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The reality behind "santurary cities" I think is bringing more heat than light. The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime. If they have to work with ice they will be avoided at all costs by the likes of victims and community members. If you don't want sychopath serial criminals hiding out with a population that cannot reasonable expel them then you need something like this. There are plenty of ways that the ability to prevent illegal immigration are hampered by the denizens of MV, but this is not the important one.
IMO those sorts of policies are defensible, but the broader "anti-immigration enforcement" sentiment (the bailey, as it were) includes state judges sneaking immigrants out literal back doors to avoid ICE custody and San Francisco trying to avoid the deportation of felons wanted on federal murder charges.
I'm not opposed to real immigration reform, but fighting over enforcement is, I think, a pretty bad look.
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The reality of Dallas becoming a sanctuary city because otherwise the large community of undocumented El Salvadorans will allow MS-13 to shelter among them for fear that the police call ICE is fairly reasonable. Same for LA, Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston, etc. That’s because otherwise law abiding illegals and their children make up a large percentage of those cities’ underclass and are willing to talk to the police if it isn’t a deportation risk.
Martha’s Vineyard becoming a sanctuary city when it already has functionally no illegal immigrants and no gang presence is pure political signaling, and the same thing can be said for other cities that lack the specific condition of ethnic gangs trying to hide among otherwise pro-law and order undocumented coethnics.
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Yes, but this still implies that the migrants are actually able to stay in the city itself.
The implication has always been that they want migrants near them.
But the people who are most in favor of allowing illegal immigrants to stay are, conspicuously, the ones who never have to live in and around said immigrants. There's consistently a lack of skin in the game with this particular policy prescription.
Do you really think if we polled people in major metro areas (the place where the vast majority of illegal immigrants actually live) on what they think, they'd be in favor of large scale deportation? They have skin in the game and also generally don't care. Conversely, why is it that some of the most intense xenophobia comes out of places in the interior of the country that attract next to no migrants?
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True, but for those of us who do live around them I prefer the police that be more effective.
Yup.
Although we could go off on the tangent about the people pushing 'defund the police' and most likely to believe that police officers are a danger to minorities turn out to usually be those who least depend on the police for protection.
It's just contradictions all the way down if you dig into it.
If Martha's Vineyard supports open borders or at least is okay with large amounts of migrants coming across, I'd love to hear their coherent reasons for explaining why those migrants can't stay in their town.
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