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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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A lot of this, as with every Republican nominee since 1932, is just that Everything I Don't Like Is Fascist Hitlerisms.

The steelman is that anti-immigration is a major component of Trump's interests, that the necessary steps for achieving those interests will involve putting a ton of people in extremely bad circumstances, and that when things get fucked up in the process quite a lot of people would die unintentionally or 'unintentionally'.

  • Exact numbers are messy, but when we're talking immigration we're necessarily talking about a lot of people. The official numbers for illegal undocumented immigrants (eg, not TPS enrollees) are only 11-12m, but this is broadly believed to be an undercount, with more skeptical takes being closer to 20m. There are around 800k TPS enrollees almost all of which are past the point where it's temporary, a larger-but-unknown number of refugee-applicants of varying levels of honesty, and a tiny number of really sketchy green card or naturalization or refugee cases (probably <10k?).
  • A large portion of Trump's claim is 'sending them back': charitably, to reenter a line or waiting list for lawful immigration that will be made moderately more accessible after enforcement of immigrant law returns to any level of credible effort; less charitably, by flipping the bird after.
  • Rounding them up is, alone, a big issue. TPS enrollees and refugees officially are supposed to keep their location on file, but enforcement is kinda lax and they definitely aren't going to have a lot of incentives if there's broad-scale deportation going on using that file. By definition, undocumented immigrants don't. There's a lot of trouble any time law enforcement gets involved in anything, but it scales up real quick.
  • Some number will 'self-deport', but this is likely to be a pretty small fraction. A more sizable group might take the L after getting caught -- trade a flight and a cleanish record for not kicking up a fuss -- but at best they'll be a minority, and more likely there will be direct efforts to jam up the system as much as possible.
  • Which matters because the system isn't built for high throughput, and several portions have Constitutional guarantees. Even if you avoid the question of whether non-citizens have certain relevant due process protections (which is itself a big question), you at least have to separate citizens from non-citizens with enough accuracy and due process. Some of them will have minor citizen children, so that's even more fun.
  • And even when you're absolutely sure you want to deport them, and you have all the physical infrastructure to actually bus or fly them out, you actually need a place to put them. In many cases, we're talking whole percents of country populations, often from countries that don't necessarily want or have the infrastructure to take them back.
  • So now you've got 5m-25m people that you're trying to kick out or are attached to people you're trying to kick out. You probably don't want to just have them wandering the streets after you catch them, but this is larger than the entire existing American prison system, possibly by an order of magnitude.
  • Well, we actually do know how to hold a whole bunch of not-especially-violent people without having to imprison them: set specific geographic areas aside for them with fences and limited in-and-out. It's not pretty, though.
  • Except, uh, we don't know how to do that well or safely. WWII Internment had no small number of rough edges, and it was much smaller, even after adjustment for general population size. We don't have good numbers for what sorta fatalities are happening in Uyghur 'reeducation' camps in China are, but I think a lowest plausible estimate is in the hundreds, and while I'd like to think that American open-air prisons would do better, I'm not hugely optimistic on them being perfect.
  • And, uh, we'll also have a large number of people newly removed from the mainstream population, not especially liked even by their home countries, and definitely not liked by the US government's leadership. Shame if something were to... happen to them.

This doesn't work, in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that it doesn't work, and at step one Trump gets slapped with APA problems, and it's going to keep going that way. Everything after step six or so just rolls around on the assumption that the Evil People are Going To Do The Most Evil Thing Possible, because mumble mumble someone said bad genes somewhere. In the actual real-world, in the incredibly unlikely chance that a Trump administration manages to get any of the big TPS status revoked, it'll be disruptive, but in the slow trickling sense.

But it's not incoherent or made up. It's just wrong. Probably with a bit of hyperbole because they see the plausible cases as Bad Enough. And those probably aren't really 'wrong'. You can do the QALY assessments, but napkin math puts 10-50m QALY on the table, sometimes pretty luridly.

((Though they may not be honest.))

You may recognize that this makes any effort to enforce immigration law Nazi-level, not just despite but because of Democratic efforts to make even trivial efforts to enforce the law so costly and disruptive. If so, congratulations, here's your Encyclopedia Brown merit badge.

My guess would be (assuming some level of competence on the part of the Trump team, I know) that they'd lean into the self-deportation -- if you crack down on illegals working/driving/transacting business in an effective way (which is theoretically possible, federally) then American Life becomes less attractive. Also it's not clear how much Trump cares about effectiveness of deportation per se -- being able to claim to have taken action and being cock-blocked by California or whatnot is probably fine with him.

Yeah, and I think conservatives are underestimating how hard even that limited approach is going to be -- there's a lot of people who know about past TPS rollbacks getting APA'd, but there's fewer who know about states just banning use of eVerify or firing people for their immigration status, or the extent that a lot of funding to support immigrants is laundered through various indirect grants or other organizations to make it hard to trim.

Trump taking whatever attempt, successful or not, and calling it is definitely plausible.

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