Chuck Schumer’s Army
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
Schumer Bill Sends Reinforcements, Drones to Border. www.nydailynews.com (2010-08-28):
The Senate passed a $600 million bill tonight to beef up border security by adding 1,500 new enforcement agents and sending airborne drones to search for illegal immigrants. The bill, backed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), targets the Mexican border…
In which “Progressive” Democrats pursue a sensible to comprehensive immigration reform by massively increasing the violent enforcement of border policies that they themselves criticize as arbitrary and irrational and desperately in need of a radical overhaul. The United States Senate’s notion of “making the border more secure than ever” is of course to further militarize the 200 mile free-fire zone, among other things creating a paramilitary “strike force” of 1,000 new border guards to interdict, harass or shoot immigrants trying to cross an imaginary line in the sand, and expropriating $32,000,000 to pay for unmanned drone warplanes to help them spy on the borderlands. Schumer, progressive humanitarian that he is, wants us to know that at least the drones won’t be armed with air-to-surface missiles. Yet. So just who is this policy of increased spying and border militarization making more “secure”? Not people living on or near the border, that’s for sure.
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So I guess your plan is Open Borders? There are a billion people in countries poorer than Mexico, so let’s have them all come. They’re ready. We can just ring our cities with squatters camps, like Rio and Sau Paulo Brazil are. Except more, and poorer. Oh but I suppose you will say they are all eligible for the new federal health insurance, won’t you? Yeah, that’s going to work.
Janet,
Welcome to the blog. You must be new here.
My is to stop shooting immigrants.
Or, in more detail, to stop using government violence against peaceful men, women and children. I don’t believe that government has the right to violently interdict, harass, raid, arrest, detain or exile individual people, solely on the basis of their nationality, in order to achieve any kind of collective demographic outcome. I believe in this because I believe that people are more important than policies, and want government to stop making and enforcing for the lives of its unwilling victims, but if you want to translate it into policy terms, then, sure, the closest translation would be open borders and immediate and unconditional amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants. For further discussion, see GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras.
Man, sounds like you’ve got a problem with poor people.
Also with personal pronouns: are not doing anything. The issue is whether or not the individual or common owners of land in, around, or outside of cities are willing to open up their land for rent or sale to poor people; or, where the land is unowned, whether or not poor people are willing to homestead it by working the land. Provided that they are, I don’t see how it’s any of your business sticking your into their affairs; people have a right to do what they want in their own homes and workplaces. No matter what their socioeconomic class may be.
I could sit here and argue with you about the likely economic effects of free immigration (if you think a billion people are all going to find it worth their while to immigrate, all at the same time to the U.S., you’re probably confused about the law of demand); not to mention the social and economic effects of shantytowns (which I don’t have any problem with, anyway). But this would all be missing the real point here. The real point here is that, whatever you may think the overall demographic outcomes of immigration freedom might be, and however you may feel about poor people living in or around city (the scare-quotes are there because the city is not, actually, your private property), the government has no business, and no right, deploying paramilitary violence against peaceful immigrant workers, students, children or refugees in the interests of socioeconomic cleansing.
I don’t care about trying to get the government’s corporate-welfare insurance cartel scheme to properly. Do you?
When you combine something idiotic and destructive, like tax-subsidized corporate insurance cartels, with something positive and productive, like freedom of movement and freedom of association across political borders, then it may well turn out to have bad results. But if so, that sounds like a problem with the idiotic and destructive tax-subsidized insurance cartel. Not a problem with immigration freedom.
I can’t speak for Rad Geek, but as an anarchist I don’t want anyone to be eligible for federal health insurance, as I want neither the insurance nor the body which would bring it about to exist. The issue of open borders isn’t complicated, borders interfere with human beings’ freedom to associate with whom they will, the freedom of human beings to travel where they will, and their existence only strengthens the power structure which oppresses us all. Now, I think your concerns about massive squatter camps are unfounded and if I were more energetic I would address them (there are plenty of posters here much more intelligent than I, and some of them might take the time) but those consequences, even if probable are irrelevant.