Why would you come to work if you weren't getting paid at all? I'm not following that. Because you assume you'll get backpay?
That aside, I simultaneously hold several thoughts about this.
The first is: The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
The second is: I have sympathy for the folks who work there, who probably are in it mostly to have a stable and non-controversial government job. I'm sure they're going through it, for political reasons that are not their fault.
The third is: There is zero political incentive for either side to cave on this, that I can see, and as somebody who is generally opposed to the behavior of ICE, I think we as the American public will just have to eat it until they are reined in. I'm including myself in that; this has messed with my travel plans and will continue to do so.
But if I were on the other side of the issue, I think I'd hold the exact same opinion: There is no incentive not to continue the shutdown.
> The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
Yeah in can be done like in Europe where security company like G4S is paid by the airport and is manning xrays and handling queues. There are few policemen around to show force and handle conflicts if necessary.
> The first is: The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
In my anecdotal experience. Literally hours before Air Canada plane crash on American airport I was flying from a Canadian airport. The agents after telling me to enter full body scanner with my hands up prevented an inexcusable violation - me bringing on board 0.33l unopened sealed bottle of still water, which funnily I got on board of a plane on previous flight. You got the risk management all wrong, all over, everywhere.
Still, Canadian airport security is probably nicer than TSA.
You have the causality wrong, other than the hardcore group of preachers the rest are swinging that way because it’s what the congregation wants to hear. Preaching the opposite message will drop attendance even more the it has already dropped and will effectively mean having to close the church.
Trump doesn’t get a vote in the Senate. That’s his shtick. He’ll ask for something ridiculous because he thinks it’s gives him leverage. He can ask for wherever he wants but he’s not going to veto a bill that funds both ICE and TSA.
“Senate Democrats insisting on major reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in exchange for ending the 40-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are worried they may be undercut by centrists looking for a way to end the stalemate.”
How does that contradict in any way what I said? Democrats have offered to fund the TSA. Republicans have refused. Ergo, Republicans are blocking TSA funding in order to get what they want. There is no ambiguity here: Republicans could get the TSA funded today, but they view their pet projects as more important than having functional airports.
Why are you on this site if you're never willing to ever say "oh OK my bad"? I don't know what you posted about in the past to get to 125k points, but these days you mostly seem to use the site as a pseudo-intellectual soapbox for conservative politics and anti-immigration sentiment. Is this really healthy? You're accomplishing nothing except getting mass flagged and raising everyone's blood pressure (including, presumably, your own).
It's ok for him to argue for extremely racist and xenophobic policies because of where he graduated, his country of origin, and skin color. He's fine burning karma for it
I’m struggling to understand your thought process. Do you think that:
1) Mass immigration of say Bangladeshis won’t substantively change the communities where they move.
Or is it:
2) You agree that this change will happen, but you think we are morally obligated to accept those changes.
The “racism and xenophobia” angle is nonsensical. I’m a Bangladshi in good standing. I make my Anglo wife deal with all our burdensome social rules and norms. But that doesn’t mean I want more of America to reflect my culture! We sacrificed a lot to get away from a country that was governed by our culture. How can I possibly have a moral obligation to accept parts of America becoming culturally like the place we wanted to escape from?
“Legal” is different from “legitimate” which is different yet again from “good.”
If a party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed—who are steeped in the culture and values and civic sense of those not so nice countries—well that’s legal. But that’s all it is.
Let me put it this way. If the GOP somehow figured out how to flood your city with people from rural Alabama, would you be happy? They would be legal voters, would they not? (The deeply ironic thing is that democrats understand perfectly well that rural Alabama is a product of the culture of the people who built it. But they think that phenomenon somehow ends right at the U.S. border.)
They know, they just don't openly say it. No one has answered your question here. They primarily view the voting bloc that those rural Alabama voters are in as a problem to be dealt with. Actually governing for them is figuring out how to disenfranchise those people because they are inherently bad. Note that everyone is apparently allowed and encouraged to vote as an ethnic bloc except those people.
there is no evidence that votes are being coerced or forced or revealed to authorities. only that homogenous groups tend to have homogenous political opinions as well. that is not some untoward ill that is a risk to America.
How do you choose between this argument that immigrants from other cultures are crucially supporting the Democratic party, and your other common argument that immigrants from other cultures are more inclined to vote reactionary?
When you do pick one, do you at least stick with it for the whole day? Or do you switch between them from thread to thread?
Both facts are true, both facts are bad. In the long run, immigrants will culturally change both parties just as they change the whole country. What will happen, and is already happening, is that American politics will begin to resemble Latin American politics. People voting for who promises more free stuff most of the time, punctuated by periods of right-wing authoritarian reaction.
Your original comment included the implication that this was a deliberate pillar of the Democratic party. ("[one] party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed"). That is outside of the scope of a dispassionate analysis, so regrouping at one is a bit disingenuous.
But responding to your new goal posts - if immigration is so central to this dynamic, then why is most of the support for the current authoritarian reactionary promising more free stuff still coming from non-immigrants? Shouldn't the noble non-immigrants see the populism trap and heartily reject it? And since they aren't, wouldn't a better explanation just be that politics in general is decaying towards simplistic populism? And that this focus on immigrants is merely another simplistic populist narrative (from both parties really, even though only one has made it central to their platform).
> Your original comment included the implication that this was a deliberate pillar of the Democratic party. ("[one] party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed")
Wait, hold on. That’s a purely factual statement. Immigrants are 10% of the electorate. If they support one party 2:1, that’s enough to swing many presidential elections. In fact, half of Trump’s win in 2024 is attributable to immigrants going from Biden +27 to Trump +1. Without immigrants (and their kids), it would be very hard for Democrats, in their current form, to win a national election. That’s just a factual statement.
I don’t think being a party that can only win with immigrant support is a “deliberate pillar” of the party. It’s just a consequence of traditional American culture being very different from the cultures in other countries when it comes to views about government.
> then why is most of the support for the current authoritarian reactionary promising more free stuff still coming from non-immigrants?
I'm not taking issue with the factual background, but rather your motivated reasoning around it (including taking current statistics, imagining changing one thing in isolation, and considering that causal).
We could just as easily say that newer immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat because they are fresh with the reasons they came to this country in the first place plus they just got done studying for the citizenship test, whereas families who have been here for a while take our country for granted which is why they so easily buy into narratives aimed at destroying it.
To be clear, I’m not characterizing why immigrants vote democrat. When I talk about the home counties being dysfunctional that’s not a dig at democrat policies. They could come here and vote republican and it would present the same problem.
ooooh you're one of _those_. america is for the white's. immigrants should assimilate to Our Western Culture types.
like it or not, those immigrants are your countrymen now. they have an equal vote to you. learn to coexist and compromise. that's the spirit of this country. i don't see any degradation of America here.
should've known better than to engage. that type is always in bad faith (sartre quote blah blah blah)
You didn’t answer my hypothetical. What would you do if the GOP figured out how to flood the city where you live with people from rural Alabama, to the degree where they started shifting the balance in the government?
> one of those immigrants should assimilate to Our Western Culture types.
Yes, obviously! The idea that immigrants need not assimilate was a fringe idea even in my now-blue suburb of Virginia just a few decades ago. Yes, immigrants should adopt Anglo-American culture. They should raise their kids the way Anglos raise their kids. Anglo culture is the common thread between Britain, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a degree Hong Kong and Singapore. That’s a fucking incredible track record.
> they have an equal vote to you. learn to coexist and compromise. that's the spirit of this country
No, the spirit of the country is where British americans forced everyone who came after them to assimilate into Anglo culture. Insofar as you can say the mass immigration experiment has previously worked in American history, it was done under a regime of forced assimilation. And the last time we had the foreign born population this high, we had a 40+ year period of immigration restriction to Anglicize all of them.
What we’re doing now—with people like you implying that assimilation is a bad word—has been tried before. It’s actually common all over the world in places like Iraq, Syria, etc. It’s ethnocultural factionalism, and it’s disastrous. In Iraq you can easily predict how people will vote based on which group they belong to. It’s not real democracy.
> In Iraq you can easily predict how people will vote based on which group they belong to. It’s not real democracy.
What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on? I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted? I think you can find a poll link to disprove that. At the least there were probably some Black people voting how Black Americans tended to, or maybe another ethnicity in your area. So your complaint is nonsensical to me, or at least it’s been a "problem" for decades longer than you say. Was the 15th Amendment the start of the problem, to you? A bunch of unassimilated non-Anglos were dumped into the voting pool en masse, only to get worse with the 19th and a bunch more people who were different than the dominant voting base were added.
> What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on?
Who is doing a good job. Non-sectarian ideological preferences. Policies. Who they want to have a beer with.
> I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
No, but you can demand assimilation to where traces of group identity become secondary to non-sectarian factors. Catholics and Protestants in the U.S. used to be deeply divided politically and now that’s not much of a predictor.
> And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted
In my suburb growing up everyone was highly assimilated and any group identity had become extremely shallow. Our group of neighborhood kids was one person with a Russian surname, two pairs of siblings with Anglo surnames, and then me with my Bangladeshi surname. Not once the entire time growing up did we perceive ourselves as having a different group identity from each other.
Weirdly, he is (IIRC) a first generation Bangladeshi immigrant with mixed race kids. Not sure how it all makes sense in his head. I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
> he is (IIRC) a first generation Bangladeshi immigrant
Right, so someone who understands that Bangladesh is the way it is in large part due to Bangladeshi culture.
I’m not raising my kids with any foreign identity or culture, just like my parents didn’t raise me with any foreign identity. My dad doesn’t own a Bangladeshi flag and thinks calling him a hyphenated American makes him a second class citizen.
The view that “brown people” have to cling to the culture of some dysfunctional country they left—waving around the flag of a country their ancestors built into something they had to leave—is one that was dormant when I was growing up, fortunately for me.
> mixed race kids
The concept of “mixed race” is a vile holdover from segregation. It’s a way of designating something superficial as meaningful. We don’t talk about “mixed eye color kids.” Luckily for my kids, all three came out three different colors, so they understand intuitively that skin color is just about how much their mom attacks them with sunscreen and isn’t an identity.
> I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
My kids unfortunately will be reading this from an America where mass immigration without assimilation has led to political factionalism and dysfunction. A place that’s more like Syria or Iraq, where people vote based on group membership than individual preferences. And they’ll unfortunately know I was right.
It's strange you seem to carry water for a political movement that very expressly wants to remove you, your family, and probably your kids in favor of the "heritage" white population. You will never be American enough for them. The DHS official account and, most recently, Greg Bovino have cited 100 million as the number of people they want to deport -- far in excess of the undocumented/illegal population. Also, *this* is the kind of shit that I'd expect from third world failed states, not whatever tepid/centrist policies the Democrats are trying to push: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-receives-yet-anoth...
I genuinely hope that you and your kids have a great future in this country. Politically, that's what I'm fighting for. The Republican white nationalist fever dream is not the America I grew up in and once admired.
The woke right isn’t going to take over the GOP and turn America into Utah again. TACO Trump is already chickening out on deportations. But mainstream Democrats maintaining their current course may very well turn the country into Queens. And I’m sorry Queens reminds me too much of Bangladesh, the chaos and disorder and political dysfunction. The third-worldian appeals to group identity, emotions, and “justice.” At that point you might as well deport me.
They've been in power for at least 10 years, "joking" about a third term, telling us America should be ruled by dictatorship, and you just trust that they won't actually do it? How do you know?
As someone whose culture and religion deviate from those of Republicans, I'm much more terrified of any movement along the axis towards "turning American into Utah¹" than "turning America into Queens" -- on behalf of both myself and my brown neighbors. Also, I'd happily argue that anyone who loathes Queens should be ashamed of calling themselves an American. For as long as I've been around, Queens has been far more representative of the US and its promise than white middle America.
¹ (Strange example to pick given that Mormonism is pretty far removed from Evangelical Christianity, but whatever.)
You’re ret-conning America. Who was Alexis de Tocqueville writing about in “Democracy in America?” It was the people in what you call “middle america.” The America that my parents left their homeland for was created by those people and reflects their culture.
There is nothing great about Queens. It’s just a richer version of Dhaka. Loud, chaotic, fractious, politically dysfunctional cities are a dime a dozen all over the world.
Utah, meanwhile, is a fucking treasure. It’s clean, organized, orderly. The people are rule following, cheerful by default, emotionally repressed, legalistic, and punctual. They’re socialized to be that way from an early age. There’s only a handful of places in the world like it in the world and it’s precious.[1]
America’s greatness isn’t whatever bullshit you’re on about. That’s not why my parents left everything behind to come here. What makes America great is that I can go down to my county office and get a birth certificate printed in 20 minutes. It’s people who are so rule following that they’ll jump off a bridge if you give them paperwork that says they have to do that. That’s what a rarity in the world.
[1] The fact that Mormonism is very different from evangelical Christianity proves that my point isn’t about religion. I don’t care what religion you are. If Little Bangladesh was clean and orderly and efficient like Salt Lake City I would live there myself go to mosque and get fat eating Bangladeshi desserts: https://yelp.to/0XejznQCXp
As it so happens, my parents also left behind a failed state to come here, seemingly around the same time as yours. So don't go preaching *your* bullshit to me: I've seen the same America you have, except believe it or not, I've found great personal joy and meaning in the aspects of our messy, polycultural society that you gape at in horror. If you want perfect order at the expense of everything else, maybe you should start learning Mandarin. (You can probably get your birth certificate delivered straight from an app! What a life!) Meanwhile, I'll do everything in my political power to make your nightmare of a woke dystopia¹ take root at home. And I will look forward to visiting Queens next time I'm in NYC.
¹ (Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism without psychos at the helm.)
P.S. "ret-conning America" -- America was never supposed to be frozen in ice. I take what some dusty philosophers said 200 years ago under advisement. Other than that, they can fuck off.
> the expense of everything else, maybe you should start learning Mandarin.
My greatest regret is that I wasn’t born Japanese.
> I've found great personal joy and meaning in the aspects of our messy, polycultural society
Good god. Are you one of those people who goes to India and marvels at how “vibrant” it is? That sentence just radiates inefficiency.
> Meanwhile, I'll do everything in my political power to make your nightmare of a woke dystopia take root at home
I already thought that is what democrats were aiming at.
> Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism
You’re describing India, except the “immigrant-friendly” part. You’re not describing any functional country that actually exists today. You’re certainly not describing any version of America that’s ever existed.
You’re committing us to an unprecedented social experiment based on romantic bullshit.
By your own logic, it sounds like you should not be voting. Do you live by your own principles? Or did you decide that you're not actually "foreign-culture socialized," unlike those *other* first generation immigrants?
I’m definitely foreign socialized and shouldn’t be voting. But I also think upper middle class people should pay higher taxes but I don’t pay more than I owe.
Do you think Democrats can’t Google these statistics? Or do you think it’s an insignificant share of the electorate? (Foreign-born is 10% and children raised and socialized by foreign born parents is even higher.) Or do you think Democrats’ immigration viewpoints have nothing to do with what’s good for their electoral prospects?
Or do you think Democrats do know all this. But it’s “unhinged” to notice because you think people from Bangladesh will participate in civic governance the same way as a sixth generation Vermonter? Or do you realize they won’t and you’re actually okay with that?
These are genuine questions. I’m struggling to understand your ideological priors here.
They want to (barely) gut the ability of the administration to disappear citizens and to have any sort of training before shooting folks in the face. But fascism gonna fasc.
Why would you come to work if you weren't getting paid at all? I'm not following that. Because you assume you'll get backpay?
That aside, I simultaneously hold several thoughts about this.
The first is: The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
The second is: I have sympathy for the folks who work there, who probably are in it mostly to have a stable and non-controversial government job. I'm sure they're going through it, for political reasons that are not their fault.
The third is: There is zero political incentive for either side to cave on this, that I can see, and as somebody who is generally opposed to the behavior of ICE, I think we as the American public will just have to eat it until they are reined in. I'm including myself in that; this has messed with my travel plans and will continue to do so.
But if I were on the other side of the issue, I think I'd hold the exact same opinion: There is no incentive not to continue the shutdown.
> The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
Yeah in can be done like in Europe where security company like G4S is paid by the airport and is manning xrays and handling queues. There are few policemen around to show force and handle conflicts if necessary.
private airport security has the same terrible implications as private prisons
cut corners, maximize profit
Airport security used to be handled by private companies. Then 9/11 happened and that's the whole reason TSA even exists.
Not sure about it. Private security companies on German airports are absolute malicious assholes, public officers would be better there.
> The first is: The TSA probably doesn't need to exist at all in its current form; I'm not aware of any evidence they actually do anything to stop actual threats.
In my anecdotal experience. Literally hours before Air Canada plane crash on American airport I was flying from a Canadian airport. The agents after telling me to enter full body scanner with my hands up prevented an inexcusable violation - me bringing on board 0.33l unopened sealed bottle of still water, which funnily I got on board of a plane on previous flight. You got the risk management all wrong, all over, everywhere.
Still, Canadian airport security is probably nicer than TSA.
And yet Sea-Tac on Tuesday morning didn’t look bad, and with TSA Precheck Touchless, it was a few minutes.
Apparently Sea-Tac has a very low TSA absentee rate:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/sea-tac-bucks-national-...
SeaTac handles this with augmentation from the port. They do an excellent job and have not been impacted by any of the recent shut downs.
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They’ll forget, and vote based on what their evangelical preacher says to do
You have the causality wrong, other than the hardcore group of preachers the rest are swinging that way because it’s what the congregation wants to hear. Preaching the opposite message will drop attendance even more the it has already dropped and will effectively mean having to close the church.
I too would want to bow and pray before a cardboard cutout of our lord and savior, DJT.
religion is dying in america faster than the boomers
but social media is calling the shots and there is a reason guys like musk wanted twitter.
how many of you outside of greater texas heard about jade helm?
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This is a talking point for the news, not an opinion voters actually have. Especially after all the murders.
Edit: Ugh. Forgot to check the user name
I didn’t say it’s an opinion people have. I said it is factually what’s happening.
For a lawyer, you sure play fast and loose with the word "factual."
Here's a fact: Democrats agreed to fund the TSA. Republicans were amenable. Trump said no.
“It would have worked ,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We could have had T.S.A. paid by the end of the week, but the president said ‘no deal.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/us/politics/trump-shutdow...
There is no ambiguity here: Republicans are blocking TSA funding unless a bunch of unrelated stuff is also funded.
Trump doesn’t get a vote in the Senate. That’s his shtick. He’ll ask for something ridiculous because he thinks it’s gives him leverage. He can ask for wherever he wants but he’s not going to veto a bill that funds both ICE and TSA.
What I’m reading is that Senate Democrats have indicated they won’t vote yes in a bill if it finds ICE. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5801109-fetterman-tsa-pa...
“Senate Democrats insisting on major reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in exchange for ending the 40-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are worried they may be undercut by centrists looking for a way to end the stalemate.”
How does that contradict in any way what I said? Democrats have offered to fund the TSA. Republicans have refused. Ergo, Republicans are blocking TSA funding in order to get what they want. There is no ambiguity here: Republicans could get the TSA funded today, but they view their pet projects as more important than having functional airports.
Why are you on this site if you're never willing to ever say "oh OK my bad"? I don't know what you posted about in the past to get to 125k points, but these days you mostly seem to use the site as a pseudo-intellectual soapbox for conservative politics and anti-immigration sentiment. Is this really healthy? You're accomplishing nothing except getting mass flagged and raising everyone's blood pressure (including, presumably, your own).
It's ok for him to argue for extremely racist and xenophobic policies because of where he graduated, his country of origin, and skin color. He's fine burning karma for it
I’m struggling to understand your thought process. Do you think that:
1) Mass immigration of say Bangladeshis won’t substantively change the communities where they move.
Or is it:
2) You agree that this change will happen, but you think we are morally obligated to accept those changes.
The “racism and xenophobia” angle is nonsensical. I’m a Bangladshi in good standing. I make my Anglo wife deal with all our burdensome social rules and norms. But that doesn’t mean I want more of America to reflect my culture! We sacrificed a lot to get away from a country that was governed by our culture. How can I possibly have a moral obligation to accept parts of America becoming culturally like the place we wanted to escape from?
huh i wonder why they want to do that?
surely not because ICE unlawfully executed two US citizens on tape in broad daylight
that didn't happen under Obama or Biden. wonder why.
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but aren't those people legitimate voters? who cares if they're the "only reason" if it's legitimate - sorry, white-y! you lose
The person you're talking to doesn't even believe in the universal franchise (or that he himself should be allowed to vote!):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305 (second paragraph)
“Legal” is different from “legitimate” which is different yet again from “good.”
If a party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed—who are steeped in the culture and values and civic sense of those not so nice countries—well that’s legal. But that’s all it is.
Let me put it this way. If the GOP somehow figured out how to flood your city with people from rural Alabama, would you be happy? They would be legal voters, would they not? (The deeply ironic thing is that democrats understand perfectly well that rural Alabama is a product of the culture of the people who built it. But they think that phenomenon somehow ends right at the U.S. border.)
They know, they just don't openly say it. No one has answered your question here. They primarily view the voting bloc that those rural Alabama voters are in as a problem to be dealt with. Actually governing for them is figuring out how to disenfranchise those people because they are inherently bad. Note that everyone is apparently allowed and encouraged to vote as an ethnic bloc except those people.
people vote as individuals
there is no evidence that votes are being coerced or forced or revealed to authorities. only that homogenous groups tend to have homogenous political opinions as well. that is not some untoward ill that is a risk to America.
How do you choose between this argument that immigrants from other cultures are crucially supporting the Democratic party, and your other common argument that immigrants from other cultures are more inclined to vote reactionary?
When you do pick one, do you at least stick with it for the whole day? Or do you switch between them from thread to thread?
On average, immigrants support democrats. For example in 2016: https://www.statista.com/statistics/632012/voter-turnout-of-.... It’s the same result for Obama versus Romney, etc.
On the other hand they have been trending Republican in the Trump era, and Trump probably won them narrowly: https://www.cato.org/blog/naturalized-immigrants-probably-vo.... But the same analysis says Biden won them by 27 points in 2020.
Both facts are true, both facts are bad. In the long run, immigrants will culturally change both parties just as they change the whole country. What will happen, and is already happening, is that American politics will begin to resemble Latin American politics. People voting for who promises more free stuff most of the time, punctuated by periods of right-wing authoritarian reaction.
Your original comment included the implication that this was a deliberate pillar of the Democratic party. ("[one] party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed"). That is outside of the scope of a dispassionate analysis, so regrouping at one is a bit disingenuous.
But responding to your new goal posts - if immigration is so central to this dynamic, then why is most of the support for the current authoritarian reactionary promising more free stuff still coming from non-immigrants? Shouldn't the noble non-immigrants see the populism trap and heartily reject it? And since they aren't, wouldn't a better explanation just be that politics in general is decaying towards simplistic populism? And that this focus on immigrants is merely another simplistic populist narrative (from both parties really, even though only one has made it central to their platform).
> Your original comment included the implication that this was a deliberate pillar of the Democratic party. ("[one] party can only win by people who are zero or only one generations away from countries that aren’t very well governed")
Wait, hold on. That’s a purely factual statement. Immigrants are 10% of the electorate. If they support one party 2:1, that’s enough to swing many presidential elections. In fact, half of Trump’s win in 2024 is attributable to immigrants going from Biden +27 to Trump +1. Without immigrants (and their kids), it would be very hard for Democrats, in their current form, to win a national election. That’s just a factual statement.
I don’t think being a party that can only win with immigrant support is a “deliberate pillar” of the party. It’s just a consequence of traditional American culture being very different from the cultures in other countries when it comes to views about government.
> then why is most of the support for the current authoritarian reactionary promising more free stuff still coming from non-immigrants?
Because most people are non-immigrants.
I'm not taking issue with the factual background, but rather your motivated reasoning around it (including taking current statistics, imagining changing one thing in isolation, and considering that causal).
We could just as easily say that newer immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat because they are fresh with the reasons they came to this country in the first place plus they just got done studying for the citizenship test, whereas families who have been here for a while take our country for granted which is why they so easily buy into narratives aimed at destroying it.
To be clear, I’m not characterizing why immigrants vote democrat. When I talk about the home counties being dysfunctional that’s not a dig at democrat policies. They could come here and vote republican and it would present the same problem.
ooooh you're one of _those_. america is for the white's. immigrants should assimilate to Our Western Culture types.
like it or not, those immigrants are your countrymen now. they have an equal vote to you. learn to coexist and compromise. that's the spirit of this country. i don't see any degradation of America here.
should've known better than to engage. that type is always in bad faith (sartre quote blah blah blah)
You didn’t answer my hypothetical. What would you do if the GOP figured out how to flood the city where you live with people from rural Alabama, to the degree where they started shifting the balance in the government?
> one of those immigrants should assimilate to Our Western Culture types.
Yes, obviously! The idea that immigrants need not assimilate was a fringe idea even in my now-blue suburb of Virginia just a few decades ago. Yes, immigrants should adopt Anglo-American culture. They should raise their kids the way Anglos raise their kids. Anglo culture is the common thread between Britain, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a degree Hong Kong and Singapore. That’s a fucking incredible track record.
> they have an equal vote to you. learn to coexist and compromise. that's the spirit of this country
No, the spirit of the country is where British americans forced everyone who came after them to assimilate into Anglo culture. Insofar as you can say the mass immigration experiment has previously worked in American history, it was done under a regime of forced assimilation. And the last time we had the foreign born population this high, we had a 40+ year period of immigration restriction to Anglicize all of them.
What we’re doing now—with people like you implying that assimilation is a bad word—has been tried before. It’s actually common all over the world in places like Iraq, Syria, etc. It’s ethnocultural factionalism, and it’s disastrous. In Iraq you can easily predict how people will vote based on which group they belong to. It’s not real democracy.
> In Iraq you can easily predict how people will vote based on which group they belong to. It’s not real democracy.
What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on? I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted? I think you can find a poll link to disprove that. At the least there were probably some Black people voting how Black Americans tended to, or maybe another ethnicity in your area. So your complaint is nonsensical to me, or at least it’s been a "problem" for decades longer than you say. Was the 15th Amendment the start of the problem, to you? A bunch of unassimilated non-Anglos were dumped into the voting pool en masse, only to get worse with the 19th and a bunch more people who were different than the dominant voting base were added.
> What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on?
Who is doing a good job. Non-sectarian ideological preferences. Policies. Who they want to have a beer with.
> I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
No, but you can demand assimilation to where traces of group identity become secondary to non-sectarian factors. Catholics and Protestants in the U.S. used to be deeply divided politically and now that’s not much of a predictor.
> And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted
In my suburb growing up everyone was highly assimilated and any group identity had become extremely shallow. Our group of neighborhood kids was one person with a Russian surname, two pairs of siblings with Anglo surnames, and then me with my Bangladeshi surname. Not once the entire time growing up did we perceive ourselves as having a different group identity from each other.
Weirdly, he is (IIRC) a first generation Bangladeshi immigrant with mixed race kids. Not sure how it all makes sense in his head. I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
> he is (IIRC) a first generation Bangladeshi immigrant
Right, so someone who understands that Bangladesh is the way it is in large part due to Bangladeshi culture.
I’m not raising my kids with any foreign identity or culture, just like my parents didn’t raise me with any foreign identity. My dad doesn’t own a Bangladeshi flag and thinks calling him a hyphenated American makes him a second class citizen.
The view that “brown people” have to cling to the culture of some dysfunctional country they left—waving around the flag of a country their ancestors built into something they had to leave—is one that was dormant when I was growing up, fortunately for me.
> mixed race kids
The concept of “mixed race” is a vile holdover from segregation. It’s a way of designating something superficial as meaningful. We don’t talk about “mixed eye color kids.” Luckily for my kids, all three came out three different colors, so they understand intuitively that skin color is just about how much their mom attacks them with sunscreen and isn’t an identity.
> I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
My kids unfortunately will be reading this from an America where mass immigration without assimilation has led to political factionalism and dysfunction. A place that’s more like Syria or Iraq, where people vote based on group membership than individual preferences. And they’ll unfortunately know I was right.
It's strange you seem to carry water for a political movement that very expressly wants to remove you, your family, and probably your kids in favor of the "heritage" white population. You will never be American enough for them. The DHS official account and, most recently, Greg Bovino have cited 100 million as the number of people they want to deport -- far in excess of the undocumented/illegal population. Also, *this* is the kind of shit that I'd expect from third world failed states, not whatever tepid/centrist policies the Democrats are trying to push: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-receives-yet-anoth...
I genuinely hope that you and your kids have a great future in this country. Politically, that's what I'm fighting for. The Republican white nationalist fever dream is not the America I grew up in and once admired.
The woke right isn’t going to take over the GOP and turn America into Utah again. TACO Trump is already chickening out on deportations. But mainstream Democrats maintaining their current course may very well turn the country into Queens. And I’m sorry Queens reminds me too much of Bangladesh, the chaos and disorder and political dysfunction. The third-worldian appeals to group identity, emotions, and “justice.” At that point you might as well deport me.
What's wrong with Queens? Too much Spanish?
> The woke right isn’t going to take over the GOP
They've been in power for at least 10 years, "joking" about a third term, telling us America should be ruled by dictatorship, and you just trust that they won't actually do it? How do you know?
As someone whose culture and religion deviate from those of Republicans, I'm much more terrified of any movement along the axis towards "turning American into Utah¹" than "turning America into Queens" -- on behalf of both myself and my brown neighbors. Also, I'd happily argue that anyone who loathes Queens should be ashamed of calling themselves an American. For as long as I've been around, Queens has been far more representative of the US and its promise than white middle America.
¹ (Strange example to pick given that Mormonism is pretty far removed from Evangelical Christianity, but whatever.)
You’re ret-conning America. Who was Alexis de Tocqueville writing about in “Democracy in America?” It was the people in what you call “middle america.” The America that my parents left their homeland for was created by those people and reflects their culture.
There is nothing great about Queens. It’s just a richer version of Dhaka. Loud, chaotic, fractious, politically dysfunctional cities are a dime a dozen all over the world.
Utah, meanwhile, is a fucking treasure. It’s clean, organized, orderly. The people are rule following, cheerful by default, emotionally repressed, legalistic, and punctual. They’re socialized to be that way from an early age. There’s only a handful of places in the world like it in the world and it’s precious.[1]
America’s greatness isn’t whatever bullshit you’re on about. That’s not why my parents left everything behind to come here. What makes America great is that I can go down to my county office and get a birth certificate printed in 20 minutes. It’s people who are so rule following that they’ll jump off a bridge if you give them paperwork that says they have to do that. That’s what a rarity in the world.
[1] The fact that Mormonism is very different from evangelical Christianity proves that my point isn’t about religion. I don’t care what religion you are. If Little Bangladesh was clean and orderly and efficient like Salt Lake City I would live there myself go to mosque and get fat eating Bangladeshi desserts: https://yelp.to/0XejznQCXp
As it so happens, my parents also left behind a failed state to come here, seemingly around the same time as yours. So don't go preaching *your* bullshit to me: I've seen the same America you have, except believe it or not, I've found great personal joy and meaning in the aspects of our messy, polycultural society that you gape at in horror. If you want perfect order at the expense of everything else, maybe you should start learning Mandarin. (You can probably get your birth certificate delivered straight from an app! What a life!) Meanwhile, I'll do everything in my political power to make your nightmare of a woke dystopia¹ take root at home. And I will look forward to visiting Queens next time I'm in NYC.
¹ (Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism without psychos at the helm.)
P.S. "ret-conning America" -- America was never supposed to be frozen in ice. I take what some dusty philosophers said 200 years ago under advisement. Other than that, they can fuck off.
> the expense of everything else, maybe you should start learning Mandarin.
My greatest regret is that I wasn’t born Japanese.
> I've found great personal joy and meaning in the aspects of our messy, polycultural society
Good god. Are you one of those people who goes to India and marvels at how “vibrant” it is? That sentence just radiates inefficiency.
> Meanwhile, I'll do everything in my political power to make your nightmare of a woke dystopia take root at home
I already thought that is what democrats were aiming at.
> Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism
You’re describing India, except the “immigrant-friendly” part. You’re not describing any functional country that actually exists today. You’re certainly not describing any version of America that’s ever existed.
You’re committing us to an unprecedented social experiment based on romantic bullshit.
By your own logic, it sounds like you should not be voting. Do you live by your own principles? Or did you decide that you're not actually "foreign-culture socialized," unlike those *other* first generation immigrants?
I’m definitely foreign socialized and shouldn’t be voting. But I also think upper middle class people should pay higher taxes but I don’t pay more than I owe.
I think we will collectively upvote and vouch all of your posts if you vow to never vote again. Federal, local, and Internet polls
Your views are getting more unhinged by the day fyi.
You used to have interesting, if tediously contrarian things to say. But now it's just strawmans and weird takes like the above.
I wonder if his clients are aware of his posting history.
Serious question: what exactly is unhinged about my point? Naturalized citizens supported Hilary Clinton 2-1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/632012/voter-turnout-of-.... They supported Biden by 27.
Do you think Democrats can’t Google these statistics? Or do you think it’s an insignificant share of the electorate? (Foreign-born is 10% and children raised and socialized by foreign born parents is even higher.) Or do you think Democrats’ immigration viewpoints have nothing to do with what’s good for their electoral prospects?
Or do you think Democrats do know all this. But it’s “unhinged” to notice because you think people from Bangladesh will participate in civic governance the same way as a sixth generation Vermonter? Or do you realize they won’t and you’re actually okay with that?
These are genuine questions. I’m struggling to understand your ideological priors here.
Obama - famous for not enforcing immigration.
They want to (barely) gut the ability of the administration to disappear citizens and to have any sort of training before shooting folks in the face. But fascism gonna fasc.