#migrant labor law

[tanadrin]

but i take a pretty dim view of the modern conception of citizenship in the first place. anybody should be able to participate politically in the life of the polity they live in and work in and pay taxes in; we tolerate some 200-odd apartheid regimes worldwide because most of them are comparatively soft--it is at least possible under law to be naturalized in the United States, or Mexico, or Canada, or Sweden, and so forth, and many countries also observe various jus soli rules that mean children can become citizens of the place they were born. (the absolute jus soli of the United States is rare, and should be treasured.)

in only a few places like qatar are those regimes not only harder, but taken to an absurd extreme: you can have a country so dependent on "foreigners" that 88% of the country is "foreign"--that it would instantly collapse if everybody there went back to their "home" country!--but which still denies the people its entire economy, its basic infrastructure, is dependent on the right of political participation. there are sections of the economy of some large states dependent on migrant labor (agriculture in many parts of the US is one example), but if every "foreigner" left Qatar or Kuwait or the UAE, it would be a catastrophe on par with the country being nuked. plagues don't kill nine in ten inhabitants of a country, outside science fiction scenarios. this is not citizenship on the modern model; it's not even citizenship on the ancient model, outside of, like, Sparta.

[determinate-negation]

crazy how so many states keep legalizing child labor even more and dismantling labor laws and now all these kids who are mostly migrants are dying and getting injured in meat packing plants and roofing jobs doing the most dangerous shit with no training and no regulatory bodies and amazon is trying to destroy the nlrb and this is all happening with the most pro labor administration in power rn?

[arctic-hands]

I'm serious when I say the United States is actively hostile to children. Constant school shootings our leaders refuse to do anything about. Child Protective Services that overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort. No healthcare. Our education system is abysmal. Very few areas in the public that are safe for children to be in. Large swaths of states making gender affirming care for trans kids a felony. Child marriages are legal in a lot of states. Treating kids like property parents have every right to do whatever they want to, to the point where the U.S. is one of the very few countries that refused to ratify the U.N.'s Convention On The Rights Of The Child explicitly on the basis that treating children like people erodes the rights of American parents. And now states are enacting laws that overturn child labor laws like it's the goddamn Victorian Age. And even before those laws were made, it turns out that migrant children have been working in factories for a lot of companies, including the supposedly socially-minded Ben and Jerry's.

As complicated as adult life is, I would never want to be a kid again, with no say or agency in my life and completely helpless to the whims of the adults around me.

[joe-england]

Child Labor: It's Back!

[undocumented-economics]

Migrant Workers' Rights

It is often assumed that, because undocumented workers did not enter the U.S. outside of legally sanctioned channels, that they are exempted from the rights that U.S. citizens or documented immigrants are entitled to. This is not the case. Often, employers exploit the "undocumented" status of these workers, as well as their lack of knowledge regarding U.S. law, in order to take advantage of them, depriving them of certain right that they deserve.

For documented workers, if they are injured on the job, they are entitled to receive financial compensation from their employer. Undocumented workers, likely fearing discovery by the governmental officials, rarely ever file for compensation. However, in certain states, it is legal for undocumented workers to file for compensation for work related injuries. To determine in which states, as of 2022, it is legal for undocumented workers to file for workers' compensation in, consult the following document:

It is often perceived that one of the primary reasons for which employers hire undcoumented workers is that they can get away with paying them less. It is illegal for employers to do so. In accordance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, ALL employees, documented or otherwise, are entitled to the same minimum wage and overtime pay.

Just as with any other business with 15 or more employees, businesses which hire undocumented workers are prohibited by law from discriminating against individuals during the hiring process. They are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) from employment based discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin. They are protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 from employment based discrimination on the basis of old age. They are protected by Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 from employment based discrimination on the basis of disability. Lastly, the Immigration and Nationality Act protects undocumented workers from discrimination based on national origin or citizenship status in the hiring or firing process , as well as from retaliation or intimidation from former or prospective employers.

Despite these legal provisions, it is still illegal in the U.S. for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers, and the threats of deportation or legal trouble still loom large. Undocumented workers wishing to exercise their legal rights should therefore speak to an attorney before taking any form of legal action.

Sources:

“What Employers Need to Know about Undocumented Workers Rights.” 2021. 501(c) Agencies Trust. 501(c) Agencies Trust. May 21. https://www.501ctrust.org/what-employers-need-to-know-about-undocumented-workers-rights/.

“Undocumented Workers.” 2023. The Gittes Law Group. The Gittes Law Group. February 21. https://gitteslaw.com/employee-rights/undocumented-workers/.

[trans-axolotl]

ID: [A poster created by Sean Saifa Wall and Micah Bazant of a Black parent holding their child. They are dressed in white and almost seem to be glowing, in front of a backdrop of multicolored waves that look like DNA strands. Colorful text reads "Protect Intersex Youth."]

"A Framework for Intersex Justice

Intersex justice is medical justice. Intersex surgeries hurt everyone.

These medical violations bring immediate harm to the child who is subjected to them.

Parents who consent to medically unnecessary surgeries participate in a culture of shame, silence and stigma, perpetuated by doctors, that allows these surgeries to continue. Parents are often left to fend for themselves as they navigate shame and guilt. The issue of parents consenting to these surgeries is especially complex when societies believe that children don’t have individual rights and that parents are always acting in their best interest.

Medical practitioners such as pediatricians, obstetricians, urologists, social workers, and endocrinologists all play a role in upholding an institution that continues to harm children with intersex variations. The practitioners, in turn, are protected by hospitals and state laws that grant them immunity.

This is why intersex justice is important.

Although the framework is evolving, the following is a definition of intersex justice co-created with Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis (they>she), an Associate Professor of Gender/Sexuality in Studio and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art: Intersex justice is a decolonizing framework that affirms the labor of intersex people of color fighting for change across social justice movements. By definition, intersex justice affirms bodily integrity and bodily autonomy as the practice of liberation. Intersex justice is intrinsically tied to justice movements that center race, ability, gender identity & expression, migrant status, and access to sexual & reproductive healthcare. Intersex justice articulates a commitment to these movements as central to its intersectional analysis and praxis. Intersex justice acknowledges the trauma caused by medically unnecessary and nonconsensual cosmetic genital surgeries and addresses the culture of shame, silence and stigma surrounding intersex variations that perpetuate further harm.

The marginalization of intersex people is rooted in colonization and white supremacy. Colonization created a taxonomy of human bodies that privileged typical white male and female bodies, prescribing a gender binary that would ultimately harm atypical black and indigenous bodies. As part of a liberation movement, intersex activists challenge not only the medical establishment, which is often the initial site of harm, but also governments, institutions, legal structures, and sociocultural norms that exclude intersex people. Intersex people should be allowed complete and uninhibited access to obtaining identity documents, exercising their birth and adoption rights, receiving unbiased healthcare, and securing education and employment opportunities that are free from harm and harassment. This framework serves a radical vision where intersex children are protected and survivors of genital cutting are cared for and respected. We owe that to intersex people and we owe that to ourselves.

The implementation of an intersex justice framework should include the following components: 1. Informed consent 2. Reparations 3. Legal protections 4. Accountability 5. Language 6. Children's rights 7. Patient-centered healthcare."

-Intersex Justice Project, founded by Sean Saifa Wall, Lynnell Stephani Long, and Pidgeon Pagonis.

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

---

Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

---

Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

---

All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[mollysunder]

Lunari Heritage in Zaun

This is gonna be a reach, but from the little we've seen of Vi and Jinx's mom and younger Silco, I'd guess they were both from the same ethnic group.

In a place like Zaun, where the people are left with scraps, any piece of jewelry sticks out. Vi's mom and Silco are both wearing similar pieces of jewelry. Silco's bracelet could likely be fitted as a necklace since it twice wraps over his wrist. Neither are wearing anything of high quality, but the necklace and bracelet in their respective pictures seem decently maintained if not worn. That's when I thought, these are probably heirlooms.

In fact they looked pretty similar too, but in smaller scale of the princess's own pendants. I wouldn't bring this up if it weren't for the fact that Piltovans prioritize elaborate art-deco aesthetics, the more elaborately geometric the better (Councilor Shoola). So you would assume even the simplest jewelry would be a square pendant or a straight line. But no, big plain circles, and then I remembered we saw that before, on the princess Ambessa killed. Big bronze circles.

And when we look at young Vi , you notice that she's wearing jewelry too. A simple necklace with a green (it looks green) gem. And I realized that the princess's necklace was also adorned green gems.

I'm pulling from scraps, but it's interesting that small things these Zaunites have to adorn themselves (though not for long with the time skips) are similar versions if not simpler version's of the princess's.

At first I thought this meant that many of the cast were actually of Ionian descent. But then in the Princess's scene a thought kept coming back to me, "Why is Mel wearing purple?". Mel, a skilled diplomat from a young age, typically wears the main colors of the nations she hosts and is hosted by. White for Piltover, Black for Noxus (Ambessa), and always with her signature accents of gold. So if Mel followed her mother to Ionia ,where green is a culturally significant color, why purple? It's because Mel and Ambessa weren't in Ionia, they were in Targon fighting the Lunari.

The Lunari are Rakkor tribal people in the Targonian region who worship the moon, and are persecuted for it by the Solari, the religious order that worships the sun. While technically Mt. Targon is influenced by Mt. Olympus and Greek mythology aesthetic, that's more the case for the Solari. Overtime the Lunari aesthetic has been mixed it's originally nomadic culture with East Asian influences. The prominent colors of the Lunari happen to be turquoise, silver, black and purple. It was such a little thing to remember but it made me see connections I hadn't thought about.

Suddenly everything starts to connect. The bronze coins represent the 3 moons that exist in Arcane's Runeterra. How do we know there are 3 moons, because the Valdiani piece Jinx stole was depicting their planet. In the Valdiani there are 3 orbits circling the Earth, meaning 3 moons (or satelites). Now the engraving on the gold of the princess's necklace makes sense, because it's supposed to resemble the gates at the peak of Mt. Targon. The pendant itself is shaped like the mountain with the gates fitted at the top.

Frankly, it works for the Princess to have been Lunari and waves of descendants of the Lunari to arrive in Piltover and end up in Zaun. In Arcane, Piltover was created as a safe haven to escape the Rune Wars 200 years from the start of the show. Even after the Rune Wars ended the shipping port has likely seen waves of migrant labor and refugees from the ongoing crisis that occur in Runeterra (*cough*Noxus*cough*). It's likely that many of the current generation of Zaunites are of mixed heritage of the various fleeing people's.

It creates a whole new dynamic of the ways in which Piltover's laws, their Ethos, strips the people of Zaun from their identity and reducing them to tools for the mines. Magic is inherently a part of religious ceremonies and religion in general in Runeterra, especially for the Lunari. How do you practice your religion in a place that has banned the means by which it's conducted? There must have been more people like the Lunari who didn't have a problem with their magic, their problem was that they were being persecuted.

The remnants of family keepsakes brought over as communities fled were clung to as best as possible especially as they had to let go of part their spiritual identity. But even that doesn't seem to have lasted either. Vi doesn't keep her necklace, her mother is dead, so lost is her necklace, and we never see Silco wear his bracelet. They could have been stolen, or at best, hidden for safe keeping, maybe Enforcers get suspicious at the hint of mysticism and suddenly they want to talk.

Finally, maybe a little less related, it is interesting how prominent Piltovans and Zaunites take on day and night aspects. The sun shines over Piltover at their best, begins to set at times of uncertainty. While in the cover of night with moon above, the strongest Zaunites strike hardest. One more thing, it is interesting how Arcane's Jinx has taken on darker tones of purple rather than stick with neon pink. I always have to go back and look at a reference to remember that her pants are purple-er than I recall.

Update: I wanted to include that the large doodle Jinx made on her cup actually looks similar to the Lunari's sigil. And the sigil remains on the cup into the timeskip, also the center moon is made smaller within the crescent like in the necklace. I also noticed Jinx's cup later has more violent bomb imagery around it.

Update 2: With the final season approaching I'm noticing this is getting some attention again. I would like to say that if I could write this from scratch again I'd say it's more likely the princess is from Ionia now, which doesn't up end the Lunari theory.

Previous League canon confirms the Lunari faith does have ties to Ionia. A good portion of the Lunari are Ionian in descent, and Diana, their aspect of the moon (essentially their demigod), currently lives in Ionia. League even created skinline for Ionians blood moon worshippers, an edgy offshoot of the Lunari faith. It's all very interesting and a bit complicated because Riot loves to drop plot points in the lore and never come back. I'll try to clean something up for a longer explanation later. What's crazy is the Medardas are still the aggressors because Noxians and Solarians, which the Medardas are both, terrorize Ionians and Lunaris respectively.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Craig Harrington at MMFA:

The economic policy provisions outlined by Project 2025 — the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration — are overwhelmingly catered toward benefiting wealthier Americans and corporate interests at the expense of average workers and taxpayers. Project 2025 prioritizes redoubling Republican efforts to expand “trickle-down” tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation across the economy. The authors of the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, recommend putting key government agencies responsible for oversight of large sectors of the economy under direct right-wing political control and empowering those agencies to prioritize right-wing agendas in dealing with everything from consumer protections to organized labor activity. [...]

Project 2025 would chill labor unions' abilities to engage in political activity. Project 2025 suggests that the National Labor Relations Board change its enforcement priorities regarding what it describes as unions using “members' resources on left-wing culture-war issues.” The authors encourage allowing employees to accuse union leadership of violating their “duty of fair representation” by having “political conflicts of interest” if the union engages in political activity that the employee disagrees with. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; National Labor Relations Board, accessed 7/8/24]

Project 2025 would make it easier for employers to classify workers as “independent contractors.” The authors recommended reinstating policies governing the classification of independent contractors that the NLRB implemented during the Trump administration. Those Trump-era NLRB regulations were amended in 2023, expanding workplace and labor organizing protections to previously exempt American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The National Law Review, 6/19/23; National Labor Relations Board, 6/13/23]

Project 2025 would reduce base overtime pay for workers. The authors recommend changing overtime protections to remove nonwage compensatory and other workplace benefits from calculations of their “regular” pay rate, which forms the basis for overtime formulations. If that change is enacted, every worker currently given overtime protections could be subject to a slight reduction in the value of their overtime pay, which the authors claim will encourage employers to provide nonwage benefits but would effectively just amount to a pay cut. The authors also propose other changes to the way overtime is calculated and enforced, which could result in reduced compensation for workers. Overtime protections have long been a focus of right-wing media campaigns to reduce protections afforded to American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023, Media Matters, 7/9/24]

Project 2025 proposes capping and phasing out visa programs for migrant workers. Project 2025’s authors propose capping and eventually eliminating the H-2A and H-2B temporary work visa programs, which are available for seasonal agricultural and nonagricultural workers, respectively. Even the Project 2025 authors admit that these proposals could threaten many businesses that rely on migrant workers and could result in higher prices for consumers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Project 2025 recommends institutionalizing the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the Sabbath. Under the guise of creating a “communal day of rest,” Project 2025 includes a policy proposal amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require paying workers who currently receive overtime protections “time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath,” which it said “would default to Sunday.” Ostensibly a policy that increases wages, the proposal is specifically meant to disincentivize employers from providing services on Sundays as an explicitly religious overture. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

[...]

International Trade

Project 2025 contains a lengthy debate between diametrically opposed perspectives on international trade and commerce.Over the course of 31 pages, disgraced former Trump adviser and current federal inmate Peter Navarro outlines various proposals to fundamentally transform American international commercial and domestic industrial policy in opposition to China, primarily by using tariffs. He dedicates well over a dozen pages to obsessing over America’s trade deficit with China, even though Trump’s trade war with China was a failure and as he focused on China, the overall U.S. trade deficit exploded. Much of the rest of Navarro’s section is economic saber-rattling against “Communist China’s economic aggression and quest for world domination.”In response, Kent Lassman of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute promotes a return to free trade orthodoxy that was previously pursued by the Republican Party but has fallen out of favor during the Trump era.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda would be a boon for the wealthy and a disaster for the working class folk.

See Also:

MMFA: Project 2025’s dystopian approach to taxes

[maybe-boys-do-love]

So I shared, the Spanish-language horror visual references in this week’s Peaceful Property episode (which are great ghost story films for comparison in thematic elements, as well). The death this week, though, is yet another ghost story reference, this time in an English-language series with lots of commentary on class and the racial and gender politics of domestic work, The Haunting of Bly Manor.

🚨spoilers for both series from here on🚨

In Bly Manor, Hannah Grose, the estate’s maid is revealed late in the series to be a ghost, who had fallen into a well on the grounds. Although the series is based off Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and its celebrated film adaptation The Innocents from the 1960s and its celebrated 2000s remake The Others* with Nicole Kidman (in which the twist from the previous is that the governess main character is revealed to be dead), Hannah Grose’s death is a new addition in the Netflix series. It compounds the complex themes about class and domestic servitude in the original British story and adds issues of race to the proceedings.

Peaceful Property uses Baanchuen’s story for similar purposes. Migrant domestic work is an important issue in Southeast Asia. The International Labor Organization put out a report last year stating, “29 per cent of surveyed migrant domestic workers in Malaysia were in conditions meeting the ILO’s statistical definition of forced labour; as were 7 per cent of surveyed workers in Singapore and 4 per cent in Thailand. Indicators of involuntariness include not being able to quit your job, having to stay in the job longer than agreed, and being made to work without overtime pay, among others.” Shackles, like those on Baanchuen’s ghost, are an easily recognizable symbol of enslavement, indicating the extent of Aunt Phom’s cruelty.

But even under legal circumstances, domestic workers are one of the least protected group of laborers in Thailand and abroad. Taiwanese-American labor organizer, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, and mentor/friend to BLM cofounder Alicia Garza, Ai-Jen Poo has a fantastic interview on On Being, in which she discusses the racialized, gendered, international, and cross-class dynamics that define domestic care work, which impacts the strategies to organizing for workers rights in the field.

“The average annual income for a home care worker [presumably in the US at the time of recording in 2020] is $15,000 per year. And I can’t think of any community that I’ve ever lived in where you can survive on $15,000 a year. It’s really quite extraordinary. And they’re there and see employers come home with a pair of shoes that are maybe more than they make in a week, and yet, their job is to care and support and love, and they do so. You can’t actually do your job as a caregiver if you dehumanize the person that is in your charge. And I think that that is so much of what’s needed in this moment. All of us need to understand that we have a profound set of challenges and inequities that we have to deal with and transform, but we have to do it with a boundless sense of compassion and humanity.”

I’d encourage some of my fellow watchers of Peaceful Property to heed Poo’s perspective on disrupting class distinctions and what the advocacy for equitable practices has looked like in her work. I’m a caseworker myself and have worked alongside people who had less privilege than me for caring wealthy people who never the less didn’t always recognize the value of those whose work they depended on and didn’t have the labor laws that might provide that guidance. There are a few pieces of work that explore this meaningfully (better than The Help, although Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer absolutely carved out depths in their characters stories that weren’t there on the page). Glad to see Peaceful Property making its attempt to explore these depths. It actually made me reflect on how many of the jobs after the first episode really focused on gendered aspects of labor—a wig-maker, assistants, food-making…

And for my Homepeach truthers out there, that gender conversation is not just about labor. Bly Manor is also notable for its queer romance storyline with a wealthier character running from her internalized homophobia/guilt after a car accident…

*Incidentally, The Others is also heavily influenced by the same Spanish film, The Spirit of the Beehive, as both referenced Spanish-language horror films in these weeks episode.

[thelastharbinger]

Did not have the U.S. government holding hearings on previously classified information and lying making confirmations under oath that they are in possession of alien bodies and ufos in order to distract from the fact that covid-19 is still the leading cause of death in children, the cost of living is astronomical, cop city is well underway despite Atlanta residents overwhelmingly crying out against it, we are experiencing the hottest & deadliest temperatures on record, the state of Florida trying to rewrite history to say that slavery was just a mutually beneficial unpaid internship, trans lives and rights are under attack, anti drag laws, FLINT MICHIGAN STILL DOES NOT HAVE CLEAN DRINKING WATER, anti-discrimination laws being reversed, Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, Roe v. Wade undone, universal free school lunches are on the ballot, ongoing mass shootings, climate change, big pharma killing off people by withholding live saving drugs at ungodly market prices, the erasure of separation of church and state, AI surveillance being implemented to detect fare evasion for increasingly costly public transport services, the rise of fascim, proud boys showing up with military grade weapons at libraries and day care centers, the permitted attempted coup of the capital, labor union strikes happening all over the country, people dying of heat in Texas because evil landlords want to cut off cooling over an unpaid $51 utility bill, train derailments causing toxic waste spills, corruption within the highest court in the land, homelessness rates the highest its ever been, migrants and asylum seekers being kicked out of temporary housing, the cost of food, book bans, Miranda Rights no longer being stated, mayors deciding to no longer publicly disclose how many people are dying pre-trial in detention facilities, federal minimum wage still $7.25, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, oil pipeline constructions on native lands, something like 30-50% of the nation's drinking water contaminated with forever chemicals, the rich remaining untaxed, biden going back on his campaign promises to forgive all student debt, still no free universal healthcare, ICE deportations increasing under biden admin, the u.s. yet maintaining colonies, teens and women getting jail time for miscarriages and abortions, 100 companies globally responsible for 70 or 80-something percent of all CO2 emissions, we are living in a police state, diseases resurfacing after years with no cases due to rising temps, death penalty, public services being defunded to increase military and police spending budgets, and abusers suing victims for defamation cases in court so that they legally cannot talk about it, and setting a dangerous precedent in the process in my 2023 bingo card but here we god damn are.

[mightyflamethrower]

Riots have broken out in multiple cities and towns across Great Britain, particularly over the past week. There were already protests taking place, but some of them have now turned violent. The topic driving all of this unrest is the immigration situation, particularly the illegal migrants that have been crossing the English Channel on rubber rafts and boats. Much as we've seen a backlash in the United States to violent crimes committed by illegal migrants, many Brits are clearly fed up as well. Everything seemed to come to a head last week when a series of stabbing attacks took the lives of three young children and left eight other children and two adults seriously injured. This took place in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool. Rumors quickly spread that the attacker was an illegal migrant, and that's when the protests turned violent. Hundreds have been arrested as a result. (AP)

Britain has been convulsed by violence for the past week as crowds spouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans clashed with police. The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event. The violence, some of Britain’s worst in years, has led to hundreds of arrests as the government pledges that the rioters will feel “the full force of the law” after hurling bricks and other projectiles at police, looting shops and attacking hotels used to house asylum-seekers. As Britain’s new government struggles to quell the unrest and announces a “standing army” of specialist police to deal with rioting, here’s a look at what’s happening and why.

The liberal media has a marked tendency to try to blame nearly everything on online misinformation or disinformation, but in this case, they do seem to have a point. The attacker was described in several outlets as someone "believed to be an asylum-seeker or a Muslim immigrant." That report spread across the media quickly, inflaming tensions. But it turns out that the killer's name is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana and he was actually born in Wales in 2006, moving to Southport in 2013. His parents are reportedly legal immigrants from Rwanda. He also reportedly suffers from autism, so the stabbing attack may have been more of a mental health issue than any sort of hate crime.

Even if the deadly attack in Southport turns out to have been mischaracterized, that doesn't mean that the UK doesn't still have a serious problem with its illegal immigration situation and resultant unrest. This situation has been simmering for more than a decade and it now appears to be reaching the boiling point. There is a group over there named the English Defence League that has been operating for more than a decade, running a campaign against massive Muslim migration into the country, and they've been attracting more followers recently.

As far as the response to this situation goes, what we're seeing is a jarring juxtaposition between two different British leaders. The UK recently elected its new Labor Party Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to replace the outgoing Conservative Party PM, Rishi Sunak. Sunak had previously vowed to stop the flow of illegals into the country by turning back the boats in the channel and deporting illegals already in the country to Rwanda. Immediately upon taking office, Starmer canceled the plan and instead vowed to take care of the problem by "working with other European nations and speeding up the removal of failed asylum-seekers."

Starmer has also vastly increased the rate of arrests... not of the migrants, of course, but of the protesters. Some of the protesters have engaged in vandalism and caused damage, with some even attacking the police, so they will need to be held accountable, but many of them are simply carrying signs and decrying both the current administration and the flood of migrants. They don't have the type of First Amendment protections we enjoy in the United States, so many of them have been sent to jail. Starmer has promised that the protesters will "feel the full force of the law" and established a "standing army" of specialist police to deal with the rioting. The entire situation is a mess, to be sure, but it's yet one more sign that massive migration and lax immigration enforcement are causing unrest far beyond America's borders. And the problem is spreading.

[just-shower-thoughts]

We turn away adult migrants at the border who are capable of working and we lower the age in our child labor laws.

[iww-gnv]

A troubling trend is brewing underneath America's strong employment market: more children are working in dangerous jobs, violating the nation's labor laws and putting their lives at risk.  In the last 10 months, federal regulators have found almost 4,500 children working in violation of federal child labor laws, an increase of 44% from a year earlier, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Some of the children were operating dangerous machinery, such as deep fryers and meat-processing equipment, the agency noted.  The surge in cases of illegal child labor come as some states are weakening their child labor laws, while some lawmakers have also pointed to an influx of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. as an underlying cause. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing focused on the hundreds of thousands of children who have entered the U.S. alone since 2021, with some lawmakers questioning Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra about their safety.  "Earlier this year, news reports detailed cases of unaccompanied minors working in harsh conditions in plants and factories," Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Florida, said at the hearing. "The reports were shocking and deeply disturbing." Almost 400,000 children have entered the U.S. alone since 2021, according to government data. The numbers have spiked in 2021, 2022 and 2023 compared with 2020, the data shows. A New York Times investigation published earlier this year found that the use of child migrant labor in factories across the U.S. has "exploded" since 2021, and concluded that "the systems meant to protect children have broken down."

[sparksinthenight]

“a 14-year-old student showed up to school with acid burns on her hands and knees from working nights at a local slaughterhouse.” Sign the petition to protect children in America, including migrant children, from child labour.