The article is about a person who forged papers starting in WW2 and up to the 70s to get people out of dire situations. It ends in "“I did all I could when I could. Now, I can’t do anything,” he said. Surely, though, the rest of us can."
Not so easy anymore, with all the biometrics and cryptographically secure data on a microchip embedded in today's passports.
I think the point isn't "now it's time for someone to forge papers" but "there are plenty of ways to help and other people with more energy can take them up"
From raising awareness, convincing governments, running for office, donating money and/or labor...just volunteering on a crisis line is a huge help.
In the context of the original article, and the current world, it appears that far fewer are willing to bring personal risk than in the past.
My guess - and it is a guess - is rather than signing an online petition, forwarding a meme, or attending a demo, in the past direct action, civil disobedience, underground networks and activism was more often used. I suspect that in today's world many of those would be viewed as terrorism or at the very least imprisonable.
> in today's world many of those would be viewed as terrorism
I’m involved in local politics. The problem is a low give-a-shit factor. Older Americans will reliably show up to vote, stop to sign petitions (real ones, not online ones), donate to candidates and show up for town halls and protests. Young, well-educated, technically-savvy urbanites are a predictably anodyne bunch. (To be fair, I’m those things.)
The risk isn’t higher. The cost just is. When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, it’s a tougher sell.
I used to go to the planning board meetings for my neighborhood. They were at 4:00 on weekdays - I wonder why I was the only one under 60 there?
Even then it was only because I was trying to bootstrap a startup and setting my own hours.
Also, "When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, " -
good points, but remember also that those old people largely could have one person working (and actually getting of at 5 with no bullshit emails/slack/other crap to follow them home) and the other doing childcare/household work/civic things, instead of 2 people working 8-6:00, rushing to childcare, and getting home tired as dogs.
I take a bit of an issue with the tech crowd claiming that a single income family is infeasible. Single parents get by all the time. People in tech make well above the median income in most cases. It's absolutely possible to live a nice middle class life on a single tech income. It's just not possible to keep up with the spending of a dual income family. All about priorities.
Ok, but I'm not just talking about people in tech.
My partner and I are, in fact, a single income household. I make somewhere around the 95th percentile of incomes in my country and I work fully remote, meaning even more effective wealth (we bought a house in a low COL area - one without a housing cartel.)
As war1025 noted, this is not true. People in tech are the most likely to have access to remote work that pays very well. I bring in the only income while my wife stays home with our two boys (6 and 3). I live in Pittsburgh, PA and worked remotely for a startup based out of SF until they ran out of money late last year and picked up a job in downtown Pittsburgh pretty quickly after that. I wouldn't say we're swimming in money but we are comfortable and don't have to check our balance for most purchases.
They don't have to do anything. There are tech jobs everywhere. Maybe you can't work for one of the big corps and make ridiculous money, but you can still make great money for hardly any effort anywhere the regional economy isn't crap.
I am involved with the Manhattan community board that oversees, amongst other areas, Times Square. Meetings are at 6 or 7 on Thursdays. Public input is sought and listened to—on accession, meetings are shifted to the weekend.
No difference in the make-up of the turnout. A lot of the population self-selects out of the political process.
American politics is generally focused on meaningless issues for most people. For an older example, the keystone pipeline was going to have zero impact on 99.999% of Americans yet it somehow became a “Major” issue.
That crap sucks up the attention so much that when issues that have real impact show up they get lost in the noise.
A thing I got a real kick out of with the Bakken (thought it was Keystone, but looked it up and it wasn't) pipeline, is that it was a big news event, and several people I knew were all worked up about it. The pipeline literally went within 5 miles of our city though, and no one cared about those portions. They cared about the parts that were hot in the news.
There are still a couple semi trailers parked in fields with big "Stop Eminent Domain Abuse" signs painted on them though. So I guess at least the farmers whose land it cut through cared locally.
Acitvists have always been attacked as "terrorists". Look at the brutal repression of the Civil Rights movement, where imprison was one of msnycworries when faced with a murderous police force and general public.
Really interesting discussion. I would add a guess that living a long life has become so normalized and expected that risk taking behaviour has become more eschewed.
This downplays a significant problem. The man in the story didn't set out to be a forger; it was an opportunity he discovered by chance, based on previous knowledge and talents.
Matching up people with jobs is hard enough with paid work. Doing a better job at matching people with volunteer opportunities that suit them would be a huge win.
Figuring out where best to donate money is relatively easy in comparison; GiveWell does a good job of that.
I'd say it's actually very hard to find effective charities. Most charities don't evaluate the outcomes versus the cost of their work, regardless of their earnest desire to be helpful. While Charity Navigator and GiveWell can weed out some of the truly bad orgs, the orgs trying to do the right thing and being ineffective is probably a larger problem than anyone realizes. You want to make a huge impact on people's lives? Solve food transportation, early cancer diagnosis, or basic medical care. Those are easily the most impactful and least sexy parts of making lives better.
GiveWell and Charity Navigator are pretty much the opposite. GiveWell has a small list of very thoroughly investigated charities, while Charity Navigator has a big list but doesn't say much of anything about their effectiveness.
True, although it's still the case that the really effective, immediate ways to help can get you arrested. Plenty of places are criminalising helping refugees.
In the article you cited it is not about helping refugees, but about the WAY they were helping refugees.
Of course you can argue that the laws violated are stupid or inhumane. But in a democratic country like Greece you’ll have a hard time. The laws are generally a result of balancing different interests, here refugees fleeing from a very unpleasant life in Turkey and there EU tax payers having to pay for their integration for the next few years.
You can disagree and if caught happily pay the price (after all, why not go to jail for some time to save a few humans).
I want to use the word crypto-fascism, but apparently there's already a definition for that. Maybe techno-totalitarianism?
There's a disturbing trend of governments applying technology to bureaucracy to better track and control people. For example, there's no document you can easily forge to get past the face recognition and fingerprint reader at the US border.
Under a tyrannical government, these technologies could kill millions of people, but under a normal regime they provide minimal benefit to society, like maybe they catch people overstaying their visa or whatever.
I would make a similar argument about gun control: Gun control can be used to great effect by tyrants, but offers minimal benefits at best under a normal regime.
For those who think gun control provides a large benefit, consider that murder has already become a minor problem in the US -- around 1/20 of what it was during colonial america. Suicide is much more common (and not easily reduced with gun control). Gun control is usually badly written (e.g. restricting rifles, which account for a tiny fraction of murders) and clumsily implemented and poorly enforced, and surely won't bring murders to zero.
Compare to a situation like Venezuela, where the military is literally blocking food aid from hungry people. I wonder how long that would last with civilian gun ownership?
Venezuela has a ban on personal gun ownership for many people, however many/most people still own guns because the murder rate is very high due to the insane poverty that's gripped the country. One of the leading candidates is talking about removing gun restrictions. The problem isn't that the populace doesn't have guns. Guns do not solve political issues. The US couldn't solve Vietnam's issues despite winning on the battlefield in most incursions. Guns don't solve any problems in nearly any case. Boots on the ground solves problems and lots of them. Basically there's no way individual people can fight against an armed military with modern weapons and transport.
I've heard that theory before, that individuals gain no political power by owning guns, and I'm not convinced. Tyrants are never apathetic about who has weapons and who doesn't.
Also, the details matter a lot. What percentage of civilians? Absolute numbers? Pistols or rifles? How are loyalty lines drawn geographically?
There are also all kinds of other political games the people in power play other than direct military confrontation. Leaving you unprotected (e.g. strict gun control and long police response times) amongst criminals is one way to make your rights useless.
That is relatively new, though. As far as I remember, in the "old days" as a foreigner you got those cardboard slips stapled into your passport which were removed again when you left the country. Today they just do this electronically and keep track of who is in the country by receiving your passport information from the airlines. (You can even check your arrival and departure history online: https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search)
The US stopped doing it around 2014.
They also stopped doing it in JFK before they stopped doing it in LAX; so when I flew in one side of the country and out the other I had to argue with the clerk....
Are you a U.S. permanent resident or U.S. citizen?
It only works for foreigners, I believe, as U.S. residents don't need I-94 forms (the old cardboard slips). I'm also not sure if it works for Canadians, as Canadians can also travel to the U.S. more easily.
The only ways to leave Canada are by air or to the US, and in either case your departure will be shared with the Canadian government by either the airline or the US government. Among other things, it prevents residency fraud (claiming benefits like healthcare or old age pension while actually living abroad).
Countries that lack strong bilateral cooperation with their only land neighbour have to use other methods, like exit controls.
I would imagine it saves the government money and saves lawful visitors time. Many borders have a manual processing line when the automated system fails or there are further questions.
It is not a coincidence that people increasingly call the moderates (GOP and Democrats) in the US “corporatists”, which is a shortening of “corporate fascists”.
From what I can tell, if you are a republican corporatist, you are sometimes called a neocon. If you are democratic, then the term is neoliberal.
I might be missing some subtle distinction between the terms, but I think these definitions are basically accurate.
'Neocon' is a label applied to a group of formerly-liberal foreign policy hawks, who moved to the right in the 1960s and subsequently. They were some of the strongest voices for military intervention in foreign countries during and after the Cold War, and are considered part of the conservative movement. Think Paul Wolfowitz and colleagues.
Neoliberalism is focused on economics, not military policy, and advocates free movement of goods, capital, and (sometimes) labour to build a global interconnected capitalism. It's probably the 'consensus' position amongst policy elites in most Western countries, though is suffering blowback from varying groups including economic nationalists (who dislike its open, cosmopolitan, nature and lack of concern for the nation) from the left (who dislike its promotion of the interests of capital over the needs of workers) and from localists (who dislike its homogenising qualities and dismissal of the value of 'place').
I think most people just mean by corporatists 'beholden to corporate interests' rather than specifically 'corporate fascists'; in either case they probably don't mean the original meaning of corporatism, which was control of the economy via negotiation between organised interest groups representing sectors of the people (farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, etc.) This was prominent in Italian fascism in the 30s and had echoes in various other parts of the 20th Century such as the institutionalisation of trades union bargaining in some social democratic countries from the forties onwards.
Surely forgery is not the only thing any of us can do about getting people out of dire situations (or preventing the dire situations from existing in the first place)?
Though he was a skilled forger — creating passports from scratch and improvising a device to make them look older — there was little joy in it. “The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he told me. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure.” Years later he’s still haunted by the work, explaining: “I think mostly of the people that I couldn’t save.”
It's interesting to consider the parallels between the power/responsibilities carried by Kaminsky, and our own lives. It is estimated that we can save a human life for $2000. Which means that each of us faces a similar dilemma even if we don't realize it: "If I go on an international vacation, 1 person will die"
This is not to say that we should live a spartan life and donate every dollar to charity. I wouldn't expect Kaminsky to forego sleep entirely either. But it's a tradeoff that is worth being conscious of, the next time we spend money on things we don't truly want or need.
It is undoubtedly clear to me that a human life is less valuable to me than my having a MacBook Pro because I am both fully aware of how much it costs to save people and consciously choose not to do so.
So life isn't really precious. It is only precious in terms of its relationship to me. My family is precious and my friends are precious. Life? Life is cheap.
Things I value more than life for life's own sake:
* The aforementioned MacBook Pro
* A trip to Switzerland
* Two months of my personal trainer's sessions
* My bicycle
* One month of rent in SF
* Having my car for a couple of months
* A celebratory lunch for my team
The real disconnect isn't that we're imperfectly choosing our spending. It's that we tell the lie that life is precious. It is not.
I will buy my parents a computer and a tablet soon. I will do this for them knowing it brings them some small pleasure. I will do this knowing that doing so will doom a child.
It sound horrible, morbid and even psychopathic, but it is the truth. Most people do not think about life in such practical ways (read: realistic), instead it is idealized and made an abstract concept.
It is not. You consciously choose, every day, egoistic actions that harm other people. You could have saved countless lifes, yet you did not. Do not pretend to care when you do not.
Same thing goes with eating meat. Animals aren't things. They feel, they suffer. And we make them suffer. Just because they taste good.
But harming a dog? Abandoning a dog to get a new puppy? That is horrible! But is it, really? Or is it just the same thing we do every day?
Most people understand that it's counter-productive to impoverish one's self in the process of trying to help others.
It's for both sentimental and practical reasons that we give the greatest help to those closest to us - our spouse/partner, children, parents, siblings, close friends; if everyone were able to do that, then the world would function just fine.
And we know that if we spend our entire wealth and productive capacity trying to help people unknown to us, we'll soon be unable to help anyone at all and will quickly end up in need of welfare rather than being able offer it.
Effectively every employed person pays tax, and is comfortable knowing their taxes help others unknown to them.
Many people give to charity because they like knowing that some of their wealth helps others outside their immediate circle.
The assertion "you could have saved countless lives, yet you did not" is false and misanthropic.
I'm no objectivist or right-libertarian, and I'm fully supportive of benevolence, humanitarianism and welfare.
But in order for these systems to function optimally, we must begin by ensuring the needs of ourselves and those close to us are taken care of, so we can be net-contributors to welfare rather than net-recipients.
Because as soon as too many people become net-recipients, welfare systems collapse.
I find it sad that other commenters are attacking you because they don't understand that you just stated your reveled preferences, and those are shared by mostly every other person.
> "So life isn't really precious. It is only precious in terms of its relationship to me"
I'm curious as to which moral framework or philosophy you subscribe to? Or more concretely, how do you go about deciding when it is permissible to engage in self-serving actions at the expense of others?
> Or more concretely, how do you go about deciding when it is permissible to engage in self-serving actions at the expense of others?
Roughly, parochial altruism, though not in the traditional sex/race/language-based sense. As you can imagine, almost everyone's point of view here is not summarizable into text short enough to be of value for you to read, so that's the un-nuanced way of putting it.
The truth, though, is that what I said previously was more descriptive than aspirational. That's just who I am, observed solely through the lens of my actions. It's not very different from anyone else. Really, I only say "I" in that entire text because if I said "We" people would be offended, even though what I said is really banally normal.
This is so egocentric. Do you really believe your choices can have such an impact ? Actually it has not, and you can sleep well knowing than buying a computer to your parents won't harm anyone, because your choices alone cannot change the world. If you're not giving money to charities, then someone else will do. If no one gives money, then there will still be some people trying to save childs anyway, using their skills and their guts, not their money.
Now imagine this theoretical situation : you have the choice between buying a new computer or save an unknown child for certain death (let's imagine a psychopath taking a child in hostage and asking you randomly). Would you still buy the computer ? Would you still consider that human life is less valuable for you than having a new computer ? I certainly hope not
Posing hypotheticals like this and passing judgment on their character for their answer is not a good-faith way of discussing a topic. It's just not a realistic scenario and someone's answer to the hypothetical indicates nothing about how they would actually act in a real situation where they were able to help someone.
You did not understand my point. My point was that you cannot pretend to not value life just because you prefer to buy a new computer rather than giving 2000$ to a charity. There is no direct connection, if it would be that easy then Bill Gates would be the savior of humanity.
Sure. I mean I think the whole discussion, right back to the root comment, is an unrealistic hypothetical.
The $2,000 refers to the estimated average cost of saving a malaria sufferer in certain countries.
But that's based on the cost of running a comprehensive program in which many people donate, many people help on the ground and many lives are saved.
In some other contexts it could cost much less to save a life. In others, no amount of money could save a particular person's life.
But many people give something to humanitarian charities from time to time and most people are comfortable that some of their taxes - probably more than $2000/year for most people in rich countries - are used for medical services, welfare systems and aid programs that save lives.
What I've written above is a reality-based comment on the way most people actually do expend funds that lead to lives being saved.
And I think it's related to the point you were trying to make at the start of your comment.
But veering into implausible hypotheticals about child hostages, and then passing character judgment based on an answer, starts turning a silly discussion into a toxic one.
You're referring to their "$2000-to-save-a-life" claim? It isn't "advice", it's a statement. There's a spreadsheet linked to from the above page, which shows the calculations they used to derive that statement.
The comments about the dangers of moving toward un-forgeable documents remind me of the xkcd about spacebar heating. https://xkcd.com/1172/
Official documents being susceptible to forgery is a bug. Like many bugs, it can be exploited for noble purposes, but it’s still a bug. The right way forward isn’t to keep this bug around so our systems can remain vulnerability-compatible with their 1940s versions, it’s to find a way to support the use cases you want to keep.
I don’t know how to do that exactly, but on the other hand, I bet none of you know how to convince governments to stick with forgeable paper documents either.
For similar reasons I’m against the centralization of Government data into one big database (so to speak) where they’ll be able to find almost anything about you in just a couple of clicks.
If this was a newsgroup, then what you propose could be accomplished through a killfile. Basically, one could add a rule that would hide a post if either the subject or body contained a certain phrase, and, optionally, could hide any replies to that post.
Without getting political (expecting downvotes), what comparable "terrible things" have happened under Trump that are at all similar to Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany?
The downvote button is the mind killer. Every time you push it, you forfeit a chance to examine a disagreement and change a life-- yours or theirs, who's to say? I prefer to assume we've all found our way here to be earnest, intellectually honest, 'truth-tracking cognitive systems', as one HN-front-page-linked article has put it.
It's easy to be steered into echo chambers and algorithmic news bubbles. Let's answer earnest questions with earnest answers. Leave the downvote button for things that break with the rules or good faith.
Sometimes when I feel a strong urge to downvote someone, I realize that in real life we would probably have a fantastic (may be a bit heated) conversation. So I don't.
How great would it be if we could just gather over a beer and chat.
In terms of things that have happened so far, the responses to your sibling post cover it pretty well. However, that was not was being referred to. GP's post refers to the feeling that such things could not happen in the United States.
There has, for a long time, been a sense that atrocities were not able to occur in the United States, due to some combination of individualism, enumerated rights, American exceptionalism, etc. Rising white nationalism and racism was a driving force in Trump's election. Since then, he has been a symbol for a darker sides of politics that people previously imagined to be absent in the US. It is not that terrible things on a similar magnitude to Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany have happened. It is that the US is not immune to those things happening.
(This is not meant to imply that family separation, rolling back of trans rights, and tacit approval of white supremacist violence are not terrible. They are deplorable actions, and I do not want to lessen their impact.)
They feel such things can't happen in the United States... and the example they give to contradict that is Trump? I merely ask how it is comparable to Nazi Germany. I still find it amusing merely asking my question rewards me with downvotes. I don't care about my own HN karma, but it's a shame to see comments in general getting downvoted for this. It's a ridiculous comparison.
I don't think it's the same or even near to nazi Germany, but if you listen to any in depth lectures on the raise of NSDAP, or development of political propaganda at the time, you'll find interesting parallels to the current times, like the use of a new form of mass communication media to further political agenda (radio, then - social networks now), or insistence of some people to "let them have power, they'll just discredit themselves, and the problem will solve itself by that way".
As to why people blame Trump for it, though he is definitely not the only one to blame, as POTUS I feel that he has a responsibility to bring people together, regardless if they voted for him or not, and instead he's doing the opposite.
What I mean is that I don't care about my own personal downvotes; I care a bit that Hacker News would downvote a comment because it calls out their kinda ridiculous political views, without even discussing it, as that means HN is going a bit downhill.
It's just a bit absurd, wherever you are on the political spectrum, to seriously think the US is at all similar to Nazi Germany now. You have to live in an echo chamber if you think Trump and Hitler are comparable. Stalin was was even very left wing, btw.
Also, you call other people's political views 'ridiculous' and then you wonder why they won't engage with that and instead downvote you? If you want a serious discussion, start with better kindling.
> You have to live in an echo chamber if you think Trump and Hitler are comparable.
Again, insulting the reader instead of offering some serious counterpoints which could spark a debate.
It's too ridiculous a topic to even seriously discuss though. The holocaust, invading Europe, the gestapo, gulags... It's not the same as the current US President. Like, do you seriously think there is merit in comparing Hitler to Trump? Do you think you would bother breaking down Hitler vs Obama?
The point isn't really what Trump has done, it's that leftists are suddenly discovering that it won't always be "their guy" with all that power, and that misusing that power against them is a real possibility.
Be very, very careful what excuses one makes when "your guy" is overreaching and expanding power.
Not sure if trolling, but look up family separation, Vietnamese deportation, the sales of national park lands, incitement to violence against journalists, the rise in hate crimes, etc
I don't care about the United States. Other than that, "needing to leave the country" (what I said) is very different from "illegally enter" (what you said), starting with the direction of travel.
The Holocaust has become a symbol of absolute evil, like the devil in a religion. We rightly understand that nothing contemporary could be comparable.
In the same way that we wouldn't believe that a child has been possessed. Maybe the child is sick, even if not possessed. The lack of evil possession is not an excuse to ignore the illness.
And there is a lot to be concerned about our culture. And yes there are parallels to some 20th century isms. But those things are bad because they are bad. Not because of some bogeyman from yesteryear.
But, Holocaust did not happened because devil or supernatural. It happened because humans. It was entirely and fully human affair. Some of people who were kids at the timead seen it are still alive. Nazism is not bogeyman from yesterday, it is living ideology, altrought not in power.
Alao, ISIS acts are contemporary and we might find they are comparable.
Oh I agree with you. Nazism is no more mystical than HIV or cancer. My point is more that society doesn't view it's in that way. WWII has become a big thing in the minds of people who had no direct involvement. It has assumed a cultural and political significance that is much more symbolic than how it was viewed in the past. And when something becomes symbolic it assumes a rhetorical and emotional power. You can talk about nazi evil and everyone knows what you mean, without really having any direct understanding of what it actually means in a practical sense.
And in a practical sense the key is always to consider the effect of bad actions on individual people. It is about human rights and dignity. And that is what nationalists want to destroy. They value the "nation" more highly than they value individual humans. That is what made Nazis bad. Everything else is just fact based symbolism that can be twisted to support any argument you want.
I know there were discussions about selling national park lands, but I can't find any information on whether it actually happen? Do you have any links?
Family separation started under Obama and the rise in hate crimes is a false narrative. Violence has actually decreased over the past decade. Journalists are only covering specific cases because it pushes the idea that Trump=bad.
The vietnamese that got deported also committed crimes. He didn't deport everyone, which isn't really that bad.
Again, he hasn't really done much of anything and is mostly a lame duck president.
There is a rise of hate crimes committed by conservatives, a high profile example being the recent New Zealand killer who praised Trump in his manifesto. Also an increase in hate crimes against Muslims.
I can think of two high profile fake hate crimes, as you mention. But that number is dwarfed by the number of actual hate crimes, which continue daily.
I haven't heard about the violence against conservatives you mention... Can you point me at an example so I can learn more?
I follow 1-2 angry conservatives on Twitter just to get a peek into that bubble, and I get to hear about a few definite anti conservative hate crimes most weeks.
Thanks for the link. Some legitimate violence in there. I do think leftist have an unacceptable problem with threats of violence, and media organizations inckuding Twitter don't take them seriously enough.
Not particularly different than the right who also has a problem with violence and threats but I acknowledge there is a problem on both sides.
I'm not going to click on the Breitbart link. What is the list of murders committed by leftists equivalent to Tree of Life, Parkland, or Dylan Roof's massacre at the AME church in Charleston, say? Or Charlottesville? If we want to branch out from the U.S., how about Jo Cox in the UK or the Christchurch massacres in NZ?
"There is a problem on both sides" is a pretty bland way to absolve the guiltier party.
"They (who?) have a higher headcount so our violence is OK"
Conservatives call out and distance themselves from the far-right and violence. A few deranged lunatics on the fringes of society do not represent conservative views. By attempting to disenfranchise conservatives, as the media are constantly doing, then it's no accident that there are an increased number of incidents coming from the mentally unstable who are the most misrepresented.
The media are complicit in enabling and encouraging far-left violence, and are attempting to push the culture further and further to the left, even disenfranchising moderate liberals in the process who no longer want anything to do with them (who in turn get labeled "far-right Nazi's" for the non-conformance.)
Left/Right violence is still dwarfed by Islamist terror incidents. Christians are still the most persecuted peoples on Earth. There are indeed problems on both the political extremes that we should all be working to tackle together, but apparently, there's no such thing as going too far to the left, as the current democrat candidates are competing for the title of who can go furthest. (I think we know the outcome, but if you live in the bubble of a college campus or in SV, you might not have an accurate gauge on reality).
Don't pretend like separation didn't happen during previous administrations including Obama's. The Vietnamese situation is simply uncertainty and involves only folks with criminal records. No actual action has taken place. Trump admin walked back plans to sell Utah national park lands:
ICE detaining families, splitting kids from their parents (apparently with no idea who belongs to whom), with work done by minimum wage paid security folks - some of whom appear to see unfettered access to these kids as a bonus and molest them?
The 2 replies under your comment dispute this, but does it make it okay if "both sides" dit it? It's still fucking evil. Obama continued the policy of drone terrorism/murders, that's not okay either.
Man oh man, America "the shining beacon of freedom and democracy". "But what about the infants being torn away from their parents?" "Don't worry, the other side did it too, so we're not the bad guys here!"
When family separation was international news I tried to see what my country (Sweden) does. What I saw was basically that if a crime was serious enough that you put a person in temporary holding cells, any children under their charge is sent to an adult relative, friends, or so called family home if there is no other options. Sweden doesn't have orphanages and instead have a system which is more akin to temporary adoption where the child enter an existing family. The process for infants is identical.
For Sweden, the rules in regard to temporary holding is also very clear. If the crime has a serious enough potential punishment and the investigation risk getting interference, or there is a significant flight risk, then the person under investigation is put in holding for as long as any of the above qualify. If Sweden ever get the same situation as the US and the government wanted to prevent family separation, what they would have to do is either write a special exception and override existing laws or change the punishment down to a fine.
Personally I don't find the law evil. The US implementation could use some major redesign in order to prioritize the child needs over that of the parents, but children should never end up in jail because their parents broke the law. The solution to the US issue must thus be in fixing so that immigrants don't break the law when they want to apply for asylum/legal immigration. That is what we did during the refugee crisis.
According to the FactCheck article you linked, the law requires that families either be separated or released.
> In 2016, a court ruling limited how long children with their parents could be in family detention centers.
Obama released families. Trump has taken a stricter stance against immigration, which requires some unpleasant enforcement, but once again according to FactCheck, he did order that families be kept together as long as possible:
> On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Nielsen to keep families in custody together “during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members” at least “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations.”
Yes, because Trump doesn't really have the legal power to ignore the Flores settlement with an executive order, but the public pressure made it impossible for anyone to challenge the EO.
Out of curiousity, how would you suggest people trying to enter the United States with children should be handled, without just allowing them to enter freely?
It doesn't actually matter what has or has not happened under Trump. There is a sizable contingent of people on the left who believe the President of the USA is a criminal supported mainly by racists. I personally disagree but those beliefs open up too very easy prongs of attack to counter 'it can't happen here' arguments:
* They likely believe the situation went from everything being fine to everything being not fine at extreme speed in 2016
* They have just been subjected to 2 years of evidence of their political tribe's relative impotence removing a criminal from high office
Those beliefs should be a lot easier to push the idea that government capability is the threat, not the governments current intentions.
Not so easy anymore, with all the biometrics and cryptographically secure data on a microchip embedded in today's passports.