«Sae Joon Park, 55, a green card holder who has lived in the U.S. since the age of seven, departed on Monday following a removal order stemming from drug possession and failure to appear in court charges from over 15 years ago.
Park attributes these past offenses to years of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which he developed after being wounded in action in Panama in 1989.
“I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview before his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”»
Here’s Matt Yglesias again:
«The self-deportation plan, by contrast, I think does more or less work. If you tell ICE not to worry too much about criminals and not to show any leniency to even the most sympathetic cases, then I think that does maximize the odds that people will leave voluntarily.
…
Democrats never want to acknowledge that precisely because most people who immigrate illegally do so for sympathetic reasons, if you want to deter people from doing it in huge numbers, you have to be mean to people whose cases are objectively sympathetic.
…
And from a progressive standpoint, if the number of sympathetic migrants is low, then you can just be nice to all of the people who deserve kindness, and there’s no problem.»
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-rediscovers-comprehensive-immigration
This is why I said he was being semi-right (Trump rediscovers comprehensive immigration reform). I just can’t stand this chain of thought. “If we’re just as mean as we can be, it’ll work.”
No, it won’t, because then we’ll just be a nation of jerks. (Like: literally, we’ll all be going to hell. Who wants to have that exit interview with God? “Well, yeah, I did support that, but I was worried about my children!”) What’s “working” about that?
Why don’t we decide ahead of time what our criteria are and be ready to make exceptions, of which we expect relatively few? Maybe not have quotas for every part of the world we tried to colonize or had issues with between 1870 and 1930? (So-and-so many Samoans, so-and-so many Philippinos, so-and-so many Guatemalans, so-and-so many Chinese, etc.) Like… real immigration reform in spite of whatever racist fool picks up the phone and gets AN ENTIRE FRICKIN PARTY to torpedo a bipartisan bill?
C’mon, we’re a great nation (and our welcome of immigrants is part of what makes us great); we can handle this.
My fellow white brothers and sisters in Christ, you KNOW you don’t want to pick lettuce and clean hotel toilets. Otherwise, you’d be taking those jobs that immigrants are “stealing” from you.
Here, Read This 