Sessions: asylum seekers are like criminals breaking into your house.
Real analogy: your neighbor’s husband is shot and killed. She flees to your house with her baby. When she knocks, you call the police and have her arrested for trespassing.
She never sees her baby again.
And the weapon used to kill her husband was sold on the black market by your friend.
The one doing the killing was hired by your hand selected leader.
A woman has a car accident. She shows up at your house. You shoot and kill her.
#2, Robert. Considering that these people are brown skinned the shooting analogy is not far fetched.
@ #2, alas, that has happened in real life more than once.
One of the things that I truly despise about the boat people debate in Australia is the labeling of said refugees as ‘queue jumpers’. As if all those people fleeing a war zone should have lined up in neat little queues. Where presumably advocates of this term secretly imagine they would be shot by snipers.
What’s even more galling is that everyone of these complainers would run over their neighbours shoulders if they were ever in a similar situation.
if the effects of climate change are what is expected by the Pentagon and others this refugee crisis we are having is but a warmup for what is expected as time and seasons ware on.
This precedent may be mild to what is today unthinkable but entirely possible later on.
uncle frogy
What can I tell you. After decades of Democratic party “triangulation”, otherwise known as moving to the right, now this is the #resistance. What do you think the right is going to do, declare victory and sit back to relax? No, the right is able to move the Overton window.
Centrist analogy: Your neighbor’s husband is shot and killed. She sends their child to your house to knock on the door. When they knock you call the police and have the child arrested for trespassing so they can be sent right back to where the shooting was. Sending the kids back is important because it will deter any more from coming to bothering us. Yaaaa, go #resistance!
What is with this constant framing of asylum seekers as criminals? Sessions acts like desperate people who are fleeing from death and conflict are somehow threatening the US.
“What is with this constant framing of asylum seekers as criminals?”
Sessions is a long time religious fanatic and racist, like so many within the Trump administration.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10-things-to-know-about-sen-jeff-sessions-donald-trumps-pick-for-attorney-general/
Simply do a Google search on “Jeff Sessions racist” and you will get more hits than you can possibly view.
emergence@8–
This is straight out of the conservative playbook invented in Australia in the 90s. John Howard, then PM, was looking for wedge issue to damage Labor’s vote (not dissimilar to Bush Jr’s use of homophobia to galvanise the black vote against Democrats). To this day, conservative politicians always and as an openly-acknowledged tactic, call refugees “illegal immigrants” even though they have every right under UN treaties that Australia has signed to seek asylum and only become illegal if they are found not to be genuine refugees and then overstay their visa.
The really sad part is that the only reason this failed as a wedge strategy is that Labor took one look at the threat and decided to adopt the conservative agenda. Every abuse, legal contortion, and human rights violation enacted by conservatives has been continued under Labor governments — and some abuses were invented wholesale by the Labor govt. to pre-emptively look as tough on illegal immigrants as the conservatives. It will surprise nobody to hear that those abuses were gleefully continued when the Labor party lost power in 2013.
And the overall impact? Well, Australia takes 200,000 migrants a year on a base population of ~26 million, so we have a whopping 29% of our resident population born overseas. On the other hand, we settle 28,000 refugees a year. So they make up a small minority of our total migrant intake. Most of these refugees were accepted through offshore processing. In terms of refugees arriving on our shores seeking asylum, it’s only 6,600. By contrast, Germany took 443,000 refugees last year, Uganda took 530,000, and Norway (with a third our population) took 68,000 refugees. More importantly, despite the xenophobic rhetoric, when we look at those who seek asylum, around 90-95% are found to be “genuine” refugees.
So all of this hatred is directed at a small number of people, a few thousand a year, who seek asylum but are rejected (which does not mean they don’t face serious threats in their homelands, just that the Australian govt does not accept the risk — there have been cases of Australia forcibly returning Taliban targets to Afghanistan, at least one of whom was subsequently assassinated, and gay asylum seekers to nations where they faced the death penalty just for being gay). And even then, most of these rejected applicants are sent back to their original country or most recent port of origin or, if there is no way of sending them home (many of their home nations have no interest in co-operating with our refugee refusal process), staying on in detention.
Essentially this is pure xenophobia dressed up as “border protection”, a political strategy refined in Australia. I’m not saying we invented politicised immigration fears, but a lot of the rhetoric and processes were tested out here with coaching from the Murdoch press in the 90s.
All in favor of changing the Attorney General’s name to
say “aye”.
aye
Aye!
As an alternative,
Per Merriam-Webster
also the practice by homœopathetic scammers of whapping their potion strongly and sharply on a leather-bound wholly bible.
Hey, it’s fine. It’s all fine now. Now she and her baby are jailed together, for some indeterminate amount of time, until they can be forced to go back home where the person who killed her husband is still waiting. Problem solved.
The immigration debate bothers me so much. Yes, illegal immigration is a difficult issue. Yes, it doesn’t have any clear-cut answers, and will require policy changes on the congressional level to fix. People have lost their damned minds lately though. Comparing those people to invaders, and acting like MS-13 lurks behind every bush. The people who are arguing for completely open borders and abolishing ICE are equally unhelpful. This isn’t the kind of thing that will be fixed with a simplistic, all or nothing change.
Yes, a nation needs borders and it needs to be able to have some kind of control over them. Also yes, we should absolutely be taking in anyone who is trying to seek out a better life for themselves and their family (along with a proper vetting process and assimilation process of course). These two goals do not have to be mutually exclusive. Helping those people is the moral thing to do, and it’s the american thing to do. Immigrants make us stronger as a nation. They’ve always made us stronger as a nation.
At the end of the day though, you need to ask yourself “What would you do if that were you?” I’d bet all kinds of money that 99% of us would be doing the same thing, trying to find some kind of better life, if we were in their shoes. If doing something that all of us would do is illegal and causing huge procedural issues, maybe the problem is the laws and procedures themselves.
You want the Overton Window moved back left? You don’t demand reasonable border security. You demand open borders.
Abolishing ICE is a good damn idea, though. They were given a far too broad a charter and have demonstrated no ability to be judicious. We’ll just have to do the Border Security that we did in the far off year of… 2001. (Hmm, I wonder what happened that year that made the country lose it’s mind).
antigone10@16, It was the INS (mostly) back then (2001), who were also facist loons, e.g., racially profiling employees of “raided” workplaces.
I actually had a robber in my place once, but strangely he didn’t bring his baby with him.
Yep, this is definitely an atrocity. As anEuropean, I will ask: What are you going to do about it, apart from bitching at an internet site?
A simpler immigration procedure. Persons coming to the border are issued, on request, a “green card” . After residing, lawfully, within the country for sixty days they may receive citizenship on giving the oath. End of problem. Very inexpensive. Moral too!
jack16
Which version of the US’s immigration laws hasn’t been ultimately racist? Let’s just undo them all.
The drug addicts who broke into my student appt. were armed with screwdrivers, not infants weirdly enough.
Thank you for letting me hijack this thread, given the enticing TITLE, to enter a completely tangential rant.
Elsewhere (I won’t name where, you know)
in response to a list of mass shooting and the identity of the shooter as being a white resident american citizen with the concluding question of “why are we banning Muslims to keep us safe”, the discombobulating response “proof it is working”. Leads me to this “hijack”.
—
for example:
-5 people killed by wolves in Massachusetts
-10 people killed by wolves in Maine
-3 people killed by wolves in Montana
-4 people killed by wolves in Oregon
-why are we spending so much to round up moose?
=== he replies: “proof it works”
like the only reason the list has Wolves as the predators is because moose have been removed from possibility.
All I could do initially was sputter, taking time to craft this counter example.
Thank you for letting me drop it here, hijacking this thread.