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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   29814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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You can’t get “deport 13 million people” (or even 5 million) past the senate filibuster or quite possibly even 50 Republican senators without some kind of pathway to citizenship for at least some illegal migrants, which would be unconscionable absent extreme concessions (see below).

Personally if I was Trump I’d propose a grand gambit, in which the GOP approves a pathway to citizenship for, say, the 5 million longest-resident illegal migrants in exchange for fully restoring the pre-1965 national origins restrictions (thus limiting all future legal immigration) into law. Sadly, the left is still too smart to go for that.

The left would go for that in a heartbeat, if only to demonstrate the illiteracy of the GOP. The pre-1965 immigration restrictions did not impose any quotas on immigration from within the Western Hemisphere. While it put Asian immigration to a dead standstill, the focus was limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Funny, the Democrats explicitly wanted to pass a very conservative immigration bill last year before Trump sabotaged it for cynical reasons.

  • -10

Yes, and at the time I argued here that that was a huge mistake. Still, the bill (while good - and again, it should have passed) didn’t really address this particular issue.

Oh, that's right, you were seemingly the one person on the entire forum that agreed with me back then. Thanks for that, by the way. It was nice to not feel like I was going completely insane.

My sympathy for you is truly heartfelt. But so is the insane cackling I can't seem to stop doing.

Millions of people can already be deported because they either have final removal orders or will be caught in the US without a visa and placed in removal proceedings. No further legislation is required to deport these people, just way more resources (realistically, the magnitude of the deportations envisioned is almost impossible without fundamentally changing the social fabric of the country).

Yeah, exactly. The bill would presumably be about both legitimizing and funding / building the infrastructure for that kind of action.

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