Facts Don't Care About Etc.

 

An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala says the odds of Trump improving the economy is worth the potentially higher risk of deportation. “Trump wants to deport those who do bad things. … I haven’t broken any laws.” https://t.co/7JFCCYGcC7

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) November 7, 2024

Our friend here doesn't realize that the bad thing he did was actually just coming here.  

That's enough to make you an "illegal". 

Wow, if we only had some precedent for this:

And Forgive Us Our Debts

 

In another BFD kind of day, President Biden announced the forgiveness of student loan debt up to $10K for borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 ($250,00 if filing jointly) and up to $20K for Pell Grant recipients. This is going to help so many people--

The White House said that 43 million student loan borrowers will benefit and that as many as 20 million borrowers will have their full remaining student loan balances wiped out.

That will be very significant for those households. Due to debt obligations, people have put off on home-ownership, starting their families, and more. Adjustments to the payments owed will also give people whose debt has not thoroughly been retired welcome breathing space. It may not be what they hoped for, but it is a change in the right direction.

Of course, people have to complain. I'm not going to focus on the more left-based criticism that the debt forgiveness should have gone further because I'm in agreement with it--I am a Gen X kid whose working class to middle class family was able to manage my education, and I acknowledge my privilege. My degree was invaluable to me, though, and I encourage people to get a good education because the broader your horizons, the better your damn time here on this earth. I got a BA in English Lit., which is one of the most humanities of the humanities degrees. It means I am proficient in my mother tongue and can discuss works people have been reading for pleasure for a long time. 

Dare to Dream

In another pleasant shock this week, SCOTUS rejected the Trump Administration's attempt to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, basically stating that Team Trump went about it all wrong.  Note: they didn't say that Trump and friends couldn't kill the program, and they certainly could decide to try it again. 

The Roberts' decision was that the decision to end DACA was "arbitrary and capricious", and Justice Sotomayor noted that there was a strong likelihood of negative bias against DACA recipients in that decision as well. It's about the process of ending the program, not the constitutionality of the program itself (which also has a strong basis, but we can leave that point for the moment) that was in question.

So where does Trump go from here? Heck if I know--but if Trump wants to go back to the drawing board and end DACA, the rationale will have to sound quite different than "because my base really, really wants me to deport kids and that's important to my getting re-elected", which, to be super honest, is how I think it could be depicted.  In the meanwhile, there is broad support for creating a legal status for Dreamers outside of Trump die-hards. (Not that Trump seems to be aware that people outside of his base exist most of the time.)

In the meantime, this is a relief for now for several hundred thousand young people who can live their lives without fear a little longer. But for those of us looking at a decision of our own in November, let's keep their situation in mind, because the current Senate is highly unlikely to take up legislation to give them a more permanent sense of relief.

Conflicted Because I Know My America

This is the family most often seen in the Twitter protestations against the teargassing of asylum-seekers at our border: they are a real family, not some staging or crisis actors, no matter what the fringe wants to express. A real woman and her barefoot and diapered kids. The world they escaped from has its horrors, and letting hope lead them to a place made politically inhospitable is a cruel joke of the cosmos. 

But this America was never fully hospitable, and I equally want to utter my fullest condemnation of Trump's policies and yet acknowledge we have been failing to be welcoming. This border conflict is a stage Trump made, knowing the caravan was coming, there was a choice between upping the capacity for welcoming and processing asylum-seekers and choosing to aggressively man the border and then issue propellants laden with internationally-banned chemicals. 

We are okay if we teargas our own. We teargas drug houses and suspected drug houses and protesters for free speech and against war and other crazy shit. We flash grenade the cradles of babies. Use of rubber bullets and teargas have been known regarding immigration protests. 

Saying "This is not the America I know" means not knowing this America, the home of the scared of ladder-climbers, the land of social quakes. I am not the type of fool who can't differentiate between the use of teargas by a lone border patrol agent in 2013 inside the US border, with a concentrated effort to fire teargas into Mexico to deter the caravan of asylum seekers, but I will allow there is something already suspect with teargas so long being part of our border defense. We at once legally allow asylum-seekers to arrive at a port of entry to be processed, and establish hurdles, just as if the language of Fox News, the Lou Dobbsian lexicon of invasion and infiltration, meant more than the cry for mercy borne of genuine privation from the people who would set out in such a way, leaving everything behind. 

My fear is not from them but for them--they need a lot, and our people are perhaps too hard-hearted by now to know what they can and should give to the stranger who is not so different from oneself.

Our asylum treatment of children has surely evolved. That does not mean it became better.

But this country stays murderous against those who are poor and those who labor. Are we still the great nation these people who travelled so far on foot hoped for? Are we a land of opportunity or scarcity (and who decides who gets what, anyway?) Can we find a place for doers and believers, or is our reputation as a place for dreams so much trash?

I wish I knew. But I would rather we retain a reputation as a land of opportunity, than a land of punitiveness. 

Before the Immigrants Take it All

I don't usually recount personal stories here on the blog, because I try to keep my real life and my blog persona separate. You might have an image of me--cool. I mostly tell the truth on myself, when I do talk about myself.  But today (of all days) there was an exchange that left me a little disconcerted, because it was entirely offhand. It was a conversation an older lady had with a slightly-less older lady in the elevator in my workplace.

I'm outspoken enough online--that much you might have noticed. I try to keep civil with folks I disagree with, but I find it easier to link to bolster my argument than just state it, because people believe what they believe for reasons. Maybe they just don't drink from the same wells I do. I don't know how they get their ideas. I want to believe examples or published data help, even if some studies and published data have told me, they don't, necessarily.

And work is a different thing than any other kind of interaction--if I don't know a co-worker from my outfit well enough to know how they will take me, I know I have no reason to attempt a conversation, let alone try out a correction of my elders. 

But this lady said something so ignorant I kind of did not know where to start. She replied to a question about when she was retiring with "I have to start taking my Social Security before the immigrants take it all."

This person had no fucking idea how anything the hell worked. She just thought there was a sloppy pool of benefit money that randos were able to siphon off of at will. That immigrants paid into Social Security and never were able to collect because they didn't have legitimate SS numbers, was not anything she had logically taken into account, although it was true. That Social Security for her was paid by workers who came after her, just like her contributions were paying for current retirees, was something she did not seem to be aware of. That Federal budgets really shouldn't take Social Security contributions into their scope when talking about what budget money is available, was not on her mental horizon.

She was happily blaming immigrants for a lack of benefits she was not even going to experience. 

All the arguments were at my tongue-tip. She got off at her floor "Have a blessed day" and I took my alone time until I got to my floor to say out loud to no one at all "That wasn't correct in any way." Because I had to say something out loud, to no one at all, or I might scream. 

And this was not even a likely Trump voter. This was just the kind of stupid prejudice people have about other people because they feel like having prejudices against people, I guess. It made me mad. So I place it here. 

I don't know when we attack that kind of fucked-up wrong concept about how things work, but I suggest the elected leaders of The Left try it. Put on record how things work. Because I am not sure some of the GOP elected know how all the things work, either. 

Labor Day: DACA Protects Working People

I'm going to make this Labor Day post about the possible undoing of DACA, which is probably going to be announced tomorrow by AG Jeff Sessions, because why not? Trump wants to curry favor with his base, but also wants plausible deniability because he thinks he can "onboard" moderates--also he will dump this in the lap of Congress. Eh? His people might call it politics, I would call it cowardly.

I would also call it, not merely cruel or stupid, because his base doesn't care what I think is cruel or stupid, but very bad business. Deporting these young people who have made their lives here is a waste of investment, talent, learned skills, education, and a complete failure not merely of compassion, but imagination. Losing these fine people will cost our economy, not add to it. The zero-sum logistics of anti-DACA debaters is the worst of sheer nonsense--DACA recipients aren't "stealing jobs from American workers". For one thing, except for not being born here, they are raised as Americans. And for another, how is anyone stealing a job on American soil from a worthy American? Because if you apply for a job, interview for it, ace it, turn up, clock in, and then work that job, you are just doing your own job. That job did not belong to someone else. It is the job of the person doing it.

My sympathy for people who worry about competition from immigrants like no one else in the world ever competes in a job market is limited.

But DACA recipients are doing truly patriotic work--as US military personnel.  They are sometimes even heroes.  Sometimes even the saddest kind of hero--the lost. In troubled times, we need all hands on deck,  not discrimination, recriminations, bigotry and abuse. Business leaders know the value of these workers.

I believe it is only right that these people, brought here through no fault of their own, acculturated and educated here, and having so much promise, be permitted to continue to contribute to our society. If Trump thinks otherwise, I will chalk this up to his bad business sense and also spinelessness in the dance with the devil that brought him to the White House.  He is being dipped, and very low at that.