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When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

newyorker.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that smoke Marijuana have also committed a crime. As well as people that jaywalk, or violate any of the obscure laws the various states have on the books. They're all criminals, wouldn't you agree? We should call them illegal citizens. Then we can start working towards deporting such criminals as the article demonstrates.

> We should call them illegal citizens. Then we can start working towards deporting such criminals as the article demonstrates. Well international law prevents you from making someone stateless so they get thrown in jail instead. But yes, non-citizens who commit crimes are generally deported. Also, the US classes crimes as either felonies or misdemeanours (possibly more categories?). In Canada we have indictable crim…

The US term you are looking for is “infraction”, which applies to traffic tickets and the like.

Felony is overused at the moment, IMHO. Lawmakers that want to appear tough on crime make felonies out of non-violent crimes.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada doesn’t do better at lifting people out of poverty. They’re just more selective in who they let in and don’t have a huge second world country at their southern border.

Canada's immigration rate is 5.3 per year per 1000 residents (200K per year, population 37.59M). The US immigration rate is 3.6 per year per 1000 residents (1.18M per year, population 327.2M). And in absolute (not per capita!) terms, Canada resettles more refugees than the US [1]. The US is in fact more selective (probably owing to decades of legislative gridlock leaving us with an outdated bureaucratic nightmare of…

U.S. is more selective..? Blatant lie.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is terrible at assimilating immigrants, the only reason we have less poverty is because our immigration laws are much tougher than the US' and we take in mostly richer immigrants.

As I mentioned below, Canada admits more immigrants per capita than the US does, and far more refugees (it surpasses the US in absolute numbers, not even per capita).

You're ignoring all the untalented, unskilled immigrants the U.S. admits, that aren't refugees, which is what drives down U.S. numbers.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#54
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should call them illegal citizens. Then we can start working towards deporting such criminals as the article demonstrates. Well international law prevents you from making someone stateless so they get thrown in jail instead. But yes, non-citizens who commit crimes are generally deported. Also, the US classes crimes as either felonies or misdemeanours (possibly more categories?). In Canada we have indictable crim…

International law hasn't stopped the US before. So why bother? We can just deport these illegal citizens to the place that best matches their heritage. Problem solved. And in the US, jaywalking is a crime. A crime is a crime, which makes jaywalking a crime all the same. If they decided to jaywalk, then they deserve to be deported for their criminal actions. For reference: Crossing the boarder illegally is a misdemean…

>International law hasn't stopped the US before. So why bother?

Because we should try to improve the situation not make it worse. I'm also not sure which international law violations you're talking about.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#55
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…

Those restrictions are exactly what Steve King’s bill imposed. Citizenship would be limited to children born in the US with at least one parent that was a US citizen or legal permanent resident: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/140. It was deemed too racist to pursue even under the Trump administration.

There is no equivalent to the grandparent thing in the US, but that would be deemed even more racist.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be in administrative violation of a statute without being criminally liable. This distinction matters a lot in law because in the former case any litigation is a civil, not criminal matter. As an everyday example, suppose you park carelessly and get a lot of parking tickets and then don't pay them. You could run into all sorts of problems and eventually your car might be towed away and sold but generally you…

To be honest, this seems like hand wringing about the degree of consequence for a given law-breaking act. It isn’t unfair to label someone who parks illegally an “illegal parker”. I understand that law may distinguish between different violations and establish terminologies (like “misdemeanor”) to classify them into categories and enable discussion around them and affix penalties based on those categories. But all these violations are in breach of the law and therefore illegal. If they weren’t illegal there wouldn’t be grounds for any consequence, after all.

So I still don’t see why people are averse to the term “illegal immigrant”. It seems accurate to me. The rest of what you point out - like people equating an illegal border crossing with murder - seems like an orthogonal discussion.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#57
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc." Yes, immigration law - both application and enforcement - tends to correlate highly with nationality. I'd wager speeding tickets also correlate with drivers. What should it correlate with?

If application and enforcement correlates with nationality because those violating the law are more likely to be of a given nationality, then I don’t think that is a problem. But I think enforcing the law to a different degree against similar violations of distant nationalities wouldn’t be fair.

That is, if 10 Canadians and 10 Mexicans crossed into the US illegally, and all faced similar consequences, I think that’s fine. If there are only 1 Canadian and 10 Mexican violators and this causes limited border patrols to be distributed proportionally between the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, I think that’s still fine. But if 10 violating Canadians and 10 violating Mexicans who were all apprehended faced different consequences, that would not be fair.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#58

"We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are i…

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

>>She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#59
post #36
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.

They committed a crime (crossing a border illegally). What should you call it if not illegal immigration? What do you call robbing a bank? Undocumented withdrawal? No, it's a crime.

If it was a crime, there would need to be a trial before deporting them.

Re: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals

#60
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those restrictions are exactly what Steve King’s bill imposed. Citizenship would be limited to children born in the US with at least one parent that was a US citizen or legal permanent resident: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/140 . It was deemed too racist to pursue even under the Trump administration. There is no equivalent to the grandparent thing in the US, but that would be deemed even mo…

this is worded on a way that suggests that because the Irish one isn't particularly racist, or at least not in a particularly bad way, that an equivalent law in the US shouldn't be considered racist.

That ignores the difference in immigration and emigration between the two countries. in Ireland, it enables ethnic Irish to return home if their ancestors moved away, whereas in America, it would promote migrants from one non-ethnically American country over another, which in the context of prioritizing white immigrants over anything else, makes it pretty racist

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