Category Archives: Immigration
The Latin Americanization of the United States 2
By Keith Preston
Everyone knows that one of the principal grievances of the right-wing involves the substantial amount of immigration from Latin America to the United States that has taken place in recent decades. The commonly voiced concern is that the traditional “white” (Northern European) majority will lose its majority status, and that persons of Latin American ancestry (combined with people of color generally) will become the demographic majority. Whether this is good or bad is an individual value judgment, but the criticisms often obscure other, perhaps more substantive ways in which the United States is coming to resemble Latin America.
The traditional class system of Latin America is one where the very rich plutocratic elites live in opulence and luxury, and rule over an impoverished working class, an extraordinarily large underclass of the extreme poor and permanently unemployed, and a small middle class of professionals and technocrats. This is precisely the same kind of class system that the United States is developing, particularly in California which is widely considered to be the bellwether of the nation.
In traditional Latin American societies, the elite rule for the sake of pursing their own class interests, without any pretense of interest in the needs of the masses. To the degree that elections are held at all, the candidates are merely functionaries of the plutocracy. US politics is rapidly coming to resemble this model.
The police and the army are the traditionally dominant force in Latin American societies, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the military industrial complex and police state have assumed a comparable role in the United States.
The one noticeable difference is that in many traditional Latin American societies, the Catholic Church hierarchy provided the ruling class with its self-legitimating ideology. In the United States, organized religion is becoming an increasingly marginal force with the new self-legitimating ideology of the state being the totalitarian humanist ideology of the new clerisy.
Interestingly, Latin America has experienced a great deal of liberalization and progress in the past few decades, while the United States has increasingly gone backward. Perhaps Americans need to start emigrating to Latin America.
Lauren Southern vs Larken Rose – Open Borders 1
A Facebook commentator recently added this response to this debate:
In any polarised debate, seek the excluded middle! What neither position here seems to address is the question of commons, which historically acted as a mediator between private property and collectively owned resources. Meanwhile, the allocation of commons necessitates the definition of those who manage those commons, which will be to the exclusion of those who are not. This is, in a sense, a border, albeit on a much smaller scale than that of a nation state. Here are Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons (or common-pool resource(s) = CPR) – note the first point.
1. The CPR has clearly-defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external unentitled parties)
2. There is congruence between the resource environment and its governance structure or rules
3. Decisions are made through collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate
4. Rules are enforced through effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators
5. Violations are punished with graduated sanctions
6. Conflicts and issues are addressed with low-cost and easy-to-access conflict resolution mechanisms
7. Higher-level authorities recognize the right of the resource appropriators to self-govern
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources: rules are organized and enforced through multiple layers of nested enterprises
…and I suppose the reason they fail to mention commons is that as far as I’m aware, in European-American settler culture, they didn’t play the role that they have in most other societies.
What’s Really Going on with Family Separation at the Border? 5
Repost from a credible source :
If you’re horrified by news of families being separated at the borders, here’s a bit of news you can use.
First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.
There are two different policies in play, and both are new.
First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.
Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jaillike immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.
So that is what is happening.
‘Enforcing the Law’ Doesn’t Justify Separating Migrant Children from their Parents 9
By Ilya Somin
Reason
The Trump administration recently adopted a “zero tolerance” policy under which undocumented immigrants apprehended by federal officials are forcibly separated from their children. In April and May alone, almost 2000 children were torn from their parents and detained separately, often under cruel conditions likely to cause trauma and inflict longterm developmental damage. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims that separation of families is justified by the need to enforce the law, and even asserts that the administration’s policy is supported by the Bible. I will leave the Biblical issues to theologians and cardinals, who have addressed them far better than I could. But Sessions’ secular argument is no better than his religious one. There is no law requiring family separation at the border. And even if there was, that still would not be enough to justify the administration’s cruel policy.
The federal law criminalizing “improper entry” by aliens does not require family separation. The law also provides for the use of civil penalties, as well as criminal ones. While it states that the application of civil penalties does not preclude application of criminal ones, it also does not compel federal prosecutors to pursue both. Until the administration’s recent policy change, civil proceedings were in fact the usual approach in case of families with minor children, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The use of civil proceedings generally does not require pretrial detention, and therefore obviates the need to detain either parents or children; some civil defendants were detained, nonetheless, but in facilities where families can stay together. The Trump administration, by contrast, has sometimes even forcibly separated children from migrants who have not violated any law, but instead have legally crossed the border to petition for asylum in the United States.
Immigration and the Lack of Clear Title 1
An interesting thought experiment: I wonder how many rightists would be willing to give up immigration restriction laws in exchange for total freedom to engage in private discrimination, and how many leftists would give up antidiscrimination laws in exchange for totally open borders.
Instead of a Blog
I think the immigration issue is more complicated than the Future of Freedom Foundation, Trumpistas or Hoppe would frame it. I don’t regard the UK (or US) government as having any legitimate authority, nor do I regard any increase in the activities of the police as desirable. While people should be allowed to exclude or discriminate against anyone they please that does not give them the right to exclude them from the property of other people or uninhabited land.
This latter point is especially salient to the USA – the vast majority of the USA is totally uninhabited wilderness. This can be settled by anyone, at any time, and no one else has the authority to prevent them. I have no problem with an Islamic Caliphate in Wyoming, as long as they’re not attacking other people. Certainly all ‘Federal’ lands are completely without owners, and ought to be open to settlement by all people, including the Chinese, ISIS and Mexicans.
Furthermore, I would argue that a lack of consensus and social cohesion is a good thing, on the large scale – it checks the loyalty to the central state and creates political divisions, sometimes irreconcilable. Anything that weakens the central government is, prima facie, a good thing.
While it cannot be denied that the US, UN and various European governments subsidize the importation and settlement of foreigners, this in itself does not legitimize the deportation or blockage of these people – anymore than collecting a welfare check is a legitimate reason to deport native-born Americans.
Put simply, the US government subsidizes and taxes every imaginable group, and being opposed to immigration on the principle of ‘citizen-taxpayers’ ignores the fact that no one really has a legitimate claim to ‘public land’ as it presently exists. The huge buckets of money that are sloshed around the USA by various tax-and-spend plans can not be meaningfully traced back to any person, nor can any person be shown to unambiguously be a ‘tax consumer’ as opposed to a ‘tax payer’.
Even if it could, there are clear conflicts within these groups – many people obviously DO want immigrants coming into the United States, and they often live in the same locality as people who do not want immigration. If there were actually uniform opposition to immigration by everyone in the city of Dallas then a general exclusion could be justified. But given that many firms in Dallas would love to have low-wage employees, and many liberals in Dallas would love to see more diversity, this is a purely hypothetical exercise.
The only way ‘immigration’ can be sorted out other than one group of ethnic chauvinists and class elites imposing themselves on another is for a thorough decentralization and privatization of all the regions concerned. But if this were to happen you could kiss ‘white America’ goodbye – while some regions would remain predominantly white and perhaps even racially segregated the vast majority of the empty countryside would quickly be filled up by enterprising frontier-folks who – by sheer demographic ratios – would mostly be Latin Americans and Asians.
Arcane Semantics: Keith Preston – Tribalism, Anti-Statism & 4th Generation Warfare Reply
A recent interview. Listen here.
Robert Stark interviews Kevin Lynn of Progressives for Immigration Reform Reply
The Stark Truth. Listen here.
Robert Stark and co-host Sam Kevorkian talk to Kevin Lynn. Kevin is Chairman of Progressives for Immigration Reform and blogs at the CENTER FOR PROGRESSIVE URBAN POLITICS.
Topics:
Kevin’s political background as an unrepentant Perotista, a failed Green Party member, and a frustrated Progressive Democratic Party member
Creating a dialogue with Progressives on the key issues of how immigration impacts workers rights, income inequality, and the environment
The longstanding tradition of Progressives opposing mass immigration including the early labor and environmental movements
How immigration impacts the environment
The Sierra Club Vote on immigration and how it was sabotaged by a wealthy financier
The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act and The Immigration Act of 1965
Will The RAISE Act Raise Employment Prospects
PFIR Unveils Its H1-B Visa Database
The misconception that H1-B Visa holders are high skilled workers
The middle class exodus out of California
New Urbanism
The dilemma that progressives are misguided on immigration while Trump and the Republicans are anti-environment, and the need for a new political paradigm
What’s the alt-right, and how large is its audience? 1
Many liberals and leftists that I know are currently in a state of panic over the rise of the Alt-Right, which they predictably regard as the onset of the Fourth Reich. In reality, the Alt-Right is a very small movement that is made to seem much, much larger than it is because of its provocative effect which is duly amplified by the sensationalist media.
The Alt-Right is an entirely predictable backlash against ongoing demographic transformation of the US, the entrenchment of political correctness, globalization, and the hegemony of the neocons in mainstream conservatism. The Alt-Right is to white nationalism what the Religious Right was to Christian conservatism, only with a lot less in the way of size, resources or influence. In nearly 40 years of its existence, the Religious Right has lost every one of its major issues (abortion, school prayer, gay rights, gay marriage, reversing the sexual revolution of the 1960s, gender roles, family relations, education policy, etc.) and the Alt-Right will be even less successful in the long run.
The Religious Right merely wanted to turn back the clock to the 1950s while the Alt-Right wants to go back to the 1920s when segregation, eugenics, and comprehensive immigration were the status quo. Ain’t gonna happen. In fact, neo-Nixonian Donald Trump may well turn out to be the right-wing’s last stand. (And unless anyone accuses me of libertarian bias, it is even more unlikely that the mainstream libertarian program of turning back the clock to the Gilded Age is going to happen).
By Thomas J. Main
Los Angeles Times
Inquiring minds want to know: What exactly is the “alt-right,” and how large is the audience for the movement?
The essence of the alt-right can be distilled to this catchphrase: All people are not created equal. That’s even more extreme than it may sound. Prominent alt-right thinkers don’t only believe that some are naturally taller, stronger or smarter than others, but also that some groups are more deserving of political status than others. They reject the concept of equality before the law.
Andrew Anglin is editor of the most popular alt-right web magazine, the Daily Stormer. He has written that “The Alt-Right does not accept the pseudo-scientific claims that ‘all races are equal.’” He also supports repatriation of American blacks to Africa or “autonomous territory” within the U.S.
Not all alt-right thinkers are so radical in their aims, but they all believe in some form of race-based political inegalitarianism. The unequal brigade includes in its ranks editors of and regular contributors to many alt-right web magazines, including Richard Spencer of Radix Journal, Mike Enoch of the Right Stuff, Brad Griffin (also known as Hunter Wallace) of Occidental Dissent, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and James Kirkpatrick of VDARE (named after Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America).
The exact size of the alt-right is perhaps not of the utmost importance. As an ideological movement, the alt-right seeks not immediate policy or electoral victories, but longer-term influence on how others think about politics. Still, it’s possible to get a sense of the scope of this netherworld through web traffic.
From September 2016 to May 2017, I analyzed visits and unique visitors to scores of political web magazines of various political orientations. (One person accessing a site five times in a month represents five visits but only one unique visitor). Through interviews and using the site Media Bias / Fact Check, I identified nine alt-right sites, 53 sites associated with the mainstream right, and 63 with the mainstream left. I excluded left- or right-leaning general-interest publications, such as BuzzFeed, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Data were obtained from SimilarWeb, a well-known provider of web-marketing information. All audience figures given here are monthly averages for the nine-month period I studied.
Robert Stark talks to Joshua Zeidner about The Tech Industry, H-1B’s, Surveillance & The Google Memo Reply
The Stark Truth. Listen here.
Robert Stark and co-host Sam Kevorkian talk to Joshua Zeidner about the Tech Industry. Joshua has worked in Tech as a software developer and private consultant for Publishing and Finance Companies.
Topics:
The Tech Industry since the Dot Com boom
Joshua’s work in the Tech Industry in Germany and Israel, and his observation that Germany’s has the best work environment and the United States the worst
Prof. Norm Matloff’s H-1B Statistics and the current cap at about 65k per year which are eligible for permanent residency
How H-1B’s provide pliant(“handcuffed”) workers
H-1B Frauds such as fake job adds and diplomas, and Indian firms Like Infosys and Tata Abusing the program
The need for Unionization/Trade Organizations for Tech workers
Nationalizing Search Engines and Social Media
The International Safe Harbor Privacy Act which was developed for social networks to be built
Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
How Venture Capital money goes into “tech ventures” that embezzle crypto coins, operated like a ponzi scheme and become a liquid un-taxable and untraceable asset
Making Sense of the Google Memo
Why I Was Fired by Google – WSJ
Is Silicon Valley pulling it’s weight for California?
Tim Draper’s Six Californias Proposal
Why a nation is not like a house or a club – and why the difference matters for debates over immigration 2
From The Washington Post.
I’ve always thought that those were inept analogies for exactly the reasons outlined here. There are some well thought-out arguments coming from the restrictionist side, but those most certainly aren’t amongst them.
~MRDA~
By Ilya Somin August 6 at 4:18 PM
If you follow debates over immigration, it is hard to avoid arguments for restrictionism that analogize a nation to a house or a club. Such claims are ubiquitous in public debate, and are sometimes advanced by professional political philosophers as well. The intuition behind these analogies is simple: As a homeowner, I generally have the right to exclude whoever I want from my property. I don’t even have to have a good justification for the exclusion. I can choose to bar you from my home for virtually any reason I want, or even just no reason at all. Similarly, a nation has the right to bar foreigners from its land for almost any reason it wants, or perhaps even for no reason at all. All it is doing is exercising its property rights, much like the homeowner who bars strangers from entering her house. In the words of a leading academic defender of this theory, “My right to freedom of movement does not entitle me to enter your house without your permission… so why think that this right gives me a valid claim to enter a foreign country without that country’s permission?”
The Great Replacement Isn’t Real Reply
Presents an interesting argument that claims of drastic demographic change are overstated.
National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply
By Keith Preston
Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.
On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.
The Revolutionary Potential of Illegal Immigrants 1
by Derrick Broze and John Vibes
Since the issue of borders and immigration continues to be a hot topic of debate among “libertarians” I figured I would share a quote from my recent book. Please feel free to respond regarding your thoughts on our take and tag your closed border friends. As you will see, John and I argue that the language around “open” and “closed” borders is a part of the problem.
“Traditionally, libertarian and anarchist positions on borders have favored an “open border” solution. This would be in contrast to a “closed border” with immigration controls. This is naturally in line with anarchism considering the fact that governments implement and control borders, and anarchists seek to abolish governments. However, recently some anarcho-capitalists and libertarians have argued for closed borders. They believe private property norms justify forcibly restricting the movement of other free humans, even beyond the borders of their own property. The Alt-Right takes it a step further and argues that the State may even be a necessary evil in order to save “western civilization” and “traditional values” from an ”invasion” of immigrants.
Deported Phoenix Mom Speaks Out: ‘This Is The Face Of Deportation’ | Reply
NBC News correspondent Gadi Schwartz traveled to Nogales, Mexico, to talk with a mother whose deportation was protested Wednesday in Phoenix, and her kids about that this means for their family.
Why I Don’t Want to Become a Minority Reply
Lana Lokteff argues that every white country is being forced to “diversify” by importing millions of non-Europeans into their nation. Lana tells why she doesn’t want to become a White minority.
Why I Am Not A White Nationalist Reply
An interesting new piece from Jack Donovan.
I generally think that WN is to race and immigration what the religious right was to the sexual revolution and secularization of US society in the postwar era. It’s a backlash against prevailing currents that amounts to swimming against the tides. Only WNs are far less wealthy, numerous, popular, or influential than the religious right was in its heyday.
I think the core argument that guys like Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer make (“Should whites allows themselves to become a minority in their historic homelands surrounded by other populations with deep seated historical grudges against whites?”) is a valid one and one that should be heard without vilification of those making the argument. And Islamic immigration is an issue that transcends racial boundaries.
But I still think it’s a one-dimensional way of thinking.
More…
Funding the Enemy: War and Welfare Reply
From March last year: Ann Sterzinger’s libertarian solution to the Islamist problem.
The welfare state is a gravy train for ISIS.
If the welfare state doesn’t end in Europe, the welfare state will end Europe. And future historians will look back on the way the West ended and think we were all out of our goddamn minds.
As the dust is still clearing in Brussels and Pakistan (killing kids on Easter… stay classy, ISIS) and wherever else the nut jobs hit before this goes to press—as the Left signals their concern that all these dead bodies and raped orificia might feed an irrational fear of suicide bombers and rapists—the press is busy lecturing European security agencies about their incompetence. They could have stopped all these attacks somehow, if only they knew how to do their jobs!
You know what? I feel sorry for the security agencies, bumbling though they may allegedly be. From where I’m sitting, their job looks freakin’ impossible. According to Pew, over a third of French Muslims think suicide bombing is at least on occasion acceptable (and among the 18-30 crowd, it’s an eye-watering 42 percent).
How would you like it to be your job to root out terrorists when a third of the base population—of whose diversity and feelings you must always be respectful—would be happy to house and hide the assholes you’re looking for?
Meanwhile the media have kept stumping for not just bringing more of the terrorist-supporting population in, but feeding and housing them at the expense of the very government budget that must also fund security operations.
I know, only a bad person would ever suggest that you end welfare, and no educated European wants to be a bad person. But what you are accomplishing by being too nice is very bad indeed, Europe. Because if you do not end the welfare state, you’re going to have a violent genocide, one way or another.
Immigrants Want You to See These Chilling Photos of US Detention Centers Reply
The police state must be opposed in all of its manifestations.
By Tom Cahill
USUncut.Com
Keith Preston: Donald Trump acts before he thinks Reply
PressTV. Listen here.
Donald Trump’s immigration policies have proven that the US president acts without thinking first, an analyst in Virginia says.
Keith Preston, director of attackthesysten.com, made the remarks while discussing a slew of directives by Trump that have plunged the country’s immigration system into chaos.
In late January, Trump introduced a travel ban against people from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia Iraq and Libya. All refugee admissions, except for Syrian refugees who were banned indefinitely, were halted for three months under the executive order, which has been halted upon a federal judge’s order.
Trump has also signed a directive to begin the construction of a controversial wall on the border with Mexico, while hiring thousands of new enforcement agents to carry out more deportation raids.
Preston said the refugee crisis south of the American borders took place in the 1980s, when people tried to flee US-backed wars in Central America, including Guatemala and El Salvador.
The crisis deepened “in the 1990s, when NAFTA—the North American Free trade Agreement—was imposed,” he argued. “That had the impact of destroying Mexican agriculture and then that created mass unemployment among Mexican agriculture workers, so they started migrating north to the United States.”
Preston said Trump was more focused on the issue of crimes committed by immigrants rather than the economic impact of immigration on the US economy.
“There is a question of practicality,” he said. “One real issue that the Trump administration has demonstrated is that they often act before they think.”
“We saw that with the seven [Muslim] nation travel ban. That was an executive order that was issued very hastily, very rapidly, and was not crafted in such a way as to address serious problems that would come up naturally when trying to impose something like that,” he explained.
“There is also the question of who is actually going to be impacted by this? Is it only going to be convicted criminals, or is it going to be their families?”
The human resources required to arrest immigrants and the due process during their detention were some of the other matters that Trump had not taken into consideration, according to Preston.
“I suspect that the more the Trump administration tries to ratchet up these kinds of actions the more political conflict there is going to be,” the analyst concluded.
My Take on the “Muslim Travel Ban” Reply
A number of people have for my views on the so-called “Muslim travel ban” imposed by the Trump administration. Here goes:
Statistically, the evidence shows that right-wing terrorists have been slightly more violent in the years since 9-11 than Islamists, at least in the US obviously. But the meaning I take from this data is that the neocons and other hawks are blowing the Islamic terrorism threat way out of proportion, while liberals and the Left blow the right-wing terrorism threat out of proportion. Both groups need these false narratives to be true for ideological reasons.
The neocons and other hawks want a permanent war against Islam and the Left wants a permanent war against whitey, so there always has to be some looming threat on the horizon. The real violence is the US comes mostly from inner city gangs that murder each other over drug dealing disputes, from fights and domestic violence that spirals out of control, and from the mentally ill or lone nuts like Adam Lanza, Dylan Roof, or Omar Mateen.
September 11, 2001 was a singular but spectacular incident that has predictably kept plenty of people up in arms ever since. The OKC bombing in ’95, which killed about 150, had the same impact on the Left. I remember how after OKC the Left was saying many more such acts were just around the corner. But over 20 years later there’s been no such thing. The same thing happened with 9-11. I remember people talking about how there was going to be nuclear destruction of US cities and terrorism with bioweapons and all kinds of stuff. But 15 years later there’s only been a handful of incidents like Orlando, San Bernardino, and Ft. Hood that were perpetrated by lone nuts or small groups of friends acting as freelancers.
Keith Preston: Trump seeks to distance Russia from China, Iran Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
US President Donald Trump’s plans to reduce Washington’s foreign interventionism and focus on issues like immigration are part of a foreign policy plan that seeks to separate Russia from China and Iran, says an American analyst.
Keith Preston, director of attackthesystem.org, made the remarks while discussing Trump’s directives to curb immigration.
On Wednesday, the new president signed executive orders to begin the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico and to crack down on states that harbor immigrants.
Following his campaign pledge to ban Muslims from entering America, Trump is also expected to sign another executive order which blocks the entry of Syrian refugees and suspends the entry of any immigrants from Syria and other Muslim countries like Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Yemen.
“He is apparently going to follow through with many things he said he was going to do on the campaign trail and I think primarily what he is aiming to do right now is to establish his own credibility,” Preston told Press TV on Wednesday..
