US Immigration Policy Megathread

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Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

As the thread title suggests, this is a thread to discuss the immigration policy debate in the United States.

Since this is very broad topic, This OP is just going to give a brief overview of these topics.

A History of US Immigration Policy
For just about the first century of the United States' existence as a country, there were no laws governing the act of entering the country. Instead, policy concerned with immigration was focused on naturalization. For the first half of the 19th century, for an immigrant to become a citizen, they had to meet these requirements:

Be a "free white."
Live in the United States for 5 years.
Declare their intent to become a citizen 3 years in advance.
If you fought for the British in the Revolutionary War, your state's legislature had to make an exception for you.
If you were white, and you were born in the US to a white person, or if you were born abroad to a US Citizen, you were automatically a citizen.

Following the 14th amendment, this was expanded in 1870 to cover black people, but nobody else.

And with the 14th Amendment, anybody born in the US is a citizen.

When the US annexed what's now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and a little bit of Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas, the Mexican residents were given the choice to leave or stay and become US citizens. Most stayed, and were declared legally white.

Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, white people start assuming that the flux of immigrants from China were indentured servants or prostitutes, and began passing laws to restrict immigration from East Asia, most notably with the "Chinese Exclusion Act," which is exactly what it sounds like, the first law passed that restricted not just citizenship, but the act of entering the country.

In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt reorganizes immigration and naturalization and adds an English literacy requirement. Immigration Laws are now solely the responsibility of the federal government.

By 1910, immigrants make up just under 15% of the US population, this percentage has yet to be matched.

In 1917, 1921, and 1924 Congress passes far-reaching immigration restrictions that severely limit immigration from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia with the explicit goal of keeping America white and protestant. Immigration from the Americas however, is unaffected. In the years leading up to World War II, these laws would have extremely tragic consequences for Jewish people fleeing antisemitism in Europe as they were turned away and sent back to Europe, where the literal holocaust was waiting for them.

In the 1930's during the early days of the Great Depression, there was a fear that Mexican-Americans, many of whom were descendants of people who had the border move underneath them in 1848 and 1853, were taking (white) American jobs. So Herber Hoover ordered huge sweeps that grabbed up everybody who was Hispanic and sent them to Mexico, even though over half of them were US Citizens by birth. Between half a million and two million Mexican-Americans were forced out of the country. Incidentally, this made the Great Depression worse.

Also in WW2, the draft was calling up so many young men off of their farms and into the Army, that there was a huge labor shortage for agricultural workers, and so in 1942, congress enacted the Bracero program, which would fill labor shortages with underpaid contract labor. The laborers who were participating in the program were all men, and they would be brought in, work for a period of time, and then go back to Mexico until they were needed again. It was not permanent migration for the purposes of residency but an ephemeral labor force that was easy to exploit.

And boy howdy was the Bracero program exploited, with workers being underpaid, part of their paychecks being taken from them and put into savings accounts they couldn't access, in addition to pretty awful housing conditions (with no other options).

After the war, the Bracero program was continued, as many of the returning soldiers used the GI Bill benefits to not do agricultural work, meaning that Congress elected to continue the Braceo program, expanding it even.

This whole time, there was still a de facto ban on immigration from Southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but as the Cold War starts to happen and the US is positioning themselves as the champion of freedom and democracy, this is really not a good look.

By 1970, the percentage of immigrants in the US has dropped to under 5%.

So in 1964, congress ends the Bracero program, and in 1965 LBJ, Along with Rep. Emmanuel Celler (D-NY), and Phillip Hart (D-MI) pass the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, commonly called Hart-Celler. This law removes the racist as all hell national origins quota in favor of preferences based on family reunification and employability. It makes it way easier for people from Asia, Africa, Southern Europe, and the Middle East to come to the US, but it also restricts the number of people who can enter the US from Western Hemisphere countries for the first time ever. But the demand for cheap migrant labor hasn't gone anywhere, since the economy had grown kinda dependent on the Bracero program, and so a lot of the same practices under the Bracero program continue, but now without the legal smokescreen, which makes it even more exploitative.

This is when Undocumented Immigration really starts to become a thing. But at this stage, there's very little enforcement, so Undocumented Immigrants are still young men who come up for a short period of time to do work and then go back home. Until the 80's the number are fairly low and constant.

In Los Angeles, LAPD chief Daryl Gates, the man responsible for SWAT teams, DARE, CRASH, and Operation Hammer (the LAPD policies that caused the LA Riots), issues Special Order 40, which tells cops that enforcing immigration laws is a federal matter and to let the feds handle it. This is not because Gates is some friend to the immigrant community. This is because bored cops were grabbing anybody who looked vaguely brown and charging them with "Unauthorized Entry" to fill quotas. But Special Order 40 is the first codified Sanctuary City policy.

And then war on drugs happens.

The war on drugs really, really, fucks up Latin America. And this destabilization means that quite a lot of people are looking elsewhere to live because of it. Namely, the US. But because of Hart-Celler, nowhere near enough people are able to enter the country legally, but the risks of staying are such that it's better to chance crossing the border than to stick it out.

So beginning in the 80's, the numbers of people entering the US without authorization begins to climb steadily.

In 1994, California passes Prop 187, which tries to restrict undocumented immigrants from receiving government services, this gets struck down, and the backlash is so harsh that it basically kills the GOP in California.

In 1996, Clinton passes IIRIRA, which further cracks down on undocumented immigration including a bunch of really shady practices like "secret evidence," and starts the process of building a border fence. Ironically, this doesn't do much to slow down undocumented immigration and it continues to increase afterwards. The composition of undocumented immigrants changes at this time. With enforcement having been increased, the risks of getting caught when crossing seasonally when there's work are too high, so migrant families start coming over in larger groups and establishing residency, the idea being that it's less risky to bring the family across once than to cross back and forth every year.

2007 is the year that undocumented immigration from Mexico peaks. After that, the economic slump and increasing racism towards Hispanic-americans causes the population of undocumented immigrants to stop climbing and start falling.

Important Immigration-related court cases

United States v. Wong Kim Ark: The Supreme Court rules that anybody born in the US who's parents do not have diplomatic immunity, are automatically citizens.

Chy Lung v. Freeman: Enforcement of Immigration Laws is the sole province of the federal government and states can't set their own rules.

United States v. Brignoni-Ponce: Cops can't just pull somebody over they think is carrying undocumented immigrants because the occupants of the car appear to be Mexican and they're driving near the border.

Plyer v. Doe: Texas tries to pass a law that says that children who are undocumented immigrants aren't allowed to go to school. The Supreme Court steps in and says 'yeah they can, and you cannot deny government services to people based on immigration status.'

Arizona v. United States: Hey assholes, immigration law is the sole responsibility of the federal government, stop trying to go around it.

Immigration Policy Today
Today, immigration into the United States is governed by the framework created by Hart-Celler. It's a long, complex, and costly process, with waiting lists that are decades long.

This flowchart from 2008 is a pretty decent summary of the current immigration process, even if it was made the Reason Foundation:

Currently, the far-right are trying to restrict legal immigration by going after family reunification (or in far-right terminology, "chain migration."), as well as the diversity visa lottery program established under George H.W. Bush.

Key Takeaways of Immigration Policy

Immigration Laws are the sole purview of the federal government, not the states.
Undocumented Immigration is relatively recent and is the result of backfiring policies.
The United States can't stop loving things up in Latin America.
Immigration Policy has a history of being really loving racist.

Recommended Reading, courtesy of After The War

Sarah Stillman - "When Deportation Is a Death Sentence" (New Yorker, January 15, 2018 issue)

quote:

Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He�d entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ICE agent told his family�s legal team that Nelson was deported because �someone screwed up,� and ICE alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge�s stay.

�His life is in danger,� Ana Lopez wrote, begging U.S. authorities to reverse her son�s deportation. Her efforts proved fruitless. Two months later, Nelson died in a prison fire, along with more than three hundred and fifty other inmates. His lawyer told me that Nelson had been detained by the Honduran government without charges, in an anti-gang initiative. Survivors of the fire alleged that it was set intentionally, perhaps as an act of gang retaliation, and that the guards had done little to help the men as they screamed and burned to death in their cells.

(Be warned, it gets pretty gruesome at points. But for a group that's been so dehumanized, sometimes it takes that gut reaction to remember that these are people.)

"Madison Paul - How a Private Prison Company Used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor, and what it could mean for the future of immigration detention in America." (Mother Jones, April 3, 2017)

quote:

The lawsuit also argues that the sanitation policy violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a modern anti-slavery statute. To maintain cleanliness in the housing units, GEO used housekeeping crews like the one Ortiz was assigned to when he arrived at Aurora. According to GEO�s local detainee handbook, refusing to clean was considered a �high moderate�-level offense and was punishable by several possible sanctions, including up to three days of so-called �disciplinary segregation�: solitary confinement. Plaintiff Demetrio Valerga told the court in a statement that he �did the work anyway because it was well known that those who refused to do that work for free were put in �the hole.'� With the sanitation policy in place, the company employed just one janitor for the 1,500-bed facility.

Michelle Chen - "ICE�s Captive Immigrant Labor Force" (The Nation, October 11, 2017)

quote:

In a 2012 investigation of four ICE detention facilities in Georgia, the ACLU of Georgia described ICE detainees� being held in unsanitary, inhumane, isolating conditions, and regularly forced to work full-time for about $1 to $3 a day. Because of sparse rations, ACLU reported, �some detainees began to work in the kitchen just so they could eat more�. one detainee lost 68 pounds.� Their �volunteering,� in other words, involved literally working for food.

(Tons of links in that one.)

Spencer Woodman � �Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor� (The Intercept, January 11 2018)

quote:

Shoaib Ahmed, a 24-year-old who immigrated to America to escape political persecution in Bangladesh, told The Intercept that the privately run detention center placed him in isolation for 10 days after an officer overheard him simply saying �no work tomorrow.� Ahmed said he was expressing frustration over the detention center � run by prison contractor CoreCivic � having delayed his weekly paycheck of $20 for work in the facility�s kitchen. ...

In addition to severe isolation, Ahmed spoke of being subjected to restrictive treatment in segregation that might be more expected for a violent and volatile criminal than for an immigration detainee under punishment for encouraging a work stoppage. Once a day, detention center officers would handcuff Ahmed and escort him outdoors for an hour in a recreation yard � which he described as a �cage� for one person. Three times a week, Ahmed and other detainees in solitary confinement were given the opportunity to shower. This meant being guided in handcuffs from his isolation cell to an individual shower room. �They push you into the shower room and then open the handcuffs,� Ahmed said, adding: �You take a shower and after that, you come back in your room. Then they put you back in the room. When you enter the room again, they open the handcuffs.� ...

In an October response to a suit from detainees in Colorado, major private prison contractor GEO Group appeared to echo this point. �Were a court to conclude that GEO must pay thousands of detainees a minimum wage, it would significantly affect the prices that GEO would have charge for its services,� stated a GEO Group court filing. The Colorado class-action suit, which demands that detainees be paid minimum wage for their labor, �poses a potentially catastrophic risk to GEO�s ability to honor its contracts with the federal government,� the firm stated in a separate filing.

Instant Sunrise fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Feb 16, 2018

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 02:59

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 18:28

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Immigration Enforcement

Hey, so remember how I said that for the first hundred years that the United States existed as a country there were no law restricting immigration, only citizenship? Well, the early government's sole revenue source was from taxes on imports, it shouldn't be a surprise that they wasted no time setting up a customs agency for setting duties and tariffs on goods coming into the United States. The US Customs Service is about as old as the country, but never really bothered with the flow of people coming in.

However, once the federal government started restricting immigration in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1882, the US Government Set up a new department that was the Bureau of Immigration, and they were the ones who processed immigrants coming into the country through ports of entry like Ellis Island.

And the bureau would then merged with the Bureau of Naturalization in the 1930's to form the Immigration and Naturalization Service, aka INS, aka la migra. This agency was originally organized under the Department of Commerce (then called the Department of Commerce and Labor), and they were tasked with enforcing immigration laws. Keep in mind that undocumented immigration at this point was next to non-existent, so the agency didn't have a whole lot to do beyond butchering peoples names at Ellis Island.

At least until World War 2.

After Pearl Harbor happened, FDR got this idea that not a single Japanese immigrant could be trusted, and ordered them to be rounded up and put into camps. And it was the INS who did the deed. Using their own information and Census data, the INS swept through Japanese-American communities and started arresting people just because.

The internment of Japanese Americans is one of the more shameful moments in American History, but the INS and the successor agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, including the infamous ICE even acknowledge this, lol.

But one of the changes in how the INS was operated was that during the war, they were moved from the Department of Commerce and Labor to the Department of Justice, in order to enable the internments and a need for "more effective control over aliens."

yeah....

So the war ends and the Bracero program that had been set up proves to be inadequate to handle the demand for agricultural labor from Mexico, so people were crossing the border illegally to get farm work, the numbers seemed large at the time but it was nowhere near what it would become in more recent years. Now, Mexico after the war was trying like hell to industrialize, but were running into the problem that for a lot of people in Northern Mexico, the only real opportunities was agricultural work in the US.

So the Mexican Government called on the US to do something about this. So President Eisenhower started militarizing the border a tiny bit.

But that wasn't enough.

So in 1954, the US launched Operation Wetback, which was a series of deportation sweeps through immigrant communities to round up undocumented immigrants from Mexico and send them back. And it was a humanitarian disaster, with people being taken so fast that they didn't even have time to grab personal belongings, being dropped off nowhere near where their families were and without any way of contacting them, even being held in temperatures of 112 degrees to the point where 88 people died from the heat, border patrol agents would shave the heads of people deported, and would often beat them quite severely.

However, at the same time as Operation Wetback was cracking down on undocumented immigration, the Bracero program was hugely expanded at the same time under Eisenhower. So often times, people "deported" under operation wetback were taken to a US consulate, signed up for the Bracero program, loaded back up onto a bus and sent back to the US under the legal smokescreen on the Bracero program.

After the Bracero Program ends and Hart-Celler is passed, undocumented immigration starts to become a thing again, Reagan tries to stem the flow by passing an amnesty bill in 1986 that grandfathers in any undocumented immigrant that was here before 1982 and pays back taxes and a fine, but the War on Drugs is still destabilizing the poo poo out of Latin America, so that barely does anything.

But after Operation Wetback, there's no major border enforcement actions like that until 1994, when Bill Clinton launches Operation Gatekeeper.

Under Operation Gatekeeper, Bill Clinton and Janet Reno militarize the poo poo out of the US-Mexico border. And as a result, this send Undocumented Immigrants eastward towards Otay Mesa and forces them to rely or Coyotes to smuggle them across the border. And this changes the demographic composition of undocumented immigrants from a churn of young men looking for seasonal work to send money back home to entire families coming across the border to stay. The people who would later go on to be known DREAMers started being brought over to the US around this time.

And then 9/11 happened.

After 9/11 happened and we got to WATCH BUSH START A loving WAR, the INS was moved from the DOJ to be under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. And it was broken up and reorganized and had bits of other agencies grafted to it at the end.

The INS was combined with the US Customs Service and restructured.

The part of the INS that handles immigration paperwork and visas was reorganized into the US Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS)
The part of the INS that handled deportation and detainment of unauthorized immigrants was expanded and split off into "Immigration and Customs Enforcement," or ICE for short.

gently caress ICE. Seriously.

ICE has one job, lock people up for entering the country illegally and deport them. GWB gave them a fuckload of lattitude, ostensibly so that the newly reorganized agency could find their feet, but Obama really failed to reign them in beyond setting up DACA and some token restrictions.

ICE operates a bunch of "detention centers" across the country, some are rented space in county or city jails, and other are old hotels or apartment buildings that are designed not to look like immigration jails, and even more are private prisons. the conditions there are really bad, with people in them being denied medical care, given moldy food, packed into extremely cramped conditions, and looking the other way as people interning in them are sexually assaulted.

The conditions that the people held in these ICE detention centers are beyond appalling and under Trump, it's only gotten worse.

Instant Sunrise fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Feb 6, 2018

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 03:06

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Spiffster posted:

You can�t overstate how much the Chinese exclusion act and the KKK had on our immigration policy. If I can dig through some of my old texts I can try to do some elaborating but it depends on my time.

Thank you so much for making this thread

Yep. Woodrow �basically a klan member� Wilson pushed the 1917 Act, which severely restricted immigration in the early 20th century.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 03:31

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Arrgytehpirate posted:

drat, that's an amazing OP.

I didn't know, well, any of that stuff.

It's interesting to think about what immigration might look like if the war on drugs never happened. It seems everywhere you look and dig beneath the surface it always comes back to the loving war on drugs.

I asked in the Trump thread, but it moves fast and I'm sure something dumb was tweeted so I never got an answer.

What would an ideal immigration policy look like? Right now the concerns are clearly dreamers and those who've lived here for 5-30 years undocumented, but let's just assume we blanket give everyone in the U.S. as of the passing of this hypothetical legislation citizenship. What does a fair immigration policy look like?

Go to a consulate, pay $30 for an permanent entry permit, come to America, stay for 2 years and become a citizen.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 03:44

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Lightning Knight posted:

gently caress ICE and nativists, solidarity with immigrants and workers.

ICE is loving awful and needs to be disbanded with its directors facing criminal charges yesterday.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 04:05

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Bicyclops posted:

This is a good grounds for discussion. I think the late 1800s and early 1900s are an interesting era to look at because of the rise of eugenics in the U.S., and how that influenced immigration quotas by region (among other things, some of which are still present with us today). I'll see if I can post a bit more on it later.

There's a lot to branch out into, too, given that this discussion will naturally look into the evolving definition of whiteness, regional differences, sanctuary cities, and lot of other things.

I touched on sanctuary cities in the OP when I mentioned special order 40, but yeah I definitely want to do a full write up about that.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 04:37

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Peven Stan posted:

Epic writeup OP.

It should also be emphasized that the replacement for national origins quotas was originally going to a merit based system, but southern and midwestern democrats were cagey that it would allow too many nonwhites in the country too quickly so they settled on family unification, which in a 90% white america at the time would preserve their racial majority longer.

Bingo. Family reunification was prioritized to get Southern and Midwestern conservatives to vote for it on the idea that it would keep America white.

Now that same provisions being called �chain migration� and treated like some huge evil by those same groups.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 06:31

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

added a section about immigration enforcement and ICE to the post after the OP.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 09:28

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

So, an undocumented immigrant did a thing, and our POTUS used it as an opportunity to paint all undocumented immigrants with a broad brush.

Let's talk about this. This is a fatal traffic accident with a somewhat famous person being killed. Drunk driving accidents are in no way rare, and occur way too much. But most of the time we don't hear about them because the victims aren't minor celebrities or the person responsible isn't a member of a class that's being used as a scapegoat.

Except of course, it's in no way representative of the undocumented immigrant population.

In actuality, immigrants, documented or otherwise commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.

But that's not what this is about. America has a long history of blaming immigrant populations for the social ills of the day. Ben Franklin raged against German immigrants, and Alexander Hamilton supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which changed the waiting period for citizenship from 5 years to 14 years.

The Examination Number VIII, January 12th, 1802 posted:

The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.

___________________________________________________/

And in the mid 19th century, you have the anti-catholic and entirely unaware of the irony, "Native American Party," better known as the "Know-Nothing Party."

In 1900, the city of San Francisco literally put up barbed wire around SF's Chinatown, ostensibly in response to a case of Bubonic Plague, but nobody could leave the area, and only white people were allowed to go in or out.

But that didn't matter, the Chinese community in SF was an easy target and they went after them.

Anyway, scapegoat immigrant communities has a long and dark history in the US.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 21:11

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

After The War posted:

Thanks for setting this up! I kept meaning to look for a dedicated thread in D&D because the topic can get swallowed up in the other US threads. Would you be into setting up a reading list for the OP, like in the USPOL threads of yore? Good reporting on the subject takes months, sometimes years of research to turn out a single article, and it will often be overshadowed by the scandal du jour. I'll try to find and share pieces I've read. In particular, if anyone else has anything covering the way immigration enforcement is feeding into the prison-industrial complex, please share - I'm sure there's a lot going on that's not getting picked up.

My all means, I'd love to have a good recommended reading list for this topic.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2018 00:43

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

For those lurkers reading this, Dead Reckoning has a history of advocating for anti-immigration policies, and has even expressed support for getting rid of the 14th amendment because of the SCOTUS case law listed in the OP stops policies that would make things even harder for undocumented immigrants.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 07:35

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Yeah.... Obama�s legacy is something I�m kind of torn on because while he did stem the bleeding in comparison to what the Tea Party, and Trump wanted, he still managed to get a lot of right wing policies implemented via the Nixon in China effect.

Anyway, I�m working on an effortpost about the history of Organized Labor and immigration, and it is not a pretty history.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 16:41

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

The number of undocumented immigrants has stabilized and decreased slightly since 2007, however.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 18:08

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Reposting this from the trump thread because that thread moves fast and it needs to be known about :

Immigration enforcement needs a serious top-to-bottom overhaul yesterday. Getting rid of ICE is a good start but we need to do more.

When poo poo like this is happening: A guy calls the police because somebody was trying to break into his car and/or house. ICE abuses the warrant system to get the police to bring him in, despite not committing a crime, but being the victim of a crime. I think we can all agree that ICE is out of control. But ICE is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our immigration court system (EOIR) is beyond hosed up. For starters they aren't actually real courts but administrative proceedings. Ones where you're not actually sitting in front of a real judge. Very frequently, people are before these courts with no lawyers, because as a civil administrative procedure, you aren't entitled to a public defender, so if you want a lawyer to sit with you, $$$$. And if you're a literal child and you're facing deportation, no lawyer for you, even if you are three years old, because according the EOIR, a three year old is old enough to represent themselves in court. It's entirely possible and legal to use "secret evidence" for deportation, and yes, that is exactly as bas as it sounds.

So yes, we need to get rid of ICE, but that's a start. A clean sweep of the EOIR and moving them to be under the judiciary instead of the executive is another vital one, but really the entire immigration needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 22:07

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

viral spiral posted:

You're forgetting the part where immigration primarily benefits multinational corporations and neoliberalism, economically speaking.

Immigration as it is implemented today does in fact, massively empower the capital class. And badly handled immigration reform would give them even more power.

Labor has traditionally been anti-immigration, and many of the more draconian immigration bills I've mentioned were supported by labor. And there's a very obvious reason for that, as workers would organize and take direct action against management and the capital class, management would use immigrants as scab labor and plays the two groups against each other.

If we want to reform immigration in a way that doesn't give massive power and act as a wealth transfer to the top 1%, we need to do away with employer sponsorship requirements, which create a massive imbalance in power between labor and capital, and then we also need to provide a path to citizenship for the undocumented, to remove that leverage by capital.

As for keeping capital from exploiting immigrants as a wedge against labor? That is what union shops/closed shops, and the abolition of Taft-Hartley and right to work laws are for.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 22:47

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Instant Sunrise posted:

Immigration as it is implemented today does in fact, massively empower the capital class. And badly handled immigration reform would give them even more power.

Labor has traditionally been anti-immigration, and many of the more draconian immigration bills I've mentioned were supported by labor. And there's a very obvious reason for that, as workers would organize and take direct action against management and the capital class, management would use immigrants as scab labor and plays the two groups against each other.

If we want to reform immigration in a way that doesn't give massive power and act as a wealth transfer to the top 1%, we need to do away with employer sponsorship requirements, which create a massive imbalance in power between labor and capital, and then we also need to provide a path to citizenship for the undocumented, to remove that leverage by capital.

As for keeping capital from exploiting immigrants as a wedge against labor? That is what union shops/closed shops, and the abolition of Taft-Hartley and right to work laws are for.

Oh hey, speaking of exploiting immigrants in an inherently unequal relationship with the capital class:

Politico presents: What if we brought back indentured servitude but like, with an app?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 02:18

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Sanctuary Policies, ICE Detainer Requests, and the Constitution

Sanctuary City Policies.

Let's be honest here you've heard this term get thrown around a lot. And it doesn't really have a clear definition, so the right will use it to mean whatever it wants to mean. So we're not playing into the nativists hands, we need to define what a Sanctuary City or a Sanctuary State actually is:

A Sanctuary City is a city that does not allow it's own law enforcement to be drafted into doing ICE's work for them.

In the OP, I mentioned a Supreme Court case, Chy Lung v. Freeman set the precedent that Immigration is solely the responsibility of the Federal government. So a state cannot pass it's own laws saying that people from country x cannot enter.

So states cannot set their own immigration laws, but Chy Lung still allows them to enforce the federal immigration laws if they want to.

Well when you have bored cops trying to fill quotas that becomes a Problem.

In 1970's Los Angeles, Chief Daryl Gates was having issues with his cops grabbing anybody who looked Mexican off the streets on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant. Well, most of the times they weren't, so this was just racist cops wasting everybody's time, and making it harder for detectives to do their jobs because potential witnesses for more serious crimes like homicide were unwilling to come forward and testify because of how these cops were acting.

So to combat this, Gates implemented LAPD Special Order 40. Under this, cops are supposed to leave the job of enforcing federal immigration laws to the federal immigration authorities.

Before you start posting "Daryl Gates, welcome to the #resistance," remember that this is the same Daryl Gates who militarized the poo poo out of the police by creating the first SWAT team, who's ridiculously racist policies against black communities had cops literally treating black communities in LA like a warzone and would ultimately end up causing the beating of Rodney King and subsequent 1992 riots.

Fast forward a few years and as the immigration debate moves into the mainstream, more and more cities start adopting policies similar to SO40, but under the name "Sanctuary City Policies."

What Sanctuary City Policies Actually Do:

Leave enforcement of federal immigration laws to the federal authorities.
Make everybody in a city safer by letting undocumented immigrants come forward if they've been the victim of a crime or were a witness to a crime.

What Sanctuary City Policies Don't Do:

Let undocumented immigrants get away with all the crimes ever.

Sanctuary City policies have a weird history but actually do a lot of good, but the far right really loving hates them.

ICE Detainers

These are written request that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sends out whenever somebody they think is an undocumented immigrant has been in contact with their state or local law enforcement asking them to keep that person in prison for an extra 48 hours (not including weekends or holidays) so that ICE can take their sweet sweet time to pick them up and put them into the deportation system.

These requests are NOT Warrants, they are voluntary requests (Galarza v. Szalczyk). ICE is supposed to need probable cause for them, but they usually don't, and they don't need a judge signing off on them.

When a police officer or a sheriffs deputy decides to honor these requests, the courts have ruled that this is a new arrest, (Morales v. Chadbourne) and they must follow due process (they don't).

So like was posted previously, what ICE is doing is asking the local cops to do their job for them, and that's not within the statutory authority of ICE (Jimenez-Moreno v. Napolitano). And ICE isn't supposed to be asking the local cops hold somebody "just because." _{but they do it anyway}

But what this all boils down to is that ICE is very likely asking cities across the country to violate the 4th amendment. But it's never come up in a Supreme Court decision, so they're gonna keep on doing it anyway.

The closest this has come to a major decision was in Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas County.

Maria Miranda-Olivares was arrested by the Clackamas County authorities for violating a restraining order. Under the Clackamas county policies, any time somebody who was a foreign national was brought in, they would send that persons name to ICE to see if they were somebody they could deport. The Judge in her restraining order case set her bail at $5000, of which she could pay $500 to post bail and go home to await trial and consult a lawyer.

However, ICE said that they thought she might be undocumented and to keep her in jail so they could double check.

So they did. And even though she was able to post bail in her case, they wouldn't let her out of Jail because ICE asked them not to while they checked if she was an undocumented immigrant or not. On the restraining order charges, she pleaded guilty to one charge of contempt of court, and sentenced to 48 hours in prison with time already served credited, so she would have been free to go.

Except that ICE didn't want her to leave.

Clackamas County held her in jail for an extra 19 hours, even though she was free to go and had served her sentence, purely because ICE had asked them to.

So she took them to federal court.

And the federal courts in Oregon came back and said:

Because the request was not a court order and the jail was within their rights to refuse, they should have refused to honor the request after she was released.
By holding her for extra time because ICE had asked them to after she had served her time and was free to go, Clackamas County violated her fourth amendment rights.

Clackamas County chose not to appeal this decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, so it's only binding in Clackamas County. With that said, several other counties in Oregon have adopted policies similar to the court's ruling in this case.

Instant Sunrise fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 21:47

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Private Speech posted:

Uhh what about the socialist internationals, workers of all countries, etc etc. It's true that immigration has always been an important topic for left-wing movements, but the relationship has not always been adversarial

e: I think I got my history mixed up a bit there

Yeah it depends on the labor organization, but a good number of unions have a history of opposing immigration for protectionist and racist reasons.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 00:09

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Office Pig posted:

https://twitter.com/timkaine/status/963977051027005440

Maybe it's something on my end, but in case Kaine's page is totally unreadable garbage, here's what they're going with:

Yes, they actually called it the Common Sense Coalition.

Reading between the lines here, Angus King is the principal author of this. He used to be an immigration hardliner and now he�s the reasonable middle of the road compromise. That�s how much the Overton window has shifted on this issue.

Going through the actual text of this:

There�s this gem hidden in there for DACA recipients:

So that little clause in there means that ICE can justifiably deny citizenship to DREAMers if they�re too outspoken. Isn�t that interesting...

:thunk:

The press release only lightly mentioned family reunification visas and offered no details.

The actual bill reduces the number of people who can receive Family Reunification visas for green card holders from 170,000 per year to 114,200. Leaving 55,800 people out in the cold.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 06:30

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Office Pig posted:

I actually hadn't been able to get around to the bill text yet. I could tell this still leaves Dreamers vulnerable in a lot of respects, but does this thing actually turn them into de facto second class citizens?

�Permanent Resident Status on a Conditional Basis� is what dreamers will have for the 12 year wait before naturalization.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 06:44

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Trump is threatening to Veto that immigration Bill.

Yep. The Rounds-King bill that accepted and internalized far-right framing of immigration, made serious cuts to the number of family members of green card holders admitted to the US and made it de facto illegal for DREAMers to speak up politically? It wasn't draconian enough for trump so he's threatening to veto it.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 20:18

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Look at the comment sections of any major news site. The MAGA chuds genuinely want every brown person from the country to just not exist anymore.

Racism is baked into our immigration system from its very beginnings.

The increasing dehumanization of all Latin-Americans by the far right is alarming, but what is even more worrisome is how much they�ve shifted the Overton Window.

Two years ago, Steve King was an immigration hardliner and an outlier.

Now his loving name is on a bipartisan compromise bill as a principal author, and it got threatened with a veto because it wasn�t extreme enough.

Our immigration system is fundamentally flawed and needs a top to bottom overhaul.

ICE is a modern day gestapo that is willing to flagrantly violate the constitution and press state and local cops to do their jobs for them.

Our immigration courts that aren�t actually courts are a kangaroo court that thinks a three year old is capable of defending themselves and doesn�t need a lawyer.

And under the current administration that�s never going to happen, it�s only going to get worse.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 16:56

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Two things today:

1. https://twitter.com/RogerDHodge/status/966734043801899009

2. https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/966733785202151427

Trump is continuing to turn the entire US Immigration service into his personal gestapo.

Like I've said earlier, I honestly truly think that the only way to reform ICE and our Immigration System is to just gut it and rebuild it from a blank slate. Nobody involved in the current agencies should be involved in a new immigration system.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2018 19:46

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

gently caress ICE.

quote:

Some detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail and Stewart Detention Center reported long waits for the provision of medical care, including instances of detainees with painful conditions, such as infected teeth and a knee injury, waiting days for medical intervention.

quote:

Staff did not always tell detainees why they were being segregated, nor did they always communicate detainees' rights in writing or provide appeal forms for those put in punitive lockdown or placed in segregation.

quote:

At Otero County Processing Center and Stewart Detention Center, we observed detainee bathrooms that were in poor condition, including mold and peeling paint on walls, floors and showers

quote:

lAt the Stewart Detention Center, some detainee bathrooms had no hot water and some showers lacked cold water. Also, detainees reported water leaks in some housing areas

quote:

The conditions in these detention facilities are deplorable and include: threats of force-feeding for participation in hunger strikes, sexual abuse, lack of clean drinking water, lack of adequate access to legal materials or attorneys, and labor for just $1 per day.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2018 17:17

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Double gently caress ICE and gently caress Gorsuch on his stolen seat for enabling them.

https://twitter.com/npr/status/968508235966828551

# ¿ Feb 27, 2018 16:58

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

tsa posted:

What's your solution for the real world, the one where you can't just tear down and rebuild entire agencies at your whim?

First of all, it�s entirely possible to do a top to bottom rebuild of a federal agency. The Bush Administration did exactly that when he reorganized the INS and USCS into ICE, CBP, USCIS, and EOIR.

But since you want to talk about incremental solutions, let�s talk:

Get congress to pass a new immigration act that gets rid of the current quotas and restrictions, Anybody who wishes to enter the country as a permanent resident can do so after paying a nominal fee.
Make immigration it�s own cabinet level department instead of being under DHS or DOJ.
Shut down EOIR and move its responsibilities to be under the judicial branch, to prevent a conflict of interest.
let people facing immigration hearings have public defenders.
get rid of the special immigration detention centers. If somebody is legitimately a threat to others, deal with that through the justice system like anybody else.
restructure ICE, ban the use of detainer requests, bar ICE from impersonating police or picking people up from schools, courthouses, churches, or anywhere else they have a reasonable expectation of sanctuary.

Instant Sunrise fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Feb 27, 2018

# ¿ Feb 27, 2018 17:37

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Also an idea: end employer-based sponsorship of immigration, replace it with an employee-based system that doesn't have such a hugely unequal power dynamic like the current system does.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 20:38

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Lightning Knight posted:

Could you explain what employee-based system means?

Pretend like I'm an idiot (you don't have to pretend).

Under the present system, somebody must have a US company sponsor them in order to immigrate to the US on an H-1B visa, this lets them live and work in the US for 6 years (10 if the company is a defense contractor).

There's a lot of poo poo the company has to do in order to do it and it acts as a sword of Damocles over any H-1B employee's head, since if they get laid off they have 60 days to find a new job with somebody willing to go through all whole process all over again (but without being subjected to the cap on new applications).

So by getting rid of the employer sponsorship requirement, and just letting people who meet the H-1B requirements (college degree) come in, along with a much longer grace period for unemployment, it gets rid of that sword of damocles over their heads, which in turn will give prospective employees more leverage W/R/T salary negotiations, and will prevent companies from using H-1B workers as a cudgel against workers born here.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 20:53

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

well the racist keebler elf is officially suing California over SB-54, which prevents state and local law enforcement orgs from sharing data with ICE. ICE by the way, is only supposed to detain people who are "likely to escape."

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-california-immigration-20180306-story.html

But for the sake of argument, lets look at the history of lawsuits regarding state cooperation of federal immigration laws.

Arizona v. United States, Enforcement of immigration laws is the sole responsibility of the Federal Government

Galarza v. Szalczyk, States and Localities are not required to hold people in jail because ICE asked them. ICE Detainers are voluntary requests. (3rd circuit in Pennsylvania)

Morales v. Chadbourne, ICE detainers are a form of seizure under the 4th amendment and require probably cause. (First Circuit in Rhode Island)

Vohra v. United States, ICE detainers are warrantless arrests (Federal District Court in Santa Ana)

Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas Co., I already effort posted about this here.

Jimenez-Moreno v. Napolitano, Detainers actually do have to have some proof that somebody is "likely to escape" and ICE can't issue them willy nilly.

Orellana v. Nobles County, Denying somebody the opportunity to post bail because of an ICE detainer is a warrantless arrest

Lunn v. Commonwealth, Cooperating with ICE detainers is a violation of the 4th amendment. (but in Massachusetts)

Buquer v. Indianapolis, Indianapolis tried to pass their own law that would let Indianapolis cops arrest based on assumed immigration status, similar to Arizona's struck down SB 1070 law. It got blocked in court before it could be enforced.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is having a hissy fit because he can't draft California cops into doing his job for him.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 19:13

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Trump admin is ordering EOIR judges to meet a quota of 700 cases per year.

That�s 2.68 immigration cases per working day.

Which means that EOIR judges will be pressured to judge and move on, which means that any chance of getting a sympathetic hearing went out the window.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 23:33

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

VitalSigns posted:

Will that pace leave enough time to teach three-year-olds how to represent themselves in court?

lolno.

Anyway, the last week tonight episode about the shitshow that is EOIR is extremely good and informative and covers a lot of the same points I made in the effortpost about it.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2018 23:13

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Fionordequester posted:

So, because of the latest controversy regarding how Trump is handling immigration, I chose to start trying to do research. I've tried reading the Immigration and Nationality Act, I've tried talking with folks I've known to be interested in politics...I've tried a lot of things. But, this is all still very confusing to me; and it's been very hard finding a source of knowledge that wasn't either clearly biased, or written in a way that I couldn't understand.

So I have to ask. "How much of what's happening is Trump's own initiative, and how much is a byproduct of an already broken system?" Is Trump adding on his own terrible twist on things? Or is he merely working to enforce a system that was already broken from the start (as this thread's OP has lead me to believe)? If it's the latter, why was it not a bigger issue under Obama's administration (which would, presumably, have been propping up the same broken system)?

If anyone could enlighten me, I would most appreciate it!

It�s kinda both TBH, the immigration system was a broken patchwork of overlapping laws and agencies, and the pressure and scope of enforcement that Trump has placed on it has made the flaws far more obvious.

Adding to that, you have the Trump administration doing a lot of genuinely evil poo poo that�s wholly unprecedented or just made up wholecloth by his administration.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2018 15:36

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Lightning Knight posted:

Instant Sunrise, you should post that Twitter thread you made about American colonialism in the Americas.

Also relevant:

https://twitter.com/clintsmithiii/status/1013075141490864128?s=21

Edit:

Another thread:

https://twitter.com/ositanwanevu/status/957653193873346560?s=21

So the context for this is that Mike Pence made a pretty dumbass comment with a straight face:

"Just as the United States Respects Your Borders and Your Sovereignty, We Insist That You Respect Ours."

Now, anybody who has ever read a single thing about US History can see that was a pretty loving dumb thing to say, because the US has basically never respected Latin American borders / sovereignty. So i put together a twitter thread that tried to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of listing every single time the US hosed around with a Latin-American country.

So this is the twitter thread here:

https://twitter.com/InstantSunrise/status/1011991108371410944

quote:

Texas: 1836
Mexico-American War: 1846
Nicaragua Fillibusters: 1850, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1857
Panama, protecting the railroad: 1856
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines: 1898
Cuba�s Platt Amendment, which lets the US intervene whenever they want: 1903
Panama (again) to break Panama off from Colombia & install a puppet govt so they can build canal: 1903
Dominican Republic: 1904
Strikebreaking in Mexico: 1905
Honduras: 1905
Cuba: 1906-1908
Honduras: 1907
Panama: 1908
Nicaragua�s president says that maybe American fruit and mining companies should pay taxes, the US pressures him into resigning, installs a new president and sends marines in to secure the new regime: 1909-1910
Honduras� President gets too friendly with the ex-president of Nicaragua who though US Companies should pay taxes, so he�s gone: 1911
Sugar workers in Cuba rebel, so the US Marines come in: 1912
The US occupies Veracruz Mexico: 1914
Occupation of Haiti: 1915-1934
Occupation of Dominican Republic: 1916-1924
The sole act of aggression by a Latin American nation against the US, Pancho Villa raids the town of Columbus NM, killing 17: 1916
US invasion of Mexico in pursuit of Villa: 1917
Cuba: 1917
Occupation of Chiriqui Panama: 1918-1920
US suggests overthrow of Guatemalan president on behalf of fruit company: 1921
Strikebreaking in Panama City: 1925
Occupation of Nicaragua (again): 1926-1933
US-backed dictatorship in Dominican Republic: 1930
El Salvador: 1932
Cuba: 1933
US-backed assassination in Nicaragua: 1934
US-approved coup in Panama: 1941
El Salvador�s dictator is deposed in a revolution, months later the former dictator�s chief of Police launches a counter-coup with US approval: 1944
US-backed President takes control of Costa Rica after civil war: 1948
CIA replaces an elected left-wing government with a right wing dictatorship in Guatemala: 1954
Fidel Castro takes over Cuba from US-backed Batista govt: 1959
US refuses to allow free elections in El Salvador for fears of leftism, right wing coup: 1960
US sends 1400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles to Bay of Pigs, fails: 1961
CIA coup in Ecuador: 1961
CIA intervenes in Brazil to keep US-unfriendly guy from taking control of Brazil�s congress.
CIA coup in Dominican Republic: 1963
US-backed coup in Brazil: 1964
US intervenes to stop overthrow of right wing dictator in Dominican Republic: 1965
US sends Green Berets to Guatemala for counterinsurgency campaign: 1966
Green Berets sent to Bolivia to assassinate Che Guevara: 1967
CIA-paid General organizes paramilitaries in El Salvador: 1968
US-backed coup in Chile unseats elected leftist govt and replaces it with right wing military dictatorship: 1973
Military takeover in Uruguay, supported by US: 1973
Right wing junta takes over El Salvador, US supports massively: 1980
US starts basing contras & death squads in Honduras and Nicaragua: 1980
US-approved coup in Nicaragua: 1982
US-approved coup in Nicaragua (again): 1983
US invasion of Grenada: 1983
Boland Amendment prevents US from spending money on Nicaragua intervention, Reagan ignores it: 1983
US mines three Harbors in Nicaragua: 1984
CIA rigs elections in El Salvador: 1984
US invades Panama to dislodge CIA-backed dictator: 1989

This is probably not a complete list.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2018 18:24

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Lightning Knight posted:

Thanks IS. I followed you on Twitter, I hope you don�t mind.

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1013104124559331328?s=21

Abolishing ICE is just the start of what needs to happen. EOIR, the immigration court system, needs massive restructuring and to be moved under the judicial branch of govt., if not outright abolished.

But more importantly, after ICE is abolished, every single person in ICE needs to be barred from future public service.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2018 18:59

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Trump wants to get rid of jus soli citizenship and the New York Times is just like �maybe he can do that by executive order????�

So let�s talk about jus soli.

Prior to the civil war the law governing citizenship had restricted it to �free white men� on a federal level, but states generally could play fast and loose with citizenship. In fact it was just generally accepted but never formally codified into law that people born in the United States were automatically citizens, which had been the precedent at the time from English common law.

In 1844, the courts ruled in Lynch v. Clarke about a woman named Julia Lynch. She had been born in New York City to parents who were in the US temporarily and had gone back to Ireland after. Though she had been living in Ireland for 20 years, the courts found that she was a US citizen by birth.

That changed in 1857 with the rather infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, which was a massively overreaching decision that said that �actually black people aren�t really people or citizens and also states can�t actually block slavery.�

As you can imagine, this wasn�t a very popular decision. In fact it kinda caused a civil war.

So after said civil war, the 14th amendment was passed as a way of giving the middle finger to the Taney Court and overturning that decision by explicitly making everybody who had been born in the US citizens.

So that�s all well and good until 1873 when the inherently unstable capitalist system did what it normally does and completely poo poo itself, dragging the US into an economic depression that lasted for a good decade. A think to realize is that when you have an economic downturn like that, people like to point fingers, so the early socialists blamed the capitalists, and the capitalists tried to convince people that it was Chinese immigrants stealing jobs and driving down wages were causing the problem.

Which worked actually.

So in 1882 Chester A. Arther signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was a �total and complete shutdown of Chinese entering the United States until our country�s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.� to quote a more recent president. With this law giving tacit approval to racists, you started seeing instances of violence against Chinese immigrants in the US, in places like Rock Springs WY, you had literal massacres because people believed that Chinese immigrants were �stealing jobs.�

In the background to this was a second-generation Chinese-American named Wong Kim Ark, who had been born in San Francisco in 1873. Mr. Wong had been making a living in SF by working as a cook. In 1890, he decided to go visit China for a vacation. He most likely had a good time there, and came back in without issue because he was a US Citizen.

So in 1894 he saves up his money and goes on another visit to China from November of 1894 to August of 1895. Upon his return though, he was denied reentry into the United States, by a customs officer citing the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Well, Mr. Wong did what any American in the 19th century would do, he filed a lawsuit. (as an aside, 19th century americans were way more litigious than modern americans)

Wong Kim Ark argued that he was a US Citizen because he was born in the United States and he had previously reentered the US without issue.

The customs officer who had denied him entry argued that he was not a citizen because his parents were Chinese, thus subject to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1898 that WKA was in fact, a US Citizen because he had been born in the US and his parents were subject to US law (in other words, they still had to follow it).

Now, US v. Wong Kim Arc pretty definitively settled jus soli citizenship for the children of immigrants, but since I can already hear the chud objections about how US v. WKA only applies to �legal� immigrants.

Also in 1982, Texas tried to deny education to the children of undocumented parents, they were sued over it and lost in the case Plyler v. Doe. In that case the Supreme Court ruled pretty definitively that undocumented immigrants were still subject to the jurisdiction of US law, and thus the children born in the US to undocumented parents were automatically citizens of the US.

This is what Trump is trying to override with this executive order. Over a hundred years of settled law because it doesn�t say what the immigration hardliners think it says. And with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the bench, we should be cognizant to the fact that the Roberts Court is probably going to come up with a convoluted legal reasoning why absolutely none of that precedent matters and that the president should just be able to do whatever.

This post is also available as a tweet thread:
https://twitter.com/instantsunrise/status/1057274796990296064

# ¿ Oct 30, 2018 15:53

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 18:28

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

Also The Obama administration was basically them trying to do The West Wing but in real life.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2018 15:57

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > US Immigration Policy Megathread