dobrojim wrote:It's sad that so many people have become so disenchanted, justifiably or not, that
they believe false equivalencies about different public figures that would make your head spin.
Jon Stewart, we need you more than ever. And we really need to implement better public
education beginning at a very young age in the recognition of disinformation.
This. You see it all the time where folks look at a tweet and decide their position. Almost like folks don't want an historical context to what is happening. Previously we had someone think that the "open border" which isn't was going to be the downfall of the country without the context of the push/pull.
If you don't understand the push/pulls that are going on, there is no context. And we are reduced to reacting to tweets.
We want our gardeners, our house keepers, and our in-home healthcare workers. Small businesses want folks to work in their restaurants, on their small farms to pick their crops, developers want builders, etc...
There are many reasons for the destabilization in many regions on the world. We aren’t the sole cause but we are a big chunk of the cause at least in Latin America. And climate change has exacerbated the problems (and will accelerate migration in time).
So, unless we slow down the pulls, none of it matters – folks will migrate for a better life and/or the push to stay alive. Check out Palestine, we know those folks would migrate in a heartbeat if they had a chance (vs. starving to death).
Next you have the border. Questions to ask, can you really secure the border (yep, a rhetorical question – you can’t). And how do most of the immigrants arrive? Another rhetorical question – it isn’t via the border – it is via overstayed visas.
Then you have Trump’s newfound voice on massive deportations. It may very well be rhetoric but words matter. Like with Arizona trying to pass a bill to search folks for their papers. Guess what, they aren’t going to be searching white folk.
And let’s go back in history. Have we ever had xenophobic immigration policies before? Know-Nothing Party (Catholics); Chinese exclusion act; Japanese exclusion act; Emergency Quota Act (Southern Europeans); and now onto the Trump xenophobic policies.
And we might be fine with these now, except we need a material expansion of immigration to pay off our debt that we incurred through the forever wars, Bush and Trump tax cuts and of course Covid. Not paying off your credit card is the other way to do it… but that will have some interesting ramifications.
So yes, we can be driven by the slippery slope arguments (like in each of the past xenophobic periods). Most of them turn out to be materially false but are effective in getting the base’s rabid responses (historically they have had a material affect on elections).
But like prohibition, the walls and whatnot don’t work unless you carveout the pulls.
But this is nuance, it is much easier to react to a tweet or a newscast and think that immigration is THE issue of the day, well - it may be but it shouldn't. It is just a driver of our xenophobia and a good one at that - not understanding context or how to find the context leaves the vast majority of Americans wallowing in their own verbal excrement.
So, violent agreement - EOR.