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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29925 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Do you have any ideas for how to deal with the large population of immigrants that weren’t apprehended at the border? The recent wave all seemed to come under the strategy of ‘allow yourself to be apprehended, claim asylum, don’t show up to your hearing’ because the government was allowing it. But even with this giant population of illegal immigrants known to the government, Trump is having a hard time deporting them due to legal process issues. For the massive population of those who aren’t already known to the government, how would we deport them if they just say they are a US citizen and make the government prove that they aren’t? It’s more likely that we overturn birthright citizenship than change the law so that US citizens can be apprehended and be made to affirmatively prove citizenship or get swiftly deported. We’d need some sort of mandatory national ID which would be opposed even by a significant contingent of Trump voters.

We’d need some sort of mandatory national ID which would be opposed even by a significant contingent of Trump voters.

Man, I remember when "national secure ID" was a D policy and opposing it as anti-Christian was an R one.

Not that you're at all wrong, but I guess you live long enough and you see politics go through some wild arcs.

I opposed ID twenty years ago in the UK when it was about being modern and in some nebulous way preventing terrorism.

I’m not, on balance, keen on it now.

I just recognise that we need universal ID to achieve goals that I care about more (immigration control).

Wait until they switch on who's pro/anti war once again.

This is why I've always thought "party switch" arguments to be sophomoric. Politics is about coalitions. Any glance at any country's political history would tell you that political positions are driven by the expediencies of retaining a coalition that can maintain power, and literally nothing else.

I've read this article a couple times trying to figure it out, and the answer is "somewhere between 10% and 95%." I'm only sort of joking; part of the problem is that the government doesn't report attendance, it reports completions:

“The government … does not report immigrants’ appearance rate,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, wrote in a July 2019 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “Instead it reports a related figure called the ‘in absentia rate’ — the percentage of ‘completed’ cases closed each year because the person missed court. Because the penalty for missing court is an automatic deportation order, these cases are completed rapidly. As a result, that figure overemphasizes rapid deportations for missing court and leaves out the much larger number of cases that remain pending as the immigrant diligently appears for every hearing.”

He used the following example to illustrate his point: “To simplify, imagine 10 people are scheduled to appear in court one day and nine show up. The judge issues a deportation order for the person who missed court, then deals with the remaining cases, finishing one and ordering the other eight to return for another hearing. The appearance rate for that day is 90%. The in absentia rate is a mere 50% — one deportation order divided by two completed cases.”

But also the numbers overall seem bizarre and don't really explain much. Like for 2023, 30K approvals, 30K denials, and 130K "Other"? Which a footnote says "Other" was deactivated in 2019, so why is still so common? Lots of missing information here.

Edit: formatting

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