own poison.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#20
post #4

> In 1919, alarmed by the growing presence of “peoples of Asiatic races,” the Anti-Alien League called for a constitutional amendment “to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e., whites. Senator Wesley Jones, of Washington State, promised to introduce such a measure—a proposal not unlike today’s calls to end birthright…

The wikipedia map shows it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#/media/File:Jus_soli_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

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