There have been several articles on immigration in the past, mostly from a theoretical perspective of liberty and immigration. I decided to write about what I would see as a more practical approach to immigration. I will restate that I am not a fully open borders libertarian, that as long as sovereign states exist – and they do for now – they need to be able to exercise some measure of control over the borders of their jurisdiction. As such, as I see the need for a policy. The merit of open/closed borders is not a subject for this post. This is a post about controlled immigration and mostly about compromises in policy. Furthermore, this is not a “ in libertopia these things would be solved by private property” argument. While this argument has its merits, sadly we do not live in libertopia and there is a distinct lack of cocaine vending machines in my vicinity.
Border castle
First and main point: if you are going to have a government, the basic function of that government is preservation of rights, laws and in general the King’s Peace. From this I conclude that the absolute lowest constraint to immigration policy should be the ability of the government to ensure this, for the both the existing and the new residents. This starts with preventing violent criminals and sever contagious diseases, and moves on from there.
The second point is that for any location, the infrastructure at a given point is of a given size and can accommodate a given number of people. Exceeding this number can be workable, if uncomfortable. Greatly exceeding it can get unworkable. Off course, immigrants often mean economic growth and development, but this takes time – building houses, roads, hospitals and so on. If the population of Austin Texas would all move tomorrow to Houston Texas, there would be no room. If the population gradually arrives over years, expansion can happen.
Some open borders people say that it worked for the US in certain times in the past, but did it really? Or was the press at the time bemoaning immigrants living in overcrowded, insalubrious diseased slums? The same thing happened during the industrial revolution: when a lot of people moved from the country to the city, the lived in cramped, crowded, rather unsanitary conditions. The same thing happens now in certain immigrant areas of Europe. The left waive this away as due to the evil of capitalism, but in general more homes do not appear out of thin air and the “empty homes of the rich” are not that many. Even the left prescription of the government building housing takes time.
A form of current open borders policy is the EU, but this was not done right away. It was accomplished by sort of applying the rules: a country was allowed in when it was considered it was ready and would not excessively disrupt others. Romania made it in 2007 with some extra restrictions until 2012. Even now Romania is not a full member of the Schengen area. So this is another form of controlled access, in the end.
We must also keep in mind, not being libertopia, there are political constraints. If a lot of immigrants come in and start creating issues – camping in parks, squatting on private land, creating piles of trash, solving this by having police or military go in force is both dangerous as a precedent for the society and untenable in certain situations, due to the uproar it causes among the bleeding hearted ones. Now, I cannot prescribe this or that number of immigrants for this or that country, but these are things that cannot be ignored completely.
In my view, existing residents do have some claims that new comers do not: they contributed to the building of the respective country, they – or their ancestors – have invested labor and capital, build houses, planted trees and all that. They have significant skin in the game that a new comer does not have right away, and as such newcomers must be mindful of these and respect the existing society, and policy must reflect that by not promoting mindless “multiculturalism.”
It is too often that people move to a place and want to keep their existing culture and behavior intact, without adapting to the new place. This cannot always work. This is significantly more important for people moving from a low prosperity country to a high prosperity one. Just like the great strings of bad luck which derailed socialist policies, many of these people do not make a link between the difference in culture and the difference in prosperity. They want to move to a new place and keep doing what wrecked the first one. This is nonsensical. Furthermore, there are some social mores to be respected. Romanians, to take a simple example, moving to Switzerland cannot keep their habit of eating sunflower seeds and spitting husks on the pavement, without expecting upset Swiss. All these must be kept in mind for a workable policy.
I cannot see value in visas like US H1B, which tie the immigrant to a certain company or job. This can welcome abuse and it is not good for either the immigrant or the natives – from a labor market perspective. I feel my preferred policy in the current world would be something vaguely similar to the New Zealand points system. Give people points for good characteristics, deduct for bad. There would be deal breakers – criminal records for serious crime, dangerous diseases, participation in serious gangs, criminal or terrorist organization, published intent to harm the new country. There would be points received for experience in skilled work, spotless records, speaking the language, education, having assets or capital to bring to the new country. Points would be deducted for misdemeanors, not speaking the language, not having any education or skills to speak of. In the end decide how many points are needed to get in.
After the immigration there would be a number of years of probation – be on your best behavior, prove you have attempted to integrate in the new culture. Any crime in this period means deportation. Not learning the language to a tolerable level at the end of 5 years should be frowned upon severely. In this period you may need to occasionally offer proof of employment and of residence in proper conditions, not 100 people registered in the same apartment. You may be required to have some sort of liability insurance in case you cause damage. After 5 years you could become a full resident, eventually with a path to citizenship.
Given the current climate on immigration, another thorny issue arises for immigration policy, politically and maybe practically. That is very delicate for libertarians as it is rather counter the ideology: can this policy be purely individual or will some collectivism inevitably sneak in. When you see a certain group commit a significantly disproportionate amount of bad things, can you submit members of that group to additional scrutiny? Or to rephrase, in certain cases people group other people in categories out of convenience. And people notice patterns. Should these patterns be used? I have to admit that I do have some reticence about certain immigration in Europe, but would not support blanked bans on whole categories. But can using patterns for some extra scrutiny be warranted? I am not sure I know myself. As a Romanian I have been on both ends of such conversations.
Of course, this are general guidelines I have yet to think of the actual points involved and how to add them up. But it is what I think can be a start for some countries. Opinions or are we all in agreement?
Would this hypothetical system add or deduct points for being undead instead of alive?
No, it would not.
The undead should be shipped in suitable packaging and labeled as “cemetery material”. Apply appropriate warnings to outside of the package and you’re ready to go.
DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE
Good article with some pragmatic, rather than ideological questions.
“A form of current open borders policy is the EU, but this was not done right away. It was accomplished by sort of applying the rules: a country was allowed in when it was considered it was ready and would not excessively disrupt others.”
The US has more open borders than the EU. The EU has open borders within member states, but immigrating from Turkey to the EU (legally) is next to near impossible. The whole notion, made by the chattering class, that the US is not the most immigrant friendly nation in the world (even with Orange Man) is so divorced from reality (and the actual numerical number of immigrants admitted to the US on an annual basis) that I really question whether these people even understand this topic.
The US doesn’t even have a skilled based immigration system (which is really just a way to protect the jobs of white collar workers). I really don’t know what country the chattering class lives in when they complain about American xenophobia.
Yep. I see people accusing America of not allowing people in and just laugh. 1.2 million permanent legal immigrants per year, highest in the world. And they come from all over, all religions and races. Our foreign born population is around 14%.
My wife’s a furriner. We could bring her mom, in her 70’s with a history of cancer, over here immediately. She could sign up for Medicaid and I’m sure some other public assistance. Her sister who lives in Australia, speaks funny English, has a stellar work record in a skilled field, and no real health issues would be a massive multi year pain in the ass to try to get a green card for. We really need to move to a point based admission system here.
I’m rather torn on a points system. If you are going to have a social safety net, it would seem to be a requirement however.
I can’t see the US making a serious cut in the welfare system anytime soon. Only way that happens is when the serious financial reckoning arrives.
The big reason why we have a family based system rather than a point based system was so immigrants would be supported by family that is already in the states. I had some family that immigrated and in order for them to get a green card their family in the US had to show that they could materially support the new immigrant they were sponsoring for upwards of six months.
Yeah but it is in a way better if they can support themselves rather that being temporary supported by family
I would need to see the comparisons between Canada’s immigrants on the dole versus the US. I’m not sure that a point system guarantees that immigrants are less likely to be on the dole. It does guarantee that you’ll end up with a lot of single males without family in a foreign country.
“On the dole” can underestimate the cost – best guess here is that illegals cost my hospital over a million a year, and we had one illegal this year who cost us around half a million in oncology treatments, refusing a transfer to pretty decent Mexican cancer treatment program.
The operative word here being “illegal”
Good point. That’s what we see a lot of with H-1B visas.
I like the points system in theory, but it strikes me too much of the government trying to manage the labor economy and mispicking winners and losers as they do in other areas. Lower barriers to entry & exit for someone working here legally, with a bit of divorce from permanent immigration.
The lack of a point system is also the government controlling the labor market. It’s harder to immigrate in the US if you attended college here than it is if your mother lives in the US
i would not go for a points system just like NZ where they have a fixed number a year, more like a bare minimum. And not just labor skills, other things. Also hot single women always get extra points.
That’s a points systems I get can get behind.
IYKWIM…AITYD
Yes, but as I’m sure you know, when you sponsor her under your I-864, you agree to repay the cost of any means-tested public benefit, like Medicaid or food stamps.
I cannot see value in visas like US H1B, which tie the immigrant to a certain company or job.
Typically, there’s a not-bad idea in there somewhere, but it got effed up. The not-bad idea is, you came here to work, so we want to make sure they have a job. As it is, the employers have way too much power, essentially a quasi-governmental power to deport.
Agreed. They should allow a person to at least switch jobs with no unemployed or minimum downtime between. Otherwise it becomes a quasi servitude to the host company.
As I said I think you want people to integrate and feel they have skin in the game. Such a visa does not lead to that.
goddamn it is raining to damn much
also as a note this is not necessarily my absolute prefered policy, but something that could be acceptable to a wide spectrum of people in the current world.
I mean I don’t really care how they live – but it was a thing in Europe like Romanians live 7 in a room and undercut good british jobs.
I don’t care if they learn the language but it is a sign of trying to integrate. I have friends who live among the netherpeople for a couple of years and have yet to learn swamp german, but they are quite productive members of socity and not much integration was needed cause even in Romania they always behaved in ways that were appropriate in dutchland
I don’t care if they learn the language but it is a sign of trying to integrate.
I’m not a big fan of government doing business in multiple languages or requiring businesses to have translators. We have to have translation services for over 80 languages. Don’t learn the language if you don’t want to, but don’t expect/demand that you will be accommodated.
Japan Today (in today’s issue) says, “90% of foreign residents in Japan say they need more public support with living conditions, survey finds
https://www.therisingwasabi.com/new-law-states-govt-responsible-for-teaching-stroke-order-to-foreigners/
Are we not doing phrasing?
So tourists who need medical care are shit out of luck?
Sounds like a plan!
When I travel overseas, I buy a med-evac insurance policy that will get me from literally anywhere on the planet back to my hospital. As an English speaker, my odds of getting medical personnel who speak my language are probably pretty good anyway, but the idea that you should be able to travel to a foreign country and expect/demand that the locals speak your language and accommodate your ignorance of their language is the height of arrogance.
Travel has some risk. If you don’t speak the language, well, you’re going to struggle in a lot of situations. I don’t see why medical care should be any different.
How much longer is that going to be an issue? We can’t be that far away from babel fish universal translators.
In the 80 languages the feds require us to have translators for? Well, eventually, sure. I’ve seen products advertised that are supposed to do real-time translation, but I am skeptical. Eventually, like I said, sure.
Even so, outside of specific transactions/being a tourist, language shapes thought, culture. The quality of translation will always lag the quaIity of communications between reasonably fluent speakers. Not knowing the local language pretty well will always, in my mind, be a barrier to full assimilation and participation in your new community.
We are very, very far away from acceptable machine translation. Basically, AI-based universal translating is one sign of the Singularity.
You’re the expert, I guess I put too much faith in movies.
Hofstadter is the expert. I’m just a tyro who managed to land a good gig.
tyro?
Best guess, 5 years for general conversations. A little more for specialized communications (possibly like doctor-patient communications.)
What are you basing your guess from?
Profesional experience adjacnet to AI research. Somewhere between Most and All high-powered language translation research is done on conversational communications (accademic language translation is not high-powered.)
There are other corpuses of communication ripe to be trained on, but thus-far no market reason to do so. I expect that to change sooner rather than later because erryone want to train their telemetry on more data, and the final fronteinr of *that* is non-conversational natural language (I’m sure a linguist you must hate the term natural language).
Current language translation is “good enough” because it is a product of market forces. Market forces are evolutionary. All evolutionary generation produces “good enough” resultsm, not great results. (E.g. human bodies work well enough, but we get back pain because we only adapated to bipedial locomation well enough. Child birth is horrifically painful and risky but works well enough. We are particularly suseptable to chocking but it works well enough.) In the same way, your phone’s translation works well enough because that’s all that’s needed.
Once organizations need better translation, more resources can and will be thrown at it. And in my totally unsupportable opinion formed via ~20 years of experience, there is fruit there to be plucked once industry throws those resources.
I too have worked adjacent to AI and NLP, (with Icelanders!) but my evaluation on the state of the field is much different. I disagree that our current state of machine translation is “good enough”. Google Translate is the punchline of 100 memes. Not to mention, that as I’m sure you know, that Google Translate “cheats” through crowdsourcing translations of words and phrases – and it still sucks.
If you haven’t read the Hofstadter essay I linked upthread, I highly recommend it. Any sort of translation that is going to be worth a damn, (particularly in domains with a lexicon as highly specific and uncommon as medicine) is going to require AI to have a much better grasp of pragmatics. And at that point, Hofstadter, argues we will have reached truly sentient AI, so the accuracy of machine translation will be the least of our concerns.
I think much of NLP is hobbled by its understandably close relationship with Chomskyian generative linguistics as a paradigm. If I were a computer programmer, I would like to hear that language is a system of rules that only generates from a particular language’s lexicon, well-formed combinations of words in a particular language. To be honest, compared to the recent advancements in cognitive linguistics, Chomsky’s Minimalist program is dead, in my opinion.
From the perspective of NLP, a cognitive linguistics/construction grammar approach is not impossible, but it is more difficult than a generative approach and well, we’re just not there yet, and won’t be for a while because it will require simulating cognition as opposed to mere computation using the merge and move-alpha functions.
I think we have different ideas of what “good enough” means. I mean it as in good enough to work for whatever product or service it is being tied to the translation.
But Hoftadter is being a bit too coy by half here. He knows exactly where a DNN is going to trip up, and his simple, clear his-and-her example is not nearly as understandable as he asserts. At least its not for me (note – I’m dyslexic). I had to read it three times to really understand it.
But even then, I generally agree. A limitation of DNN based translation is a lack of context. but this lack of context isn’t some inherant flaw in AI or even DNN. Its just the way this particular translation service is implemented.
In this example of a medical xlation service, there is the current technology:
A patient walks into a doctor office (possibly with their associated personalized language model and vocalization model) and starts to describe their symptoms. A generalized DNN tries to xlate her description, and does a poor job of it.
But here’s what we could have, just off the top of my head:
The same patient walks into a doctors office (possibly with their associated personalized language model and vocalization model). The patient stops by a kiosk where some rudimentary intake is performed in their language, which collects the same kinds of questions my urgent care kios asks (e.g, why are you here today, how long have your symptoms been in place, etc.)
Then, the patient’s personalized language model is merged with a domain-specific medical model that is trained on correlations of symptoms and diseases as well as a domain-specific language model that is trained on historical communications between patients with the same symptom profile and doctors.
In such a case, the model does have a lot of information about context, and will be able to incorporate that into the translation. This type of intermediate state determination, contrary to what Hoff is saying, absolutely does happen. Every internal neuron represents *some* intermediate state. We just don’t understand it in a Deep application of AI, and they are different than what we as humans generate.
If and when those intermediate states become important (as in the case of a medical conversation) there is not reason we have to stay in a Deep application. Feature engineering done on a large scale, by domain experts, with the kind of manpower that a multinational buisness can bring to bear, could do this.
And like all AI, as soon as its done, there will be people out there ready to tell us that this isn’t “real” understanding or not “real” intelegence.
But I’m just an engineer, so I don’t care if it’s “real.” I just care if it will work.
Also, Clarke’s first law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Yeah. I don’t think the Hof is saying that it is impossible. He is clearly saying that it is possible, but that we are nowhere near as close as tech evangelists claim we are. I see your point about it just needing to “work”, but in order to get doctors to feel comfortable communicating using it, it needs to work very well. Well enough that they will feel comfortable prescribing treatments that they are held legally liable for.
And speaking of generativists, if I recall correctly, Pinker came down hard on statistical language acquisition theories. I do believe it is a fruitful area to pursue when developing AI machine translation. Again, contrary to Pinker, if we accept that the language of thought is, in fact, language, an AI that can translate to the level acceptable enough for what we are talking about is getting close to the Holy Grail.
It’s not a matter of expectation, it’s a matter of an institution accommodating its clients out of profit motive. Bumrungrad got my money because they went out of their way to accommodate me.
Because the stakes are pretty damn high? Besides, it is nonsense to require fluency for a tourist who is visit a country for say, 2 weeks. Don’t be silly.
Bumrungrad got my money because they went out of their way to accommodate me.
Sounds like a good business decision. Good for them. My beef is two-fold:
(1) The government mandating translation services (at our expense, naturally). We’d have some regardless (business decision), but not 80 languages. Probably more like a dozen.
(2) People expecting/demanding that their ignorance or lack of planning be accommodated.
Do you have any issue with people who travel to a place where they don’t speak the language, and expect or demand that the locals accommodate them?
Because that’s pretty much the “Ugly American” stereotype.
I agree that the government shouldn’t mandate the use of translation services. Though, with health care being what it is, in the scenario that you have someone who only speaks Amharic comes into your ER, are you saying that you wouldn’t avail yourself of phone translation service and risk the liability that comes from an inability to communicate? Phone translation services are an easy fix and relatively inexpensive; I don’t see what the big whoop is.
Demanding, no. But I wouldn’t go anywhere that I felt there was no expectation to accommodate guests. Particularly in those industries that are part of or allied with tourism and hospitality.
but how do you know he speaks Amharic and not something else?
Typically, the patient is provided a list of “I speak “x”” in the various scripts offered and he or she points.
I lived in the NL for several years and only speak basic Dutch. The problem there is that almost everyone speaks such high level English that there is no real patience for waiting for foreigners to spit out what they want to say. You really need to be self motivated. I also spent a couple years traveling and working in South America and speak Spanish well and Portuguese very well. But in Brazil you really had no choice but to learn the language. Brazilians were also pretty patient with your attempts to speak it. That and I had a few young women who were very willing to help you learn the native tongue.
young women who were very willing to help you learn the native tongue
A very sound pedagogical method.
Nothing motivates like the desire for poon
Heh, heh. Word.
If you stick with you, you too can become a cunning linguist!
*stick with it
This sort of thing comes up here in NYC all the time. Like two-family houses in Queens will have a couple dozen unrelated Guatemalans living there, four or five cars parked in the front yard, etc. The neighbors tend to object to that.
We’ve got some cases of that. Last I heard, there was a proposal to make it illegal to have more than one household per housing unit or something like that to crack down on the flophouses, especially as some of them are in fairly decent areas. The wording was such that the number of lessees couldn’t exceed the number of bedrooms, counting couples as one pair rather than two people. Then someone was like, “Well, what about AirBnB?” so they had to change the wording to accommodate short-term rentals, which are also really big here during Commissioning Week or any of the boat shows, and I think it eventually just got edited to death and nothing came of it.
Fuck, I spent years living in shitty houses with bunch of friends while we were going to school that had people living everywhere. The house was someplace you could grab some sleep and leave your shit, but it was way too crowded to just hang out in.
At one place we had 10 guys living in a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house. I lived in the basement in what was supposed to be a utility room in a bunk bed with another guy. Frost formed on the walls in the winter, but it was the quietest place in the house. It wasn’t pretty, but it was dirt cheap.
It also depends on the occupants. Our house was jam packed, but we were pretty quiet and there was a parking lot across the street we could park at, so we were pretty good neighbors.
My first place was a crappy house with arguably one bedroom if you didn’t count the semi-finished attic. We fit three guys and a rotating cast of girlfriends/drunk buddies in there for about a year. I turned the living room into my bedroom. We drank like fish and had people over to all hours, but we were also on the very edge of a residential neighborhood and right next to a busy street, so it wasn’t like we were the ones keeping the property values down.
I’m not a fan of telling people what they can do with their property. On the other hand, especially now that I own a house I’m going to try to sell in a few years, I totally get not wanting a bunch of transients and degenerates blowing out a rental house two doors down from me. Like you say, it depends on the occupants.
You’d be surprised. They managed to find room for New Orleans.
for how long? Schools for all the children?
Living people are less “immigrants” and more “food shipments.”
If the resident population where they are immigrating to is undead
Woot! My first Gilmore!
But a more correct response: 40,000 of them stayed permanently. I don’t know how long the other quarter mil stayed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/25/new-orleans-west-houston-hurricane-katrina
Or fine if the population of LA would move to Austin
I wish……
To be fair, Texans are very good at stacking things and organizing them to take up less space.
Is immigration the next abortion issue? For a long time I was an Open Borders kind of guy, as long as it was a reciprocal arrangement. Jose can come here, Joe can go to Mexico. Problems seem to arise because few Joes wanted to go to Mexico permanently . Seeing the US being flooded with new arrivals from everywhere has changed my mind a lot. I live in an area that doesn’t get much immigrant visibility (yet) but there are some MN towns where there are larger numbers.
I am more racially/ethnically conscious than I was even 30 years ago. Its a little strange, my father was an immigrant some 100 years plus ago, my wife and in-laws are all immigrants. They all assimilated fairly well, even as they (we) eat a lot of food with chopsticks. The youngest generation are totally hamburger eating Americans.
Needing a passport to go to Canada seems totally ridiculous, not being allowed to be productive as a non-citizen is contrary to human behavior, IMHO.
It’s not the next abortion issue. Immigration has a lot more subtlety and room for compromise. Abortion is basically two camps: Either you think a fetus is a baby, or you don’t.
Except most people don’t hold to either viewpoint. Most people are ok with legalized first trimester abortion, are not ok with legalized second trimester abortion, and 70% are not ok with third. It’s way more lnuanced than either extreme will admit.
Right. TOK’s break down is the case for anyone that spends 45 seconds thinking hard about the issue. But Urthona, you are right, thinking hard for 45 seconds is beyond the capabilities of most people.
Well I was never fully open borders, but as I said I am thinking of something like a compromise. And Europe has the potential of much more trouble than the US. More welfare state closer to areas that would send millions of complete unskilled and mostly illiterate immigrants, a rather dumb multicultural policy of segregating such immigrants.I am wary of open borders to be honest.
i can live with most of your suggestions. With the exception of the points system, it was very similar to what my family experienced when they came to the US.
Great article!
o/t – I laughed
I largely agree, although I’m torn on the part about subjecting particular groups to additional scrutiny. With regard to specific bad actors, such as terrorists, they’re such a small percentage of whatever demographic that I don’t see a blanket policy as especially effective. With regard to people coming here and establishing communities that aren’t interested in integrating into the larger culture, that, too, doesn’t bother me until they attempt to project their culture beyond those communities to the detriment of others. It’s the whole, “Don’t flee to a Red state and then turn it Blue” type of thing.
I think open borders, to the extent that we had them in the US, worked well during a period of time when we had a frontier. Immigrants moved west, and it didn’t matter that they might not speak English particularly well or that they had funny ideas about religion or whatever because there was nobody there to bother or be bothered by. Those were communities in the process of defining themselves, so there wasn’t much to disrupt or displace. And yes, reformers and Progressives and others complained about the conditions of the immigrant poor in the 19th century, especially towards the latter half. The discussion doesn’t seem out of place with what you hear today. One side bemoans the exploitation of poor immigrant workers forced to live in squalor, the other warns of foreign hordes of questionable moral character overwhelming working class citizens, taking their jobs and running roughshod over local communities. Today it’s the “Mexicans”, back then it was the Irish, the eastern Europeans, etc.
I am also torn.
With regard to people coming here and establishing communities that aren’t interested in integrating into the larger culture, that, too, doesn’t bother me until they attempt to project their culture beyond those communities to the detriment of others.
I don’t see how they would not unless they never live the community.
But, maybe not as exaggerated as in the right wing blogs, but serious shit like high crime, rape gangs and genital mutilation and arranged marriages happen, and less serious shit like petty theft littering and destruction of property. I use scare quotes for multiculturalism because it is not about culture in the sense of music food dress etc. It goes way beyond.
The left fetishizes “multi-culti” because it leads to bigger government and more power for the left. They don’t give a shit about crime, food, or any of that other stuff.
Well, there’s a difference between, say, coming here and saying, “Hey, try some of this goat, it’s an old family recipe!” and “Hey, if your daughter wears a tanktop in public I’m going to throw acid at her and call her a whore!” I’m good with the former, not good with the latter.
My great grandparents crossed the pond from Italy in 1911 and 1913. They never spoke the best English, but they would only speak Italian to each other. They spoke English to their children because they wanted them to be “real American children”. My grandfather never learned more than a little rudimentary Italian as a result. Sure, they still ate polenta all the time and Nonnu made his grappa and cherry brandy like in the old country, but there was never any question about assimilating.
Cherry brandy…..hmmm. Got any of that kirschwasser, do you?
That’s for the girls. You want the grappa.
Are we related?!? My G-Grandfather used to read the dictionary after dinner because he was so committed to learning.
Today its Central Americans, the Mexis are fine,
I used the quotes because my Texas in-laws consider anyone migrating north who doesn’t look like Ricardo Montalban or Jessica Alba to be a Mexican. I have heard the phrase, “El Salvadoran Mexican” before. It cracks me up, but my wife dies of shame.
In rural flyover country even a white American that moves in is looked at a little suspiciously.
At the local cafe a newbie asked to join the the coffee table of the bib overall wearing guys. He was welcomed and introductions were made, etc. As time went by every time the new guy tried to say something he was cut off by one of the others. Finally, after a few weeks he asked “When do I get to speak?” He was looked at in horror and the guy sitting next to him said “I’ve been here for four years and my turn hasn’t come up yet”.
While that may be a little exaggeration its easy to understand why some groups stick together and don’t/can’t assimilate easily.
With regard to people coming here and establishing communities that aren’t interested in integrating into the larger culture, that, too, doesn’t bother me until they attempt to project their culture beyond those communities to the detriment of others. It’s the whole, “Don’t flee to a Red state and then turn it Blue” type of thing.
This. I look at the Amish as a counterexample to the forced integration talking point. The Amish are holed up in their culturally distinct enclaves, are skeptical of outsiders, and tend to carry their distinctiveness through generations more successfully than immigrant cultures. The only thing they aren’t? Rampant statists who vote uniformly to import their cultural mores into law.
I think open borders, to the extent that we had them in the US, worked well during a period of time when we had a frontier.
Yup, the Frontier closing was one of the things that kicked off the decline of the US. When you can’t escape the busybodies, they accumulate power at an accelerated pace.
the amish are probably good neighbors. fundamentalist Muslims less so. Immigrants to not come to forms Amish like communities. SO while yes, a community doing their thins is no issue (unless they break the NAP), this is not that possible in high density urban environments
I live in a heavily Muslim neighborhood in NYC. The difference between here and same in Europe is that there are also plenty of non-Muslims mixed in & everyone gets along more or less. There are no rape gangs or bomb labs in basements that I’m aware of. I can walk into any store with squiggle-writing over the door and expect to be dealt with in English. Their kids are the same brats as any “native” kid. Etc.
In short, it’s workable under the right conditions.
Romania also has plenty of Muslims that cause no trouble. The Turk/Tatar minority has lived here long, but Lebanese Syrians Arabs etc also. It greatly depends on the Muslim and the local culture they create. In England and France that did not go well.
you rarely to never see full hijab in Romania
I see it every day here. Mostly older gals. Nobody cares.
If our nation evolved on the borders of the Ottoman Empire, we’d be more like Romania in that respect.
i dislike it myself but would not ban it or anything
See it with increasing frequency around here. It was almost unheard of 15 or so years ago. Even seen a handful of full-on niqabs. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that unsettling. There is no place in the world that I’d like to import to my neighborhood where that thing is common .
God, that last sentence was really poorly put together. Sorry!
Ehhh… not really. Of course, it also depends on the Amish community you’re by. I’ve heard lots of anecdotal tales of petty theft from people who live near the Amish communities, as well as getting upset at the buggies taking up the road (compare that to a cyclist). Then you have the difference between the Amish and the Mennonites.
The food and wood working is quite good though.
“The food and wood working is quite good though.”
As are the desserts.
Desserts qualify as food.
Duh! I have no idea what I thought i read when I posted that. I blame insufficient caffeine and work-related PTSD.
Amish Paradise
Hostile Omish!
With live butter churning action!
Mennonite food is pretty good also. Haven’t check out the woodworking, but they put up nice well made houses for themselves.
The Amish are an excellent example of what I’m talking about in one sense. They’ve got their communities, they do their thing, they follow the laws, and they don’t try to force non-Amish to wear ankle-length skirts and ride in buggies. I’d argue the other end of that is nearly every immigrant community, sooner or later, in the United States. Italians moved into Italian communities with little to no grasp of English and maintained their own distinct culture, but they also integrated into the larger American culture. As that community acclimated, the larger culture adopted some of its superficial aspects and accepted its more particular or fundamental aspects as simply a part of the fabric of American society. The fewer things an immigrant culture has in common with American culture the longer and more difficult the transition, but it seems to always happen regardless.
I’m on board with all of this, but I’m a little reticent because America in 2019 seems to have a strong anti-integration faction that didn’t exist 100 years ago, and the “waves” seem to be a lot longer. There has been, what, 60 years of Mexican immigrants vs ~10 years of [Pick random Catholic European country].
I worry that this will make integration harder. I hope I’m wrong, but I worry about this.
And the anti-integration thing seems to be country-of-origin specific. I don’t see a strong push against Indians integrating, and frankly if it wasn’t for their skin color you’d never know if most of my Indian frieds are right-off-the-boat or 4th generation Americans.
>The only thing they aren’t? Rampant statists
Oh yes they are, they just don’t care about the English government.
You had me at “cocaine vending machines”.
Do you perhaps have a newsletter that I may subscribe to ?
1) Tall Fences. Attempting to skirt the system is disqualifying.
2) Wide Gates. No criminals. No contagious diseases. Come on in.
3) Work or die.
Three will be the hardest to implement.
4. don’t start shit
5. . . .
6. Profit!
The problem is a chunk of this country, and an even larger chunk of the political world doesn’t agree with #1, 2, or 3.
Paging SugarFree…
Stephanie Grisham, a top aide to first lady Melania Trump, has been picked to replace Sarah Sanders as White House press secretary, the first lady announced Tuesday.
Grisham, who developed a reputation as a fierce defender of the first lady during her tenure as spokeswoman, will also become the White House communications director.
“I am pleased to announce @StephGrisham45 will be the next @PressSec & Comms Director!” the first lady tweeted. “She has been with us since 2015 – @potus & I can think of no better person to serve the Administration & our country. Excited to have Stephanie working for both sides of the @WhiteHouse.”
Would.
Pie II
Pie II, Hat and Hair Boogaloo?
You know, for a rapey, pussy grabbing mysoginist, Two-Scoops sure employs a lot of chicks.
Targets of opportunity.
Looks high-maintenance but sure.
Definitely would. Kind of strange in that the first picture makes her look a little like if Pie lost 50 pounds and got her strabismus fixed.
“Young Pie”
She looks like if Pippa Middleton drank a lot more.
*perks up*
You know, for the kids
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/62019-yeet-cannon-ar-15-lower.jpg
Yanno, if Hi-Point doesn’t sell vast quantities of the YC-9, I will be disappointed in the gun community.
Yeah, I’m not buying a Hi-Point. Especially given the prices I’m seeing on S&Ws.
ArghH!H At least today is the last day of the our A3 meeting.
Carry on! /hiding underneath the conference room table, busy dodging the three letter acronyms being tossed my way
But are you walking away from the meeting with action items, or will you need to touch base later in order to have a touch point call so everyone can get in sync?
*thanks lucky stars that stuff doesn’t apply to Legal*
*glares menacingly*
In my experience, legal is where meaningless jargon comes to die.
Mostly, we don’t want meaningless operational jargon polluting the gene pool of our meaningless legal jargon.
You don’t synergize ipso facto conclusions in order to socialize the section 114(b) analytics with the internal customers?
I’m jealous?
The last “?” should be a “.”
*Goes to put head in a bucket of water*
*Thinks better of it*
*Puts trshmnstr’s head in the bucket instead*
*dies peacefully, knowing that it is less painful to drown than to sit through another meeting about crowdsourcing expertise from the feature set stakeholders*
This contract has been litigated 100s of time and we’ve always prevailed.
There is zero reason to change it from Aramaic to actual readable English despite the pleas from our salespeople and our customers.
It’s a tall ask Nephilium, but I’m sure you’ll be able to deliver an actionable solution.
How can you even come up with a list of action items if you haven’t had a work shop with all the relevant stakeholders?
Time for a SWOT analysis!
Immigration: Don’t really care that much honestly. Would like to see the Feds come up off all that land they own out West.
OT: Pure evil.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/06/24/pain-patients-left-anguish-doctors-who-fear-opioid-addiction/1379636001/
1) Its a travisty that these people are trapped in a medical system that still follows the mechanistic view of pain.
2) If you are going to stick to the mechanistic view of pain, as a doctor, you can’t follow these laws without breaking the Hypocatic Oath. They are mutually exclusive.
Great example of over-reacting and top-down decision-making. I believe we absolutely have, and had, an opioid problem created by overuse of time-release opioids. I also believe that pain, being subjective, cannot be managed by one-size-fits-all, whether the one size is the “all oxy all the time” approach pushed by the drug companies, or the “no pills for you” over-reaction.
Are you familiar with the biopsychosocial model of pain?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17592957
We’re bringing more “integrative” pain management into our pain clinic. Some med management, some procedures (injections), some counseling. Our director of pain management views opioids as a last resort. Doesn’t rule them out, but doesn’t lead with a bottle of oxy either just to get you out of his office.
We’re also cutting back on discharge prescriptions – after most surgeries, you shouldn’t need more than maybe 5 days – if you do, there’s probably something wrong (well, other than recently having been sliced open).
Cool. After a lifetime of chronic pain due to obesity, I’ve drunk the biopsychosocial Kool-Aid. Its literally life-changing for me.
Is it a time-release opioid problem, though, or a hillbillies grinding up the pills to defeat the time-release mechanism problem?
The first. Same problem as in mental health. Why go to all the trouble of laboriously educating and working with the patient when you can just write them a script that they say they want anyway?
Fuck the scum in the article still defending their actions. Greatest public health crisis in modern history my ass. Public health officials are worrying about pain medication, tobacco use, gun ownership, and all manner of things that have zero to do with public health while ignoring the spread of contagious diseases due largely to unsanitary conditions. The sort of contagious diseases that were all but wiped out until recently.
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Prominent legal mind.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday called into question the nation’s immigration laws, asking “What is the point?” of tracking down fugitives ordered out of the country?
———
She described the plan for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, delayed two weeks, as something animals would do.
“It’s so appalling, it’s outside the circle of human behavior, kicking down doors, splitting up families,” she said.
Then she added, “In terms of interior enforcement, what is the purpose? What is the point?”
ICE officials said that their plan is to track down the 97% of illegals who have refused to obey court orders issued in February to leave the country. ICE had offered each one legal help and a 30-day pass, but that time has come and gone.
Pelosi also suggested the immigrants have guaranteed rights to the U.S. She said, “You cannot be ignoring the rights of immigrants to our country.”
“We just pass laws. We don’t care what happens after that.”
“It’s so appalling, it’s outside the circle of human behavior, kicking down doors, splitting up families,” she said.
Now do the drug war.
“In terms of interior enforcement, what is the purpose? What is the point?”
To enforce laws that haven’t been updated since before you entered menopause. I am sure that she has been shocked to find out that the president’s job is to enforce the laws passed by congress in the legislative process. But I guess that wasn’t a problem before bad orange man.
To be fair, it is worthy to question whether paramilitary raids are necessary to enforce a misdemeanor.
Sure, the first violation is a misdemeanor, but the penalty is deportation. If someone won’t leave, how do you evict them without the use of force? I’m setting aside the issue of whether the law is just or effective, mind you.
The penalty of deportation is only after an immigration judge hears their case and decides not to issue a waiver.
Of course, that’s how it’s supposed to work, but CBP have been abusing their powers of expedited removal and conveniently placing all unauthorized immigrants on the southern border under expedited removal
since 2016 thanks to the hardline Trump administration’s directivesince 2005 thanks to Jeff Flake and John McCain pushing for the expansion of Operation Streamline.the whole point is you bastards need to get rid of visas for Romanians
LOL. I was wondering if that was the angle.
I will write a letter of recommendation for you. I suspect your skills would be more useful in Texas or Cali. I’d rather you end up in a nice Chicago neighborhood, if you prefer city life. You might not mind a nice suburb like Naperville.
Semi-OT: story of first skyjacking in the USSR (1970): http://news.ku.edu/2019/06/10/first-soviet-hijacking-triggers-insights-cold-war-boundaries
I don’t get the hard-on some folks have for a “merit-based” points system over family reunification. At least family relationships are a concrete criterion, merit points are inherently arbitrary and up to the fiat of some bureaucrat.
But not his BMW.
My gaze is so narrowed, I’m typing this with my eyes closed.
Either way, you’re gonna be in the shop a whole lot.
I like neither. Or both. Whatever you would call a flexible system of sponsorhip. Family can sponsor a relative by promising to support the immigrant for a while, similar to what we already have. A buisness can sponsor a worker by showing proof of employment. A school can sponsor a student by showing that they’ve paying tuition and can cover room and board or are being funded by private grants. An individual can self-sponsor by putting up colatoral or escrow. Private, charitable organizations like Churchs etc could do that.
The sponsored immigrant thus demonstrates “merit” of some time, to someone, enough for them to put their money where their mouth is. That feels both nessisary and sufficient to me.
i am not fully for points systems ideologically, i am thinking of something palatable to both immigration and non immigration crowds
i do appreciate in a points system that it can be based somewhat on skill and not of I happen to have family there
the issue with reunification is you have no control on who comes which would not sit well with many
Why should the drooling, sloped-browed, knuckled-dragging mob have a say on whether or not my putative step-child lives with me or not?
Why should the people who live in a country have any say at all on who moves in?
because the premise of the article is based on that duh
Define “tolerable level” and tolerable to whom?
eh I sort of walked back on that one in the comments
It is a fair question. Having seen inside the sausage factory, though, I was just pointing out the complexities of defining language proficiency that are not always evident to the layman. Language proficiency is domain-specific, one could be fairly fluent conversationally, but lag far behind when it comes to academic or professional language. The language proficiency you need to take a college-level course is different than the language proficiency you need to interact with customers at a shop. One has to decide not only what level of language proficiency is desired, but in what contexts (as well as what modalities – do we care if they can’t read or write?, etc.)
So much this! I work with lots of English as a second language professionals. I’m quite impressed with their ability to work professionally. I’d be utterly lost professionally in Japanese, but could easily work in a retail store.
Sure, master いらっしゃいませ, 45 degree bows, wear either a suit or some goofy smock, and you’re pretty much already there.
For retail work in Japan I’d better start learning Mandarin.
Also applies to retail in Wien.
“tolerable level”
Conduct common consumer transactions in the public sphere.
Ok, but why would my hypothetical wife need to do that if she’s going to be a housewife? Or grandpa and grandma, who are also just going to stay home? Or my 5-year-old stepchild?
housewife – sexist much? you need a wife who goes out and works and supports you
I think that’s called “human trafficking”.
It ain’t easy.
Just sayin’.
I guess shut-ins can survive with no capability to speak the local tongue.
Seems like an unpleasant life to me. But different strokes for different folks.
It’s not how I would want to live, but I’ve seen it several times. A school buddy’s grandmom still only spoke Polish after 20 years here. My work colleague’s parents still only speak Portuguese after coming here more than 40 years ago. In both cases, they were able to survive this way because they moved to towns in New England during with high populations of their ethnic group.
“staying at home” is code for “trafficked sex worker.”
That’s about where I am at with Spanish and there is no way I am getting hired in Mexico in a job similar to what I do here.
To show mastery of a language, you should be able to:
1) Order a beer
2) Ask where the bathroom is
3) Call someone an asshole
4) Say “Thank you”, “please” and “excuse me”
I think everything else is just gravy and show boating your big vocabulary.
I think pick up lines need to be included as well.
pick up a drunk chick in a bar
200+lb. drunk gal?
Woo hoo!
*tosses JLPT N5 book into trash can*
That is pretty much the list of phrases I can manage (and the order I learn them in).
When I was in Korea for Team Spirit 88, we would get liberty and catch a bus from the base into town. Along the way we’d pick up a ton of normal Korean workers from factories. The base was the end of the line, so we could always get the back of the bus. As we went into town we’d work on the Korean we had learned that day from the ROK Marines.
Of course those words were almost all dirty curse words. Being nice men, we didn’t want to offend any of the natives, so we would keep our voices way down when we said the English curse words. Since we were learning, we made sure to clearly and loudly enunciate the Korean words.
So it ended up with us in the back whispering “OK, kiss my ass is … POPO KINDINGI, retard is … PABOYA”
It took us several trips before we figured out why were always getting nervous looks from the Koreans. “Dude, we are doing it backwards!” I think we laughed for about 20 minutes straight when we finally saw the light.
Hah! One of my squad leaders when I was a wet behind the ears young hamhock went to Team Spirit 88. He had some… interesting tales to tell.
The only Spanish I know I learned in 10 grade spanish class. Oral exam, teacher asks one of the students “You are in a cab, you pay, but the cabby says you need to pay more or else he won’t let you out. What do you say.”
Student, deadpaned face, eyes bulging out “Yo como a tus hijos por mi comida.”
That guy got an A.
Our German teacher had German-only days when I was in tenth grade. One of my friends walked in late and she asked him in German why he was late. He responded in English so she sent him out and told him to come back in again. Asked him the same question, he responded, “Sprechen sie English?” That was the end of the class for about 10 minutes.
Interesting. The psycho in my high school Spanish class also did particularly well.
Let me ride on over here on my unicorn and provide the solution to cold fusion.
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/can-trump-actually-win-the-black-vote/
Go home Roger, you’re drunk.
I think you are being overly pessimistic. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Trump can go to Watts.
Watts is more Latin than black these days, though.
#Lexit
Wouldn’t that be #Blaxit?
Trump only needs to increase his draw of the black vote by a few percentage points to ensure re-election.
True or black turnout needs to be depressed due to lack of motivation to vote for the top of the ticket. The Democratic coalition now entirely hinges on black turnout since they have shed so many white voters.
He doesn’t have to win the black vote. He can really fuck up the system if he gets a sizable amount of them. 30%? I don’t know what the number is, but if a big chunk of black people vote for him it does two things: a) takes votes away from his opponent and b) normalizes the idea of voting GOP in the hood. B is probably a bigger deal in the long term.
He could do it if he legalized weed and started pardoning anyone in prison that was there on bs drug charges.
I think this is probably true. On average, the Dems get what, about 85-90% of black voters? If that dropped down to even 75%, they’d be in serious trouble.
Probably although, as always, it would depend where.
I was unaware that was a pun.
*narrows gaze, picks up broom*
It is too often that people move to a place and want to keep their existing culture and behavior intact, without adapting to the new place. This cannot always work. This is significantly more important for people moving from a low prosperity country to a high prosperity one. Just like the great strings of bad luck which derailed socialist policies, many of these people do not make a link between the difference in culture and the difference in prosperity. They want to move to a new place and keep doing what wrecked the first one.
I think there’s a critical mass of people in an enclave that allows this to persist for any length of time. The Euros have done a dandy job of making sure a lot of their new immigrants are boxed up in enclaves where their crap cultures can hang on. Of course, people also naturally are drawn to communities where they share language and culture, so enclaves are also self-forming as well and unavoidable.
e.g., the history of New York City.
NYC has show the key is that the various groups fight each other so that they are too preoccupied to go after the the elites.
I’ve always found it fascinating that the Irish and the Italians fought so much. Both groups were marginalized and Roman Catholic, but historically no love for each other.
No wonder I’ve always hated myself – dad’s family is Italian, mom’s family is Irish
Old country rivalries die hard and competition for jobs and political clout within the new country further foments divisions. But, it’s all in good fun. Where I grew-up the Irish hated the Italians and the Italians hated the Poles. And the Poles hated the Mexicans. Every single one of them were Roman Catholic, but they all had their own churches where only their ethnic religious festivals were celebrated. And if any priest tried to foster cross-cultural Catholic solidarity (as they often tried), he’d be ridiculed by the parishioners.
I think it’s because members of underclasses in America (and likely elsewhere) see people above them with power and believe that one day they can take their place. They see other groups in their same class as rivals, not allies.
I think it’s because members of underclasses in America (and likely elsewhere) see people above them with power and believe that one day they can take their place.
And they’ve historically been mostly right about that.
The old joke I heard growing up in NYC is that the Irish hated the Italians when they came here, and then they started to marry them. And then the Italians hated the Jews when they came, but then they started to marry them.
Plus, some laws like prohibitions on employment, couldnt have been designed to intentionally do more to destroy whatever healthy civil institutions the immigrants might be bringing with them…
Ghettoization is good. So long as the ghetto remains a ghetto. It allows for a community where immigrants can learn about their new country with people that they are more familiar with. It allows immigrants to not feel isolated and strange within a new foreign country. No one wants to stay in an ethnic ghetto past a couple of generations. I have seen ethnic ghettos grow and fall. They don’t last that long- especially not anymore.
Of course, people also naturally are drawn to communities where they share language and culture, so enclaves are also self-forming as well and unavoidable.
I think that’s true on the short-term. But, the natural evolution, absent intervention to prevent it, is for that to dissipate within a generation or two. Adopting the majority language and culture just has too many advantages to lose out. Within a generation or, at most two, the people who hold on to their original culture used to get written off as “greenhorns”.
My grandpa came to the US to escape the Mounties in Canada. When gramps was 11, his father abandoned the family (he has 7 younger siblings), so he started poaching. He would go out in the woods and come back with meat and furs that he sold to traders who weren’t too nosy about where he got it.
The Mounties were trying to catch him and gramps got a letter saying that because one of his relatives had once had a homestead in South Dakota territory he had six months to either move back to the US or renounce his citizenship. So Gramps gave his traps and rifle to the next oldest boy in the family and moved to South Dakota.
He used to always brag about how the Mounties didn’t always get their man and he was proof of it.
I hold a very negative view of Islam. It’s a totalitarian proselytizing ideology that hasn’t given me many reasons to believe that its adherents, when they get power, will leave me alone. Individual Muslims can assimilate really well but as soon as their numbers reach a certain threshold they will push for the policies that are often at odds with the customs and mores of the host country. My views are close to the ones held by Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated by a pro-Muslim leftist. I’m in favor of some sort of ban on Muslim immigration.
The same sentiments were echoed about the papists (and kind of still are) and now there are six of them on the Supreme Court. But, someday they will impose cannon law on us all!
meh. the fact that X was said of Y does not mean it does not apply to Z
Why do you suppose Dearborn, MI doesn’t see grooming gangs and regular riots like most of Europe does?
Living in Michigan is medically equivelant to a steady drip of Diazepam…
Different patterns of immigration probably. I dont think overall the same type of muslims go to the us as europe. But the kind thay come to europe are a lot more.
And besides all that there sre differences between islam and christianity
You cannot expect identical outcomes in different countries on different continents. Michigan and England have substantially different cultures: just think of gun rights. Also, many Arabs in Dearborn are actually Christians.
And that’s the point. The Muslim is a menace in Europe, because Europe is a continent with a rigid blood and soil method of identifying who is “French” (as an example) and who is not. If you can never be accepted into your new home country then you tend to fall back on the only identity that you have and become more antagonistic toward the new country in which you live.
The mere fact that many Arab Christians live among Arab Muslims in Dearborn further bolsters the case. In the Middle East these communities are antagonistic toward one another. In the US they have no problem neighboring one another.
But, whatever, I’ve said this many times on here. I get that I might be in the minority, but I don’t fear Muslim immigration. I can fully understand why, if I were gay, I would be very suspicious of Muslim immigration. Or, if I were a woman, why I might be fearful of Muslim immigration. I don’t fault anyone for holding the opposing view.
Just know that I am not presenting this case because I am some “muh..diversity is strength” virtue signaling jackass. I just think that the data shows that the US does a good job with immigrants and I don’t see why the Muslim would be any different from the Catholic or the Hindu or the Sikh.
Right, that’s why our newly elected Muslim Congresswomen are so rabidly pro-American. Oh, wait…
Neither Hinduism nor Sikhism is a proselytizing religion. Just because of that they leave non-believers alone. Catholicism lost its vigor long time ago.
You argument was about a general ban against Muslim immigrants and then your example of them being dangerous are two individual examples. Are we arguing in the whole or anecdotally?
And the notion that proselytization should be a negative against a faith would mean that Evangelicals should also be excluded from immigrating here. Further, Catholics from Africa and South America are not as house trained as the American Catholic. They most definitely proselytize. Granted, that Catholic proselytization is primarily through charity work.
I’m not ready to shred the First Amendment because of the Muslim. France disfavors immigrants based on religiosity and forbids prostelizying, essentially, and they don’t have a great relationship among their religious minorities.
If we’re talking about grrizzly’s specific concerns, then African Evangelicals should be banned from coming here as well.
The First Amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners. Even today Communists are strongly disfavored from immigrating into the US. Nobody seems to be bothered by that. I fail to see how disfavoring Muslims would be any different.
“The same sentiments were echoed about the papists (and kind of still are) and now there are six of them on the Supreme Court.”
SEE WE WERE RIT TO BE AFEARD A THEM
*laughs in Latin*
Would you rather they impose trebuchet law?
Arquebus law.
but surely you expect police to enforce ordnances?
What Kinnath said above is pretty close to my idea.
Assuming one admits the existence of a nation-state, an immigration and border control policy comes along for the ride.
No sneaking in, *minimal vetting* (no criminals, no untreatable contagious disease), no welfare.
I wouldn’t have a problem with that; if you can meet those requirements, you’re just as American as I am.
It’s a more than reasonable position and is fairly similar to current immigration policy. But, it is not woke and that is the faith of America’s upper classes. They needz them some desperate labor, but they also want to feel good about it.
^^^^ This
I would insist on deporting those who commit crimes
Chain gangs.
if you can meet those requirements, you’re just as American as I am.
I think there is more to being an American than not having a communicable disease, not being a criminal, and not being on welfare.
Agreed.
I don’t see it that way.
You don’t say!
I’m glad I made my point clear!
Nice Corgi. Pembroke?
Yep. She’s my homie.
Great pups. My parents had one who was a really cool dog. I can’t believe how fast the little fuckers are.
The racetrack here has Corgi races. I’ve always wanted to go watch.
Sounds like a short race.
Penis.
Well somebody had to say it.
Sounds reasonable to me, I think that letting in people that actually *want* to be Americans seems like a good idea, but I can never come up with specifics.