This sounds like an awful experience and I feel bad for the little girl that had to go through that.
Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal". Is the proposed alternative just open borders?
[1] > She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and regularly traveled back and forth to the United States to visit her mother, who had been in the U.S. since 2018. (Maria Alejandra had overstayed a visa but since married a U.S. citizen and was applying for a green card.)
Maybe if someone can live somewhere peacefully then they should be allowed to just live there. Maybe making laws that lead to horrors is the crime.
Maybe the real nihilists are the people who'd rather see unjust laws followed than to look at something evil and re-evaluate the legitimacy of giving power to the people doing the evil thing.
I’ve lived in several countries. When you get a visa, it’s always very clear that overstaying is a crime and if you do it you’ll never be allowed again in the country, or at least not for many years. But normally they just deport you immediately if you get caught. Going to an airport is the easiest way to get caught, but in countries like Australia they frequently check cafes and restaurant staff for illegals. I don’t know why they need detention centers though, just put them on the first airplane back home like they used to do.
I'd like to see an amnesty, immigration reform to make the entire system possible to navigate and humane treatment of all involved.
The current administration approach is to unleash a masked, unaccountable paramilitary to hold people in warehouses converted into concentration camps.
I’m in favor of amnesty only because we have allowed employers and households to hire people without immigration status for decades. It’s absurd to punish the supply of labor and not the demand of it. At this point entire key sectors of our economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. Randomly punishing a small percentage of illegal immigrants does nothing to change that reality - and so it’s just performative pain rather than a solution.
We also as a democracy simply cannot allow the status quo of a permanent underclass of non-voting residents to be a large percentage of our population. It’s corrosive to have different classes of people with different labor protection rules, wages, etc. There simply is not a clean path forward that doesn’t involve some kind of amnesty simply because seeking justice would be a humanitarian and economic crisis.
Amnesty might not be justice, but as a nation it’s our penance for decades of destabilizing our neighbors and allowing this situation to continue. Let’s get a reasonable immigration system in place and move forward.
Regardless of if there ought to be some sort of consequences for a civil (not criminal) infraction, the consequences shouldn’t fall on a 9 yo girl. I have no idea how the operators of the for profit detention center sleep at night.
Usually receiving a green card forgives any visa overstays. Because she married a US Citizen she would almost assuredly have received the green card. The months of suffering of a little girl are just due to a delay in a bureaucracy approving some paperwork.
Asking the wrong question, friend. What should the penalty be for failing to process an immigrant through your system for ~7 years? Where does the fucking buck stop? The US immigration system is broken, and has been, so where are the penalties for this mismanagement? I'd love to see Republicans propose a punitive approach here, but all I seem to hear is though terminating cliches like "should we just have open borders?"
But, absolutely - after we fix the broken system and start processing immigration in a reasonable and timely manner, then we can start asking what the penalties should be for people who abuse our immigration system. But I don't have an ounce of energy to spare on that deflection until the former is done.
> Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal"
How about something like the plan from the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" developed by 4 Democrat and 4 Republican senators (the Republicans were Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, John MacCain, and Marco Rubio), which passed the Senate 68-32?
It provided a pathway to citizenship for people who had been here long enough with no problems, after they paid some fines.
> We need laws for agents, specifically that their human-maintainers must be identifiable and are responsible.
This just creates a resource/power hurdle. The hoi polloi will be forced to disclose their connection to various agents. State actors or those with the resources/time to cover their tracks better will simply ignore the law.
I don't really have a better solution, and I think we're seeing the slow collapse of the internet as a useful tool for genuine communication. Even before AI, things like user reviews were highly gamed and astroturfed. I can imagine that this is only going to accelerate. Information on the internet - which was always a little questionable - will become nearly useless as a source of truth.
It's funny how one can see a persecuted underdog in a company that claimed full self driving (coast to coast) almost a decade ago and had not delivered anything close until just last year. I wonder how the folks who bought their "appreciating asset"[1] in 2019 feel about their cars' current value.
I just got one after the 14.2 update. Best car I've owned, I run >90% self driving. Is it ready for totally autonomous driving? No. It gets confused. They'll get there soon enough.
If new, you just funded a narcissistic wanker and his ding-a-ling tribe. Just saying.
If used, good on you. You're not making things much worse. I've seen people cheap out and buy performance diesels as they'd depreciated so much. Picking up a cheapo Tesla is at least better than that sorry outcome. Thanks.
I'm actually in awe. I wish I had lists like these for other "hot-button" issues where the common narrative is that things are constantly on the brink of some kind of catastrophe or resolution. Really puts things into perspective.
i recommend writing prompts for Gemini / ChatGPT along the lines of "as a history professor put X in perspective. Compare the evidence for / against. Be sure to include grounding on each fact ..."
What if someone else thinks that there are better (more kind, empathetic) uses of that money than funding someone's college? Why is "free college" the most kind and empathetic thing we can do with this money?
It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity.
Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
When compulsory education became a thing it met resistance from families that didn't wanna lose another pair of working hands on the farm. Babysitting is a 20th century post agrarian phenomenon.
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
i dropped spotify because i saw how terrible the non paid version of spotify is between payments, and was offended at how much i felt they used my library to hold me hostage.
Im not interested in being held hostage to pay a company xx$ a month for literally my entire life. At least when a netflix subscription is over, its not crafting up ways to torture its users into feeling obligated to resubscribe. Not that i like the streaming video services much either...
I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.
No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.
The Windows UI has been a trashfire since Windows 8. I think the expectation that it sucks has been baked in at this point, though Windows 11 represents an increase in the slope of increasing suck.
reply