| Jaicee said: Frankly, I have noticed a longstanding pattern with you of opposing just about everything that involves enforcing laws and of demeaning the victims of crimes (especially when they're female). The Laken Riley Act is so-named because doing what you propose to do differently from what was done in the past (nothing) resulted in unnecessary bloodshed. I feel like that fact is getting lost to your want of conflating more or less the entire concept of border security with Trumpism. There are reasons why Trump won last year's election and some of them have roots in very real problems. One ingredient of that was that the nation was simply unwilling to just tolerate limitless volumes of illegal mass migration while suffering a partially consequent housing shortage and a drug overdose epidemic of unprecedented scale. Word of violent crimes being committed by people with records who weren't supposed to be here anyway served as the icing on the cake for many. Something different had to be done! None of that is to say that I'm in favor of deporting American citizens anywhere, let alone to foreign prisons notorious for deprivation and even torture, and least of all if they have clean records. But you will also recognize that that xenophobic shit is being done not as a result of the Laken Riley Act, but rather because we have a fascist in the Oval Office (or wherever he's spending his time, I dunno) who rules by decree and just does whatever he wants that way and Congress is too timid to stop him, so it falls to the courts and to whether the administration is willing to abide by their verdicts and...well you know all this by now. You keep up with events. Anyway, the fact that this "law-and-order" administration in fact has no respect for the rule of law (to the point that the president actually claimed recently that he's not sure it's his job to uphold the Constitution!) isn't a good reason to just let what really did happen to Laken Riley and others continue to happen when there are simple things we could do to reduce their prevalence of such crimes that aren't fascism. Or in short: 1) fascism is bad, so don't vote for fascists, and 2) border security is not fascism, it's just an issue that aspiring tyrants exploit. If you don't let them have the issue, they'll have a tougher time winning elections. |
Lol, what?
What did I say about any victims of crimes? This is what I mean about propagandizing bills. Hit 'em with the old "Oh, you disagree with this bill? How dare you demean this victim". Just absurd.
Now, as for the bill's namesake, I kind of do have an issue with this brand of thinking. At the end of the day, criminality will exist in any suitably large population. As a population grows, to an extent, so too will that criminality (in raw numbers, not rates). The fact of the matter is: any substantial increase in population will lead to an increase in "unnecessary bloodshed". Now, is that cause for population control? I am of the mind that it is not. I feel that that is a scare tactic used by fascists who seek to other a group of people, and it is so easy. It is so easy to say "Hey, if we eliminated this group of people, we could protect the real Americans," but does that actually make this country safer? Immigrants (both documented and undocumented) commit less crime that native born Americans. I feel like if we were genuinely interested in taking action to make the people of this country safer, we would start with the native born Americans (that is somewhat satirical, just to be clear). And as a bonus, if you get rid of a few hundred million people, the amount of unnecessary bloodshed in this country would plummet.
But would that be good policy?
"But something has to be done!" Undocumented immigrants are and have always been a scapegoat for our homegrown problems. The housing crisis, and the drug epidemic, and the crime rate aren't problems caused by illegal immigrants. They are as American as apple pie at this point, and I feel like it is people like you who are willing to accept the scapegoats as if they were actual solutions who are perpetuating the status quo of inaction. You say it yourself: Border security is an issue that aspiring tyrants exploit, so why are you letting yourself be exploited? Because it feels good to do something (even if that something is primarily there to give power to fascists and make the rest of us feel good about it).
