Bussing immigrants to sanctuary cities

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Bussing immigrants to sanctuary cities

1margaretbartley
Apr 16, 2019, 4:48 am

I'm not sure why sanctuary cities like Seattle, San Fransisco, etc are calling Trump's proposal to move people who are at the end of their detention to sanctuary cities cruel. What's cruel about it?

I can understand mayors saying that they can't afford to take care of them. I can understand mayors say there isn't room for them, but to dehumanize migrants by calling them "Pawns" and other words seems irrational to me.

Jenny Durkan of Seattle said they have always welcomed immigrants, that it makes the city more vibrant and attractive. So why is Trump's proposal considered so awful? Is it just a matter that everything Trump does has to be attacked, on general principle? Is that the only thing the mayors are objecting to?

None of the mayors are complaining about what seems to me to be the logical problem - they can't afford to take care of all these desperately poor people. Is that just being political? These mayors are incapable of telling the truth?

2John5918
Edited: Apr 16, 2019, 5:19 am

>1 margaretbartley:

I suppose the big question is why bus anyone anywhere? Why doesn't each city take care of whichever immigrants are in that city, instead of bussing them somewhere else for someone else to take care of? Looks like the avoidance of responsibility which we call NIMBY in the UK - Not In My Back Yard.

3margaretbartley
Edited: Apr 16, 2019, 11:16 am

There are too many in detention - they have to go somewhere else. There are tens of thousands, and they can't just be released into the border towns they are being held in.

The US has a history of putting large numbers of immigrants in small rural areas with case managers and support; now they are talking about sending illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities specifically, presumably without that additional support.

4John5918
Edited: Apr 17, 2019, 8:03 am

>3 margaretbartley: There are too many in detention

Maybe the solution to that problem is not to detain so many?

they have to go somewhere else

That may be true, but why bus them only to "sanctuary cities"? Why not spread them equally around the cities of the USA, so that all cities can share the benefits of new immigrants and become "more vibrant and attractive"? Or why not simply ask them where they'd like to go in the USA? (Edited to add: and pay their fare there?)

5Crypto-Willobie
Apr 17, 2019, 7:37 am

Cruel because he's using them as pawns, not as people.

6proximity1
Apr 17, 2019, 8:20 am

>5 Crypto-Willobie:

LOL!

Unlike what editors and management at CNN, MS-NBC, Rachel Maddow (est. net-worth, circa 20M. (USD), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (est. net-worth, circa 16M. (USD) (Roll Call Weekday paper, Washington, D.C.) or any of dozens of others with vested interests one could name have done, are doing, or would do if they could turn a buck from it.

Political actors and news people and many others (with the power and influence to help themselves) shamelessly use other people less fortunate than themselves as pawns in their selfish schemes to get and keep power, privilege and advantages over others.

Who knew!?

7John5918
Apr 17, 2019, 8:24 am

>6 proximity1:

So are you agreeing that he's using them as pawns, not as people?

8margd
Apr 17, 2019, 9:13 am

Bad timing, Canada! Trumples will be BUSING folks to Champlain, NY!
(And other such spots along the border, e.g., my favourite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_House :)

In a twist, Canada asks U.S. for help cracking down at its southern border
Selena Ross and Emily Rauhala | April 17, 2019

(A) narrow dirt path connects Roxham Road in Champlain, N.Y., with Roxham Road in Hemmingford, Quebec. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have used it to enter Canada...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-a-twist-canada-asks-us-for-...

9margaretbartley
Edited: Jun 8, 2020, 3:16 am

By "not detain so many", you mean open borders? Let everyone in who wants to come in? Or do you mean send them back (to where?) instead of detaining them? How about claims for amnesty? The US signed a treaty saying people have an absolute right to life, and if their life is threatened, they have the right to the closest safe harbor. People whose lives are being threatened by the Mexican government (excluding judicial punishment) have the right to be in the US, as their closest safe harbor. So the US cannot just automatically put everyone on a bus that they catch crossing the border. The only alternative is to open the borders and let anyone in who wants to come in.
Is that what you are advocating?

The point of putting them in sanctuary cities is that those are the places that are welcoming of immigrants. There are stories that pop up periodically in the press about some little town in Idaho or Vermont or Michigan which gets a large number of immigrants, and the citizens are not happy about it.

Presumably, the immigrants can't afford to pay their fare to the inland of the US. If they had that much money crossing the border, they would probably have been robbed before they got caught by immigration.

10John5918
May 4, 2019, 12:34 pm

>9 margaretbartley:

Why do you need to detain people who are applying for amnesty? They are not criminals.

11margaretbartley
May 4, 2019, 12:52 pm

Their application needs to be verified. Just because someone claims to be in fear of theri life, that's not a free pass to come in the US. They need to provide documentation and proof. And it takes time to check on it. Plus, if there are thousands of people who are all claiming that their lives are being threatened in a country that is not at war, that will take time to verify.

12John5918
May 4, 2019, 5:17 pm

>11 margaretbartley:

But why lock them up while verifying their claim?

13madpoet
May 5, 2019, 5:27 am

>8 margd: Great. So Trump is making the American immigration problems Canada's problem. We should send him the bill.

14proximity1
May 5, 2019, 6:29 am


>9 margaretbartley:

"Let everyone in who wants to come in?"

Yes!, that is indeed what they mean--and this has at last become painfully obvious. Never mind that they have neither the guts nor the honesty to openly admit, it's still very much what they mean.

15margaretbartley
Edited: Aug 18, 2019, 4:17 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

16margaretbartley
Aug 18, 2019, 4:25 pm

12 johnthefireman:
But why lock them up while verifying their claim?


To avoid the open-borders issue. Why bother verifying the claim, if they are already loose in the country? That's the same as saying "OK. come on in."

I just want to verify that that's your opinion - no limit or control on who comes in.

17John5918
Aug 19, 2019, 12:13 am

>16 margaretbartley:

My opinion is that we should not lock up people who have not committed any crime and are not even accused of any crime.

18JGL53
Aug 19, 2019, 4:51 pm

Didn't Ronald Reagan, Mr. Republican himself, sign into law a blanket amnesty for millions of undocumented aliens, mostly brown people, back in the 1980s?

Reagan - the man who has been worshiped as a veritable god by most republicans to this very day?

So - how did republicans turn from caring human beings into crazed satan-worshiping nazi-loving hate-filled demons-made-flesh who drink the blood of innocent Hispanic babies?

Motherfucking motherfuckers - it is republicans who should be sent back to where they came from - apparently HELL.

Motherfuckers.

19StormRaven
Aug 19, 2019, 7:13 pm

The only alternative is to open the borders and let anyone in who wants to come in.

No, it is not, and only the truly ignorant or truly mendacious could possibly claim that it is.

20StormRaven
Aug 19, 2019, 7:18 pm

To avoid the open-borders issue. Why bother verifying the claim, if they are already loose in the country? That's the same as saying "OK. come on in."

This is simply dead wrong. There is no need to detain most asylum seekers - when the U.S. did release asylum seekers prior to their hearings, the vast majority showed up to their final hearing. If they were provided a lawyer, virtually all asylum seekers returned for their scheduled hearings.

The actual solution is to provide more judges to hear cases and provide legal counsel and proper translators to asylum seekers. Doing that wouldn't be "tough" so the dipshits who support this administration or say things like "the only alternative to detaining people is open borders" won't support it, but it would have the advantage of actually being effective.

21margaretbartley
May 3, 2020, 6:26 pm

So you are assuming that if the US just gives a court date to everyone who claims to be an assylum seeker, there will be no or very few people to take advantage of that?

How about the thousands of people from Africa and the Middle East who cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim that the US is the nearest Safe Harbor?

22RickHarsch
May 3, 2020, 8:33 pm

>21 margaretbartley: how about them? are they coming in hordes? have you any idea the mortality rate of Africans merely seeking to cross the Mediterranean?

23proximity1
May 26, 2020, 11:28 am


>21 margaretbartley: "So you are assuming that if the US just gives a court date to everyone who claims to be an assylum seeker, there will be no or very few people to take advantage of that?"

Of course! Every "liberal" "knows" (i.e. assumes) this. It's a given: illegal immigrants when caught, and, despite their desperation which drove them to immigrate illegally in the first place, always honor their court-appointed dates for being heard before having their cases and asylum claims denied and rejected and, upon that, being sent back to their country.

(These are the people who call Donald Trump a moron.)

24kiparsky
May 26, 2020, 12:40 pm

So, just to get something more like a discussion out of this, what's the case against open borders? The case for it is pretty obvious: immigrants make our country better, they solidify our relationships with our neighboring countries, they boost our economy, they commit fewer crimes than immigrants-by-birth.

What's the case for creating artificial barriers to entry, distorting job markets, creating a second tier of workers not protected by labor law to undercut wages and labor rights, and creating a lot of welfare-state jobs for bigots who want to beat up on brown people on a paycheck that comes out of your taxes?

Anyone claiming to stand up for a libertarian position, wanting minimal state interference in people's lives, you might want to explain why it's a good thing for the state to decide where people may and may not live, and why you think that capital should move freely across borders, but labor should not.

25John5918
May 28, 2020, 5:28 am

>24 kiparsky: what's the case against open borders?

That's an important question which should not be lost. It seems there is a dominant default assumption in favour of strictly controlled borders. And yet well-defined national borders are a relatively recent occurrence, largely a result of the rise in sovereign nation states in Europe in the late 19th century. In Africa and much of Asia they can be traced to artificial divisions created by colonial powers, although in an understandable but ill-advised effort to avoid the potential chaos of redrawing boundaries they were accepted by newly-independent African states and the African Union, with very few successful challenges. The secession of Eritrea and South Sudan from Ethiopia and Sudan respectively are two relatively recent examples; the secession of Somaliland and Puntland from Somalia have not been widely recognised; and attempts by Biafra, Katanga and other regions to secede from their states were crushed by military force, heavily supported by the former colonial powers. The break up of former Yugoslavia and the USSR, and the tensions and in many cases conflicts over the years regarding the status of Catalonia, the Basque region, Sud Tirol, Alsace-Lorraine, the Sudetenland, Crimea and Northern Ireland demonstrate the absurd artificiality of many borders in Europe.

But even with redrawn boundaries, border controls still exist. One really wonders why. For the ordinary people of communities which span borders, such as the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, or the Zande in South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, the borders are irrelevant and meaningless. Local people and their cattle wander freely backwards and forwards, oblivious to border controls.

The European Union is a brave attempt to move on from artificial borders, particularly in the Schengen region. I know people who live in France and commute daily to work in Switzerland, just a couple of kms away, and that sort of arrangement is common throughout Europe. The recent Brexit furore over the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland shows how ridiculous and meaningless borders are to the people who live on either side of them. And yet we now see a tightening of border controls throughout Europe in response to Brexit, COVID-19, and that catch-all term, "security". Why do we fall immediately into this knee-jerk regression rather than exploring other options?

Freedom of movement is a basic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which the USA has signed but not ratified) states in articles 13 and 14, "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his/her own, and to return to his/her country. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution", with the proviso that "This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." Why are most of our immigration systems set up to exclude rather than allow freedom of movement? Why are travellers treated as if they are criminals who might fall under that proviso until they prove otherwise?

Might even be worth a thread of its own in Pro and Con?

26margaretbartley
Edited: Oct 30, 2020, 8:28 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

27margaretbartley
Oct 30, 2020, 8:29 pm

>25 John5918: "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his/her own, and to return to his/her country. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution",

If you parse those sentences, none of them individually nor collectively mean that anyone can live anywhere they want.
1) To say people can move within their state does not mean they can go anywhere in the world they want, only that they can move within their state.
2) "to leave a country" means a country can't keep people in, like they tried to do behind the Iron Curtain - not that it can't keep people out.
3) "asylum" is a legal term with specific rights under UN Asylum agreements, which the US has agreed to, and which say that people have the right to be safe, and that they have the right to be granted asylum in the first safe harbor, which means the first place where they are free of the threat of violence. It does not mean if a woman is being beaten by her husband, or a kid has pissed off a gang member, they can go anywhere in the world they want under the ruse of "seeking asylum". They can't pass through safe country to get to another country with better welfare benefits.

I don't know what to say to someone who thinks it is a good idea to have open borders, allowing hundreds of millions of iliterate, sick, unskilled people who hate our way of life into the country.

Borders may be a fairly modern concept, but the same can be said of indoor plumbing, traffic lights, national parks and magazine subscriptions.

Because something is not millenia old does not make it a Bad Idea.

28Crypto-Willobie
Oct 30, 2020, 9:04 pm

"iliterate". 'Nuff said.

29John5918
Oct 30, 2020, 11:37 pm

>28 Crypto-Willobie:

Well said.

>27 margaretbartley: people who hate our way of life into the country.

If they hated your way of life, they wouldn't be coming to your country. If they are " iliterate {sic}, sick, unskilled", terms which you apparently used in a pejorative sense, then your rich and developed country is a good place for them to find education, healing and skills training, something which people aspire to. That could be part of the contribution of the rich to the poorer.