Frank's post itself is worth reading, but he makes a hell of a great point; one huge reason that the Immigration troopers just luuuurve this Trumpy open-season so much is that it makes their jobs ridiculously, like slam-dunk easy, because:
"...they don’t have to go looking. It’s also easy because they don’t have to worry that the person they are arresting is violent. Just imagine if 90 percent of the work you have to do in your job was lifted. You’d be very happy.My conclusion in the earlier piece was that this Mexican ratissage would do very little other than make some innocent people's lives pretty miserable. But Frank's conclusion is, now that I think about it, even more likely to come true and even less palatable when it does; that people will be harmed because fewer ICE resources will be used to try and catch MS13 gangsters when nabbing old granny from the corner bodega counts just as much.
For the managers at ICE, this is fantastic. Now they can catch more people and get credit for doing a great job. They’ll hear, “Wow! You doubled the number of people you deported!” And they’ll think to themselves, “It was easy! I used to have go after violent criminals, but now I capture housewives and grandfathers.” There will be nowhere on the reports they file to indicate what percentage of the people they captured were “bad hombres.” A 55 year-old father of four with no criminal history is as good as a gang leader captured after shooting the graveyard clerk at the local 7-11."
AND...that when one of these MS-13 "bad hombres" does something predictably awful it will just provide the Tangerine Toddler and the Fraudulency Administration with more justification to kick granny back to Sinaloa.
It's the lickiest of self-licking ice cream cones.
Isn't THAT fucking dandy..?
5 comments:
100% right chief, basic human nature and motivation. When dealing with criminal investigations for fraud (in a former life...) our team's target was doubled. Did we go after more hard nuts? Did we balls. We did a couple of easy exercises, got the low hanging fruit, tea & medals all round....
Going after hard nuts is tough work with little reward unless you get the big payoff. And if you, your boss & your boss's boss is being measured on numbers, chasing the hard nuts becomes a luxury.
There's some backlash, some states are refusing to cooperate with ICE.
oh, and fuck street signs
bb
Chief, this, intended for a Veterans for Peace publication, may be appropriate here:
I have recently returned to the States after a decade of living in a small rural community south of Veracruz. Casey Stinemetz asked that I write about Mexican immigration on the basis of that experience. Ten years in the country certainly did not make me an expert on immigration or any aspect of Mexican life other than rice and beans. But I did spend much of the time there with people who are most likely to immigrate and who have the least opportunity to do so legally.
The Mexican minimum wage currently stands at 78.10 pesos per day or U.S. $3.52. That’s enough for two meals if you don’t pay rent or ride the bus to work. Construction hands put in a ten-hour day and work until the early afternoon on Saturday. Special jobs like pouring cement can keep the workers busy late into the night. Only a handful of companies pay overtime and hardly any contribute to the worker’s retirement fund. I never met a retired laborer who had a pension or even a bank account. Retirees live, as best they can, on the generosity of their children.
Maids, housekeepers, gardeners and other domestic workers settle for what they can get. When she was seven years old, my wife Mica was sent out to keep house for a couple – both medical doctors -- in Veracruz. They had two small children and in the evenings, when the mother came home from the hospital, she would teach them to read. Mica listened and that is the extent of her education.
Mica’s parents – Flora and Armando – live near San Andreas on the coast where they take care of three grandchildren. Ana, the mother of two of these children, returned to Mexico last year after a decade of working and living in a restaurant in Chicago. Terrified of Migra, she left the premises only to go to the airport to come home. When I met her last summer, she carried a Coke bottle with a tube that disappeared under her dressing gown. Cancer. Ana died two months later.
Armando, who was also once a soldier and fought traficantes de drogas, is seated in the attached photo. He was discharged after eight years in the army because he could not read. Armando since lost both legs to diabetes. It is difficult for him to be dependent, to crawl and be lifted into the outhouse, and to watch helplessly as everything falls into ruins. His wife Flora is also a severe diabetic. They are good people, honest, and kind.
How does one, who probably has never left his or her own state in Mexico, arrange to cross the border? First, you need money, usually about US$3000 and sometimes as much as $5000 to pay the coyote. If you have relatives in the States, they can loan you money. Or you can go to a local loan shark who will take your family members in Mexico as hostage. Nor is there any guarantee that the coyote will keep his end of the bargain. Pregnant women and the old are often abandoned en route. And some immigrants are kidnapped by the narco gangs and end their lives in slave labor.
Once in the States you have no legal protection. Bosses will work you four days during the week and fail to show up on Friday with the pay. Complain to the police and you will be deported. And if the job is at all legitimate, you will pay Social Security (on somebody else’s number) and withholding taxes. The Social Security Administration estimates that undocumented immigrants pay $13 billion a year into the retirement system and collect about $1 billion. Forget about food stamps or other benefits.
Most undocumented workers now come from El Salvador, Honduras and places south in order to escape civil war, gang violence and the economic dislocations, made worse by the violent weather associated with global warming. To avoid the check points, most of the migrants cross Mexico by riding on top of high-speed freight trains, known collectively as La Bestia (the Beast). Their 1500-mile journey begins at the southern border, typically in Ixtepec or Arriaga. The initial destination is La Lecheria, a giant marshaling yard in Mexico City. From there trains fan out to the U.S. border.
Criminal gangs and corrupt Mexican police periodically board the trains to demand protection money and to rob and rape. A shelter near La Lecheria closed last year because gang members had targeted the migrants there for kidnapping.
Many fall or are thrown off the freight cars. If the fall happens at night, the victim must wait for dawn for the possibility of help. The young amputees I saw when volunteering at the Casa Juan Diego shelter in Houston were the worst off -- alone in a foreign country, unable to provide for themselves, and almost surely, never to reunited with their families.
So it goes. And now Trump is going to spend billions – according to the American Action Forum the figure will be as much as $600 billion – to keep these poor, brave people from cutting our lawns, washing our dishes and taking care of our children. And the cost to the U.S. economy will be on the order of a trillion dollars a year. May he rot in Hell.
Totally off-topic (for which I apologize), check out this link. It's a lot more stomach-churning than I expected. We've come a long way, baby.
http://frank151.com/seriously-disturbing-vintage-advertisements/
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