when you treat immigrants like they were not people with lifes, you are just one step away from treating poor people as they were not people and then too treat all common people as they were not people.
also it has been quite convenient explanation for adopting systems such as Flock and allowing all kinds of para-police actions which seems very similar to what happened in germany circla 1930-1934
This is my touchstone for evaluating any society: how does it deal with people without power?
> when you treat immigrants like they were not people with lifes
Thus the rebranding of humans as “illegals”.
Especially when they arbitrarily change the rules so people who did everything by the book are now “illegals”. Especially when they “lose” paperwork somewhere inside of an enormous overworked and hostile bureaucracy.
That term has been in use for at least the half century I’ve been alive. It’s a common word almost every where in the US, shows up in daily conversations, but it’s been deemed not politically correct. That’s why you maybe never heard it in media or from a politician in the past. This presidency is all about breaking political correctness though and it’s on brand. This is why his devotees love him. Simple things like saying the words we were told we couldn’t say really resonates with some people. There’s unfortunately still a lot of deep seated racism in the US. Will take a thousand more years to really get rid of it. Political correctness is a way to force accelerated the process, it backfires when you push it too hard too fast. You’re trying to change culture faster than humans can be expected to change (pesky long lifespans and all). It doesn’t work well and cause a pressure cooker situation. Trump is the steam venting of years of political correctness and rapid progressive movement.
> Simple things like saying the words we were told we couldn’t say really resonates with some people.
Nobody said you couldn't say them, it was that open bigotry is something everyone associates with being a person of low class. When it's used by the upper classes it's as a divide and conquer tactic to keep the lower classes from focusing on the group that's actually exploiting them.
The normalizing of open bigotry is a kind of 'death of despair' for US culture: it indicates that, en masse, people have given up on elevating their class in society and being better people, and have decided to just wallow in it. Blaming the 'other' isn't anything new, it's the basic lazy tribal default and it's the 'easy' button for a culture that simply gives up.
Trump is not about “racism.” He won more racial minorities in 2024 than any republican president in modern history. Trump is about Americanism versus third-worldism. Among immigrants themselves—half of whom voted for Trump in 2024–it’s about whether immigrants should Anglicize and dissolve into the American polity, or whether they should bring their home cultures with them and retain their separate ethnocultural identity.
Fundamentally, it’s a disagreement over what makes countries the way they are. Does a Bangladeshi start thinking and acting like an American the minute they set foot within borders where the 1st, 2nd, etc., amendments apply? Or is culture deeper than the words on paper.
>Trump is not about “racism.” He won more racial minorities
"Of course I'm not racist, I have black friends"
...
I have a family member that is a naturalized citizen. They were in the country illegally for 2 decades before that, and they are the first one to yell "kick those lazy illegals out". So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture.
What's really fucking stupid about this guy is the people he loves to vote for are the ones that would strip his rights and kick him out of the country in a heartbeat for.
Remember when America was a melting pot and not a bunch of redhats goose stepping in line?
> Of course I'm not racist, I have black friends
It’s weird that you think my point is about the superficial optics of having immigrants in Trump’s coalition, rather than about the motivations of the immigrant voters themselves.
> So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture
You can’t be “racist” against a culture. Racism is wrong because race is superficial—how much sunscreen someone does or does not need is as irrelevant as hair color or eye color. But culture isn’t superficial. Culture has major impacts on the types of societies people create.
Your family member’s viewpoint is totally rational, and frankly, more rational than the opposite. If you come from a country that’s dysfunctional and unsuccessful, why wouldn’t you dislike that place’s culture? It’s like someone who left some failing dinosaur company to go to a high performance startup saying that the culture at the new company is better.
oh please, everyone knows that its referring to their immigration status or legality of stay in country.
you surely must realize that any rational person just shrugs off listening to what else you might say when you start with such ridiculous interpretations
> when you treat immigrants like they were not people with lifes, you are just one step away from treating poor people as they were not people and then too treat all common people as they were not people.
"The way that a society treats its prisoners is one of the sharpest reflections of its character." - Nelson Mandela
http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1998/980625_dcshr...
I did not know this but true. I would point out that when you are talking about criminals there is still a layer of judgment from society given the crimes. When talking about legal immigrants and refugees there is even less space.
The US is an outliner on prison terms and sizes etc. Under the surface it is hard to tell if the public lead the prisons or if the big prison business shapes public opinion but from the outside it seems crazy.
Different societies are at different places on the prison is for punishment to prison is for rehabilitation spectrum, and their reoffending rates reflect that.
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You treat them like they are people without personal agency.
Temporary worker programs are a deal offered on open terms: people can come to work, but they have to leave afterward. The laws are plastered with the word “temporary.” People take advantage of the deal knowing the terms and there is nothing wrong holding people to the deal.
This is not that, these are people seeking to immigrate to the United States legally getting jerked around instead of a process that approves or denies them on a set timeline.