International law is inherently more of a social contract than an actual law. That doesn't make it useless because it does have a real effect on how countries behave, but it does mean that enforcement looks more like getting ostracized than it looks like law enforcement.
I don't think it's a very common opinion in the US that immigration laws should not be enforced. There is a small contingent on the left that wants that on humanitarian grounds and another small contingent on the right that wants very loose immigration laws for the business benefits of immigrant labor.
There were an enormous number of deportations under previous administrations without much pushback.
What distinguishes this situation is that the deportations are proceeding with a complete disregard for US law and human rights. People are being deported without getting a chance to fight it in court, a violation of the constitutional right to due process. People are being rounded up as suspected illegal immigrants solely based on their skin color or the language they are speaking, a violation of the constitutional right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure. People are being deported while it is still being determined whether they are eligible for asylum or refugee status, a violation of US statute.
The US is supposed to be a nation of laws where everyone can be certain that their legal rights will be respected. That is being grossly violated with the current deportation push.
Opinion polls are around 60-70% supporting enforcement of immigration laws.
That’s means a quarter to a third don’t believe they should be enforced. I’d call that significant.
And the US “disregard for human rights”? You mean the right to contest your deportations multiple times? That’s far more than other countries provide. It’s more typical for an officer to not find proof of legal entry being the sole decision maker. You’ll be on a plane the same day leaving the country.
There are people in the US who have been here for years awaiting a decision on their case. You feel that’s an abuse of their human rights?
If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).
You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."
Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
IMO, if you like every single story that a magazine publishes, the editor is playing it too safe and not doing their job properly.
The biggest advantage of short fiction magazines over longer form is that it's a lower stakes way to try out new ideas and ways of telling stories and to expose readers to new authors.
Doing that means taking some risks and publishing some stories that won't always land with readers.
Do you think that is genuinely the news in general, or just the subset of the news you personally follow?
I would imagine Swifties see a lot more Taylor Swift news than Zuckerberg news. For someone on HN, they're going to see a lot more Zuckerberg news than average.
$1 trillion is one year of Manhattan's GDP. Painfully expensive? Absolutely, but it's absolutely affordable over the course of a few decades.
The sooner we start, the cheaper it will be, so we shouldn't put it off, but it's not going to kill everyone or even convince everyone to leave NYC in the foreseeable future.
Sure, but a big part of the reason for that is that we produce a huge surplus of food, so food prices are extremely low compared to how wealthy the US is. That means wages for farm workers are too low for typical Americans to want to do the job.
If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.
Yeah, that's a common myth. How much would you have to be paid to work 8 to 12-hour days bent over in the sun, with minimal water, and with exposure to pesticides and herbicides? Spotty bathroom access and few breaks?
A common theme found in various sources about using American labor in the fields is that American laborers are too slow, damage too much produce, and don't show up after a couple days. Another common theme is that immigrant labor works hard and uses their resources to ensure their children don't do the same work.
First of all, many of those conditions can be improved. 12 hour days, minimal water, lack of bathroom, few breaks are imposed by employers trying to squeeze as much out of as few workers as possible. More people would be willing to do the job at maybe 25% cost to make conditions better.
It my late thirties, I wouldn't do the job because I have better options, but when I was high school or college age I would have killed to do that job if it was paying $30 (in 2025 dollars)/hour. My dad literally did that type of job for a while in his younger years.
Will that raise prices of food? Absolutely, but we're talking about going back to 1950s prices relative to wage, not about famine.
ICE enforcement and immigration laws are also a choice. We can change those if we need to.
There's no getting around a fundamentally misaligned incentive like that.
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