For the Record: Del Rio

 

Screenshot from El Paso Times.

Thing that's not being mentioned now is that they were all Haitians, refugees from the 2010 earthquake, that's TWELVE years ago who had found communities in Chile and Brazil, where they were feeling unwelcome, and drawn by a rumor that Del Rio was a good place to crosss into US.

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

... deporting practically everyone without hearings on the bogus Title 42 policy that treated all migrants as likely COVID cases who would spread disease into Texas (where COVID was already raging worse than it was in Mexico, in other words it was a fraud)

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

N

And also very Trumpy in its complete arbritrariness, since some people did indeed make it into the courtry and had a chance to tell their story to a judge, and you could never tell why some did and most didn't—it felt completely random to tha Haitians And let's pause to note how extremely bad the situation in Haiti was at that point, just a few months after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, with a nonfunctioning parliament and an unelected prime minister governing by decree and the

loss of government control over strategic areas to the hands of dangerous armed gangs, widely believed to be financed by politicians and to have police officers on their payroll. Violence has worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis.

Well, of course, here we are in the US of A, where the governor of Florida seems able to commandeer the assistance of federal officials in the Department of Homeland Security and facilities at Lackland Air Force Base in his project of kidnapping 50 people in Texas—people whose asylum applications are already under consideration and who are thus not just legally in the US but officially under federal protection—maybe we've got a bit of a Haiti-style problem of our own. 

Becuase, angry as I might have been with Biden on this issue, he did try to get rid of the Title 42 idiocy and the "Remain in Mexico" imposture, and was repeatedly stopped by federal courts whose judges seem themselves to have lost interest in the rule of law. It's only now, a year after Del Rio, that he seems to have acquired some ability to have the law obeyed, and we've learned recently that there are now a million new asylum seekers in the country awaiting hearings (which, under the current situation, will be some seven years from now for most of them, during which they won't even it's a hit-or-miss proposition whether they'll even be able to get temporary working papers [see Redhand in comments], even as employers all over the country complain about a desperate shortage of workers, which is contributing the the inflation they all care so passionately about... Faugh.

On the American side too, hundreds found shelter in El Paso,https://t.co/Wgfv5raZOR but it was Mexico that really came through https://t.co/TmHgDeblkT

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Anyway, it's clear that this small (but real) crisis of a year ago occupies an enormous place in Republican minds for one reason and one reason only: because these asylum seekers were Black. And that's why they keep bringing it up--it's a dog whistle.

/fin

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Literary Corner: Days on the Border

One of the most 25th-Amendment things yet, from Trump's Mar-a-Lago Thanksgiving press availability, as reported at Huffington Post Canada, starting around 16 minutes in, when he informed the startled reporters that he had closed the US-Mexican border a couple of days earlier. Startled, I mean, because if he had done that they thought they probably would have heard about it, And of course they hadn't....

I. Closing the Border

Actually two days ago
we closed the border.
We actually just closed it.
We said nobody’s coming in
because it was out of control.
You take a look at Tijuana Mexico
and see what's happening there
it's really a bad situation.

Annals of Derp: It's also Cognitive Dissonance

Image via Ghoul Friday.

A sighting of the old zombie study proving on the basis of a completely factitious approach to some very dubious data that 5.7 million "illegal aliens"--more than half the total undocumented population--came out to vote in 2008:

This isn’t surprising to those of us who are being honest about the corruption in our political system. https://t.co/p2tc835TB6

— Defend Trump (@Defend_Trump) August 27, 2018

It shouldn't be too surprising, given that the story came out 14 months ago.

But it was always a meaningless extrapolation from unreliable data and it still is. pic.twitter.com/WndyOtTobO

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2018

Litter-ary Corner

Song of Illegal Immigration

by Tucker Carlson

I actually hate
litter which is one of
the reasons I'm so against
illegal immigration.

It produces a huge amount
of litter. Huge amount
of litter and I mean that
with total sincerity.

Text from Andrew Lawrence via Steve.

Was Lukoil just asking for a friend?

Lukoil station in New York City, via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, this (from Danny Hakim and Matthew Rosenberg at the Times) is sort of interesting:

When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.

“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

Only Nix's interrelated companies, the UK SLC Group and US Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer–created "psychographic profiling" firm hired by Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner to create the in-depth picture of how Trump's message resonated around the country that dictated the candidate's travel schedule in 2016, did claim that they worked in Russia in some of their promotional material (SLC says one employee did "commercial work" for a "private company" in Russia 25 years ago, but the brochure suggests that SLC has clients on its active list with the firm's elections division), and then apparently they had at least three meetings in 2014 and 2015 with executives from the privately owned but deeply government-connected Lukoil oil export firm, discussing some possible work that never got going.

Annals of Derp: "Anchor Babies"

Wong Kim Ark, via New York Daily News. Great article, too.

Comment thread, from Mother Jones:

Yastreblyansky • 6 hours ago

That "anchor baby loophole", aka the 14th Amendment.

 

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CathodeGlow  Yastreblyansky • 39 minutes ago

Probably never intended to confer birthright citizenship upon the offspring of illegally present foreign nationals.

 

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Yastreblyansky  CathodeGlow • 25 minutes ago

There was no such thing as illegally present foreign nationals at the time. There was literally no immigration law in the US, until the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Nevertheless it was in exactly a case about a child of Chinese noncitizens that birthright citizenship was established as settled law, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).

 

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Vatican't even

Look at all those wetbacks swarming in shamelessly from Rome! Where's the border patrol for God's sake? Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.

Trump:

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. 

Long before that, the Vatican will probably be overrun by illegal immigrants breaching that ridiculous excuse for a wall, stealing all the jobs and raping the, um, choirboys?

Dangerous Attitudes

Via SimplifiedSafety. Not suggesting any attitudes on the bosses' part—I guess that's why they call it "simplified".

Harrowing story in the Times by David W. Chen on the epidemic of fatal construction accidents in the ongoing construction boom in New York City, doubling over the usual average during the past fiscal year:

Seven workers have died on the job since July, including three in a nine-day stretch before Labor Day, according to records of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

The city’s Buildings Department keeps its own count of construction deaths, injuries and accidents, offering a broader look at safety year over year. There were 10 construction-related fatalities in the most recent fiscal year, from July 2014 to July 2015, according to city figures. In contrast, the annual average over the previous four years was 5.5.

Meanwhile, 324 workers were injured in the last fiscal year, a jump of 53 percent, and the Buildings Department recorded 314 accidents over all, an increase of 52 percent from the year before. The total was more than two and a half times what the city tallied in 2011. In comparison, permits for new construction projects grew by only 11 percent in the last fiscal year and permits for renovation and other work by 6 percent.

You have to read this story, which does a wonderful, horrifying job of getting to some of the individual humans behind these statistics. But the thing I want to focus on is who, in demographic terms, has been dying, namely the "illegal aliens" we keep hearing about:

Why deport when you can extort?

Tampa Bay reporter Dan DeWitt gets some tips on blueberry picking. About 85% of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented; they're paying payroll taxes but they'll never collect Social Security. Photo by Will Vragovic, Tampa Bay Times.

Something I've been confused about in the immigration debate that others may be confused about too, because it hasn't been handled very well by, say, the Times:

Judge Hanen said in his ruling, in a case brought by Texas and 25 other states, that the administration had not followed required procedures for changing federal rules. The judge issued an injunction ordering that the program be halted, and government officials quickly postponed the actions to comply with the order.

Sounds like (sounds like we're playing charades, hahaha) it's so obvious that the executive's prosecutorial discretion permits it to decide who to deport, given that they can't deport all 11-odd million simultaneously or proceed entirely at random, which seems to be what the Republicans want (they think any kind of forethought is treachery), that what Judge Hanen had to do to throw the DAPA and expanded DACA programs out was pin them to some kind of quibble from the arcana of the federal rule books, so exotically bureaucratic that it couldn't even be explained to us, but this is not exactly what happened.

Worth nothing

Christopher Cillizza, via GQ.

Chris Cillizza literally phoning it in:

You can tell by the extraneous h in the parenthesis in line 4, which must have been produced by an Autocorrect gremlin making fun of Chris's portentous style.

I'm wondering how much President Obama has really thought at all about the political consequences of delaying his immigration action until after the election—beyond simply believing whatever Mark Pryor tells him.

Supremely affordable

Update

Night vision golf. From Incredible Things.

Everybody has to submit a take on the Supreme Court this week and what they're going to do with the Affordable Care Act. One reason for optimism might take a back road, as follows:

We don't know that the Court does everything the Republican Party wants; what we know is that it does everything Big Business wants, by and large, which is not the same thing (Republicans only really care about the bond market and other such bloodsuckers). There are a lot of businesses that have figured out how to do reasonably well or much better with the new law, such as doctors, biotech firms, drug companies, medical schools and teaching hospitals, and many more. It is not in their interest to see the ACA repealed, and John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy may well have heard about this. They play golf, don't they?

Update Monday evening:
With the Court's ruling on Arizona's immigration law out, I just want to brag a little on how it goes along with the above argument. Business, properly speaking, has nothing against illegal immigration, you know: it's a source of cheap labor and growing markets.

Republicans are against illegal immigration because they are tied to this crowd of nativist yahoos that vote for them—if only millionaires voted Republican, they wouldn't be able to win an election even in Scarsdale, so they have to give on these issues that they don't actually care about at all, like abortion and guns, and they have to at least pretend they care about the dusky hordes invading the homeland to speak their foreign languages right in our faces.

But the Supreme Court doesn't need anybody's votes; they are free to represent the millionaires in a more simple and direct way. So they voided all the anti-business provisions of the Arizona law, leaving nearly intact, however, the provision allowing the police to harass anybody that looks like he might not have a birth certificate, because what's life if a cop can't even harass anybody?

And then when business and Republican interests are in accord, as in the case of the Montana corporate campaign contributions law, the Court's task is easy.

So will the same logic work with the ACA? We'll see.

Update 6/28
I hate to say I told you so. Told you so!