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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8402 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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What's ugly about it is that Americans who are not sufficiently white don't like the idea that their white coworker or whoever is basically fine with them being seized and deported to El Salvador just because they're a bit too far on his circles of concern.

I can’t speak for Americans but an awful lot of people who are sufficiently white are very fed up with having foreigners and the children of foreigners dumped on them and being told, “these are your people now and so you must care about them”. No, they’re not and they never were. I know damn well who my people are.

Not to mention that the foreigners in question know perfectly well who their ingroup is and have spent the last ten years making it very clear that the ingroup excludes me. If we were having this conversation 15 years ago it might be quite different. But it’s way too late for that now.

All that's being asked is that you not send innocent people to prison in third world countries. I don't think it's reasonable to reject that. In some cases, foreigners are being invited to come to the US, and then being deported to El Salvador, a country they are not even citizens of. No one is asking for you to give up anything of value. You are being asked to not be inhumane.

Except that isn’t what happened here. The guy is an illegal immigrant from ES.

There have been cases of Venezuelans legally in the US being deported to El Salvador where hey we're imprisoned, with the US paying for it.

Granted, and given ideal circumstances I agree with all of that.

What can’t and doesn’t work is having hundreds of thousands of people arrive every year and then having to follow an expensive multi-month process for every single migrant to get rid of them.

In short, how do you propose to square truly mass migration with giving each migrant due process, given real-world legal and financial constraints?

The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.

But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.

Well, for example, you could minimize damage by not sending deportees to foreign prisons. Just fly them out and let them off at the airport and don't let them back in again. Whether the country to which they've been returned wants them locked up is its problem and they'll have to arrest them by their own means and prove a case against them within the local justice system to do that.

Well - do we know, actually, that this isn't what happened here? I think it's pretty likely they did in fact fly to an airport and not directly to a prison, and that it's pretty likely they did in fact turn them over to El Salvadoran custody at that point. Or are you making the stronger demand that we not deport anyone who is likely to be imprisoned in their home country? Unfortunately this amounts to a demand that we provide sanctuary and extra privileges to the world's criminals, which is outrageous.

Trump actively liaised with El Salvador, and apparently paid it to imprison these people. This isn't a case where we flew the deportees to El Salvador, and El Salvador separately decided to indict them upon their arrival. It's not clear to me that Garcia has been formally charged with anything specific in El Salvador, and I would be astounded if he had gotten a fair trial there. Had America taken the handcuffs off him at the airport and let him go where he pleased from there, it's not clear to me that El Salvador would have any desire, let alone just cause, to arrest him unless he started committing crimes there. This is what I propose we do; it seems like a pretty clear middle ground between "refuse to deport anyone who might be imprisoned by their home country" and "actively ask for and facilitate their imprisonment once they're returned".

Sure, I’m fine with that. I suspect the prison is an El Salvador requirement - one problem with deporting people (especially criminals) is that lots of countries don’t actually want these guys back. This gives El Salvador an excuse to demand payment and guarantees that the returnees won’t be a nuisance.

Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with the main problem though.

You are being asked to not be inhumane.

Tough luck. The mood in the maga crowd (at least from my peers) is fuckem all. Some are even wondering how they are going to push the overton window enough to start denaturalizing citizens.

That's the motte, where the bailey is that any individual instance of deportation is inhumane for one reason or another and the burden of proof is on the society that would like to deport the immigrants and that this proof is so onerously difficult to provide that deportations become so much more difficult relative to illegal immigrations that a positive net inflow of illegal immigrants is absolutely guaranteed.

You're the one employing the motte and bailey technique by literally changing what the argument is about when challenged. No one here is saying all deportation is inhumane. This is a distraction from the fact that the US government is sending people to foreign prisons without charge.

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