Give it some time, they're emulating russia in just about every other respect as well.

What’s happening today is that megacorps are bringing in people illegally to dump the salaries of the locals and for some reason the left, which should fight for the working rights of the locals, is siding with the revenue of the billionaires.

There are plenty of diverse visas available. Arguing that specific visa is not available and therefore you do not have to follow the law is not an argument I can follow. In my mind that is tantamount to fraud.

America is a very large country and I’m sure if you paid enough, and took the time to train the workers you can find people to do the work. If you have planned your budget and timeline around not taking this path then it seems unethical to me.

I’ve witnessed tech jobs done where there are plenty of capable people in the us available to do the work. They just cannot afford to post us wages and train the workers in the us.

I completely understand that some projects are different, and you need a specific skillset. But if you are going to do work on us soil you have to follow the law.

Absolutely nothing prevents anyone from working in a place. I don't see anyone in this thread saying otherwise.

ghaff's comment - the one you replied to - included "there's been something of a crackdown on out-of-state work from a tax perspective".

As you correctly point out, that's a different thing than the right to work somewhere.

Interesting. I missed this. Thanks.

Yes, I know we have detention centers. Believe me I'm not happy about them.

> The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.

The US is an outlier in relying wholesale on an illegal workforce without representation and without healthcare or access to the legal system to keep their economy afloat.

> For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.

Sorry, and given that this is a point of law, you are utterly wrong on this, which makes me wonder what else you are wrong about where you are so confident.

https://www.vera.org/news/what-does-due-process-mean-for-imm...

Have a read, and maybe adjust your priors a bit.

> Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.

You keep saying that, here and elsewhere. But it just isn't true.

> As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.

That is very much not true and you know it. The biggest problem with US immigration law is that it is (1) ridiculously complex (2) dealt with by understaffed entities (3) kept in place because industry and agriculture more or less depend on it and (4) effectively makes the country a vast amount of money.

If you're so horrified by it then you can blame your parents for picking a country to emigrate to that was soft on emigration. You can't pin this on the emigrants, many of whom were in the USA well before you were even born.

Meanwhile, you're on the record as a lawyer that argues incessantly on behalf of a government that is doing their level best to destroy the justice system that you've grown up in and that you - ostensibly - support. An extrajudicial assassination or two - let alone 11 - doesn't even cause a raised eyebrow, and mass deportations without so much as a chance of legal review doesn't either.

> I truly never could comprehend how Hitler got to power.

There are two great movies about this. 'The Third Wave' and 'Er ist wieder da'.

Of course we have reality now and we see how ostensibly smart people are lured in by soundbites and simple solutions to complicated problems. The dumb ones I can't really blame but the smart ones are a much bigger problem. They twist and turn like eels on a hook to try to justify that which can't be justified at all, not even in the abstract. And yet, they persist. And in doing so they normalize the language and the attitude that goes with that. It's like watching something viral replicate.

> Now we’re seeing it in action, and it scares me.

Yes, it scares me too. It scares me in ways that I did not think I could be scared. It scares me to the point that I wonder if we're not already past the point of no return, that this - like WWII - has to burn out before things can get better again. Assuming there will be anything left. Too many forces are working really hard to destabilize the world that we've come to take for granted.

What I have realized though is that at the head of these movements are a relatively small number of people, each with their own agenda. And you have to wonder: if it hadn't been Hitler, who would have come to power there? None of the cast that we know had the power of oration that Hitler had, his ability to make people believe that he had the answers, when he clearly did not. The dissatisfaction of the German populace with the outcome of WWI and the finger pointing are very much reminiscent of what is happening right now in many places all over the world. The exact same patterns. And instead of radio (which never lost its power) we now have the TV and the internet to push our buttons and make us act against our own interests.

'May you live in interesting times' always was a curse, not a blessing.

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> American democracy is highly unusual in the world.

Indeed it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through.

> Indians, for example, have figured out mass voting—within a society where people see government as a parental figure—but they don’t have anything resembling the bottom-up participatory democracy of something like the Iowa Caucuses.

Nor do they have gerrymandering. But such singular characteristics are not defining either. Both India, the USA and in fact much of the planet have issues in terms of government, participation and representation. It is however pretty rare to see a nominal democracy turn into an autocracy overnight. Rarer still that this is being cheered on by those that stand the least to gain from the change.

> I think it’s inevitable (and baked in) that democracy in America will degrade to what it is in most third world countries: masses of low information citizens with little sense of ownership and participation voting for daddy government to care for them.

That is one possible outcome. There are many others and quite a few of them a lot worse than that. Currently, based on how things are going we are not on a worldline (to use a popular term) where the outcome that you sketch is inevitable at all.

> I linked that page because the iceberg metaphor is extremely useful.

Indeed it is. But remarkably, it serves mostly to show why what you are writing is simply not true.

> The rest of the page is feeler slop.

You mean the bits you didn't bother to read before you linked the page? Or just the bits that you don't like?

> It recognizes that cultural differences are substantive (e.g. concepts of fairness) and not only superficial (e.g. food).

And this is news how?

> But it takes it as axiomatic that mixing those differences necessarily is a good thing.

Which indeed it is.

> Of course we don't have to take it on faith that mixing cultures is a good thing, we can look at actual results. For example, more than 200 years after they immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers, Dutch Americans are still more successful and orderly along many dimensions even compared to neighboring German Americans.

This is absolutely hilarious. Dutch Americans went to America not because they were so orderly or successful, they went there because there either was money to be made or because they were - case in point - deported. The same for many English and Irish people that made it to the early USA. My very high flying and orderly lawyer decided to figure out his ancestry and ended up at some criminal that had picked the boat instead of the gallows.

> For example, Dutch Americans, along with Mormons, were the two groups of Republicans to vote strongly against Trump in the 2016 primary: https://michaeljdouma.com/2019/05/19/dutch-americans-in-alie....

That's by a guy whose ancestors came from Friesland, arguably the most nationalistic of all of NL, but along the lines of how Catalans or Basques see their position in Spain. They cling to their history due to endless suppression of the Frisians by the Dutch (at the time, North Holland and South Holland), not unlike what the UK did to the Irish but a bit less brutal (usually, anyway). But fine, let's look at what he wrote instead of at who he is and what his ancestorship is.

He mostly argues that the Dutch have managed to set themselves apart from other groups of immigrants by staying true to their roots, but also that they have since assimilated and that those communities are now more mixed.

I know a bunch of people like that. Family members that emigrated long ago, you may have heard of them, they're amongst the wealthiest in the United States. They are no longer connected to the Netherlands in any practical way, the only thing that still links them is their last name, and a vague recollection that they had some Dutch ancestry. Their story is fairly unique, but there are many stories that are much more mundane without such insane commercial success. If not for their last names you wouldn't be able to tell their ancestry at all.

And sure, rural towns that were populated or founded by immigrants from one group tend to keep some of their roots alive, possibly as some kind of time capsule. Just like the Dutch Afrikaners, to name one weird offshoot of Dutch colonialism. Nothing to be proud of, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, the cities are the melting pots, and that's where far more people live of all kinds of ancestry than in the rural country side. That's also where the fear of the other tends to be a lot lower, simply because there are more others and it is much easier to live together because it is normalized. I employed the only non-white guy on an Island in Canada and I've seen up close how those former Dutch (and German) ancestors dealt with the opportunity to get up close and personal with other cultures. Hint: not very well. So spare me the great advantages of those orderly people who once upon a time came across the Atlantic to colonize the new land. They are no different than anybody else, and with a little luck their little islands are as racist as they come.

> If you don't care about superficial elements of culture (food, movies), cultural influence from immigrants has made almost no positive impact on American culture.

What???

> The most functional and orderly communities in the country in 1725 were New England Purtians [sic], and the places populated by their descendants remain so in 2025.

Yes, who would have thought that having a massive head start in money and education would lead to a lasting advantage over time? Where do you think the term 'old money' comes from? Immigrants as a rule, especially undocumented ones are not going to be hobnobbing with the wealthy New England old money descendants to pick up the finer points of dining table behavior or how to function in a social climate different than the one they came from. There are some exceptions but let's not kid each other here. But there is a very good chance that the UBO of their presence in the USA is exactly that group of descendants of those New England Puritans, and not the immigrants. And that allows you in turn to point at them as failures, rather than as the exploited.

Really man, you've just been schooled in a basic principle of law, your stated profession by a foreigner. That's roughly in line with you having to explain to me what RMS power stands for or how to set up a for loop in C.

You then deflect to a bunch of utter tripe about the country that I'm from, on which you have projected a whole bunch of your own feelings which are completely disconnected from reality on the ground. Now you're pulling in the end result of a couple of hundred years of head start by the first wave of immigrants as a proof point that other cultures are at best a neutral or very slightly positive contribution, if not the source of many negatives.

Maybe take a breather and think this over, you are not exactly anonymous on here and you have a real world reputation to consider.