Ask Lemmy

Why do you oppose them?

• The crime they don't bring?
• Economic losses they don't cause to citizen workers?
• Economic gains to domestic businesses?
• The contributions to social security & medicare they don't get back?
• Because they're not white?
• Because outsiders are convenient scapegoats for politicians to blame & flex power?

It's important to pin down clear, substantiated reasons.

From The Business of Migrant Detention covering the history of anti-immigration policies & its disparate treatment of white & brown immigrants

ARABLOUEI: OK. If federal government's spending all this money to detain and then deport people and a lot of times they're coming back in the country, and it's not actually achieving anything economically in terms of supporting American workers and it's actually hurting American companies, why? Like, why are they doing this if there's no material benefit to the economy or to protecting workers?

NOFIL: To me, it is a core question of sort of who is an American. Immigration detention's roots are in this moment that is so blatantly racist, that sort of - you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act pulls no punches about what it is doing. It is targeted to a specific group of people. But that is where we get the legal precedents that undergird this entire system today. It is a system that has only really ever, to my opinion, receded. Immigration detention is only really ever rolled back when it is seen as threatening whiteness. And it is a system that has, you know, continually expanded and gained public support by, you know, targeting racialized people, by targeting people who Americans are encouraged to imagine as maybe kind of criminal anyway, right? It is doing political work, and it is doing work that I think is, like, really revealing about how the nation sees itself.