#us immigration news today 2023

[head-post]

US and Mexico in talks to curb migrant flow

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Mexico’s president to discuss the influx of migrants reaching the southwestern US border.

A caravan that began its journey north on Sunday reflects the challenges in curbing migration. Migrant caravans have become a common phenomenon and are usually broken up by the authorities well before they reach the US border.

The latest caravan, roughly 1,000 miles south of the US border in the state of Chiapas, includes people from Honduras, Haiti and Cuba, among other countries. The Mexico office of the UN refugee agency said in a statement that the procession was starting to disperse and consisted of more than 2,000 people. It initially included approximately 5,000 people, the agency said.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he was willing to help, but he wanted to see progress in US relations with Cuba and Venezuela, two major sources of migrants, as well as increased development aid to the region.

On Monday, Mexico’s main goal was to get the US to reopen border crossings that had been closed due to a massive influx of migrants. 

Read more HERE

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.

The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace. Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.

‘Congratulations on such a great book’

Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive. The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.

The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.

In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.” Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.” In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s. “Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”

Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.” He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice. “You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”

[...]

‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’

In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues. In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.” Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”

Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’” In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.” The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”

Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.” Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”

[...]

‘Do not subsidize childcare’

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”. Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.” “Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.” Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”. Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.

Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”. Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”. Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”

Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.” In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”

The Guardian reports that Trump VP pick and Ohio Senator JD Vance promoted far-right extremist views from Arthur Milkh’s Up From Conservatism essay book.

[contemplatingoutlander]

The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.

Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.

Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.

This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.

[See more below the cut.]

And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.

[yuribeam]

With the flood of empty meme-ification of the bigoted violence targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, I had no idea until today that there is actually a Haitian Community Help & Support Center that serves Clark County and surrounding areas.

They were founded in 2023 and help assist refugees and immigrants with a variety of pressing needs, including:

housing

interpreting

job search

welfare assistance

"Through our work and determination, community services must be accessible to people in need of them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, color, religion, or sexual orientation. We envision it as a place where people feel at home when they come for community services and are served with dignity and respect." -HCHSC

They are now navigating the community's fears amid escalating threats, including multiple evacuations due to bomb threats, and violent racism that has exploded after J.D. Vance and Trump's xenophobic fear mongering lies were platformed at the debate.

The Haitian Times and the Hatian Community Help & Support Center organized a meeting on Saturday (9/14/24), bringing together activists from across the country, NAACP leaders, journalists, and local activists in conversation with community members.

The meeting had to be moved online out of fear for residents' safety.

"Some Haitian residents in the meeting shared their experiences in recent weeks and months as the fake news went viral. Participants also shared their fears, concerns and hope for the growing community. Even as they spoke, a ruckus broke out outside the community center from which a few participants logged into the Zoom when a strange truck appeared in the parking lot carrying white occupants acting cagey." - The Haitian Times, 9/16/24

The Haitian Times reports that some parents are keeping their children home from school out of fear for their safety. One woman's cars were vandalized in the driveway of her family home- the attacker used acid and broke a window, while another resident is facing discriminatory eviction from her business location.

White supremacist groups such as neonazis "Blood Tribe" are active in the area and are associated with the origin of the anti-Haitian lie.

Springfield's annual CultureFest, a two-day event that celebrates diversity, arts, and culture, has been cancelled for safety concerns.

"I take my kids to the park usually, I cannot do that anymore. You know, I have to just stay home and just don't go out. We used to just go for a walk in the neighborhood, but we cannot do that anymore," - Jims Denis, quoted in the Columbus Dispatch, 9/14/24

It is especially important to support the Haitian immigrant community during times like these. I hope visibility will shift from unhelpful dunk-on-trump memes to instead focus on the facts of the matter, the actual harm being caused to real communities, and how we can help.

With that in mind, the Haitian Community Help & Support Center takes donations through Stripe and Paypal on their website.

"Your generosity can make a profound difference in the lives of our Haitian community. By making a donation today, you help us provide essential resources, support, and opportunities for those in need. Donate now and be a part of the change. Every contribution counts! Thank you for your support." -HCHSC

(photo from Springfield Flag Day festival, 2023, Springfield News-Sun)

[eretzyisrael]

President Sisi, how can you say Jews were not persecuted in Egypt?

Once numbering 80 – 100,000, there are fewer than a handful of Jews left in Egypt. Yet ‘Jews were never persecuted in Egypt,’ President Sisi of Egypt declared to US secretary of state Anthony Blinken. Here is Edmond Haddad’s response in JNS News: 

Carefree days on Abu Kir beach in Egypt in 1938 (History of Egyptian Jews Facebook page)

Let me tell you about oppression and persecution: In 1947, my uncle went to prison for 15 months for purchasing a train ticket to Tel Aviv. In 1948, my father broke his arm trying to prevent the burning of his factory. He was beaten in 1950 because of his religion.

In May of 1956, Jews employed by Egyptian public institutions were sent on vacation, then dismissed. When he announced the blockade of Akaba, then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser dared the “Jews” to come—not Zionists or Israelis, but Jews. On Nov. 23, 1956, Egypt’s Minister of Religious Affairs declared, “All Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state.” Imams read this statement in mosques across Egypt.

In 1962, I went to the bank with my mother to open a savings account. After the teller saw on my identification card that I was Jewish, he threw the money I gave him back at me and told me that Jews could not have savings accounts in Egypt. Muslim teachers in my school often told us that Jews were not wanted in Egypt, so we’d better not talk in class.

In 1967, all Jewish homes and property were confiscated. All male Jews were put in detention camps for anywhere from six months to three years. Just before Nasser died, all the prisoners were deported and their families expelled.

I summarize two eyewitness accounts from my cousin Gamliel and Ibrahim Farhi, who were both imprisoned in Egyptian detention centers: The police arrested all Jewish males over the age of 18. Their businesses, cars, furniture and possessions were confiscated or auctioned off. The prisoners were taken to Abu Zaabal prison. “No one was called by their name there,” I was told. There were no watches, no shoes and only women’s names for the prisoners. The prisoners were forced to undress and run around the yard while the guards beat them. Their heads were shaved. Most were raped. They were fed white cheese full of worms and bread full of bugs. For six months, their families didn’t know if their loved ones were dead or alive. This torture continued day and night. Nasser released them only in June 1970.

At the time, Egyptian Jews were of mixed education, wealth, religious observance and political beliefs. The wealthier members of the community founded banks, owned department stores and traveled freely abroad because they could afford the bribes required. Most Jews were stateless, because their applications for Egyptian citizenship were almost always denied.

Many Jews converted to Christianity or Islam and tried to assimilate. Jews spoke several languages, but not Hebrew. They were often ambivalent about the State of Israel. Some spoke against Israel even after they were expelled from Egypt. Most of the middle-class and wealthy Jews immigrated to the U.S., Brazil, Argentina and France. Most of the poor Jews immigrated to Israel.

In Egypt, Jews were continually harassed, insulted and mocked. The secret police would knock on their doors in the middle of the night and ask them when they were leaving Egypt. Had they bought their tickets? They had better leave within a week or else. Over 35,000 Jews left or were expelled after the 1956 war. By 1967, there were about 2,000 Jews left in Egypt. Today, there are only two Jews in the entire country.

President Sisi, although you and some of leaders of the Egyptian military have close relations with Israel, most Egyptians continue to hate Israel and Jews. In 2016, a member of the Egyptian group Tawfik Okasha was physically attacked and expelled because he invited an Israeli diplomat to his home for dinner. A 2023 survey of Arabs living in countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel found that 84% don’t support the agreements.

President Sisi, how can you honestly say that Jews were not targeted in Egypt or other Arab and Muslim countries? While living in Egypt, I was ashamed of being Jewish. I was a slave in Egypt and did not realize I was free after we left. I missed my home, school and “comfortable” life. It took years for me to realize that my life changed for the better because I could now live as a Jew and be proud of my heritage.

Read article in full

[mariacallous]

I’ve been thinking about a famously orange-skinned former presenter of trashy TV programmes, who lives on a luxurious coastal estate. He has a history of racist and Islamophobic remarks, of blaming asylum seekers for bringing disease into the country and ranting about the “supercilious metropolitan elite”. He swept into a rightwing political party and refashioned it in his image, presenting himself as the antidote to politics-as-usual, whipping up culture wars and using the platform to boost his planet-sized ego.

I am, of course, describing the British former politician Robert Kilroy-Silk.

After he was sacked from his presenting job by the BBC for a crudely racist rant in the Sunday Express in 2004, he joined Ukip (the forerunner of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK), energising it and captivating the media with his culture war polemics against the EU, immigrants and “the political establishment”. His unnatural hue inspired the viral video Mr Tangerine Man. But when Ukip could no longer contain his ego, he broke away and started his own political party in 2005, Veritas (widely dubbed Vanitas), which quickly crashed and burned. Thank goodness there are no such characters on the world stage today!

I could just as well have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi, the satsuma-tinged TV presenter and culture warrior, who, like a certain other politician, went to extreme lengths to hide his baldness. He became the demagogic, rightwing Italian prime minister, seeking (successfully) to return to power after being ejected from office, despite a long series of sexual and financial scandals and criminal charges. Like Donald Trump’s, his loyal supporters somehow managed to overlook his moral repulsiveness, childish attention-seeking and love-in with Vladimir Putin, and saw him as the saviour who would make Italy great again.

Of course, there are differences between these people, but every time one of these characters emerges, we are nonplussed by them. We react as if we’re dealing with something new, and appear to have little idea how to respond. But there are patterns to the emergence of extreme-right demagogues: patterns that repeat themselves with remarkable fidelity. By learning and understanding them, we can better defend ourselves.

I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today: Trump, Farage, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, the leaders of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the National Rally in France, the Brothers of Italy and – lately – Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson.

Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression “that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community”. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of “incumbent elites” to gain power (think, today, of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Paul Marshall, and various billionaire funders), they sought no major changes “in class structure and property relations”. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. “They need to revile incumbent elites and institutions without foreclosing cooperation with them.” So their project “is far more militant in rhetoric, style and conduct than in political, social and economic substance”.

For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to “account for them in any coherent and systematic way”. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping “humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot” and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.

The fake firebrands often, Mayer remarks,also issued “rampant broadsides against science” (think of the climate science denial to which almost all today’s rightwing demagogues subscribe), and against innovation, modernism and cosmopolitanism. They combined “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behaviour patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences”. Hello JD Vance and Ron DeSantis.

The demagogues of Mayer’s period adopted a purposely “ambiguous position”, when people who might have been inspired by their claims committed acts of violence – both inflaming the attacks and distancing themselves from them. This might trigger memories of Donald Trump during the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Modi during anti-Muslim pogroms and the video Farage made after the Southport murders, which is seen by many people as bearing some responsibility for last month’s racist riots.

But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called “crisis strata” of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse.The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited. It has enabled the formation of a new rentier class, that owns the essential assets and ruthlessly exploits younger and poorer people. Young men step into a world of promises – to find all the golden doors are locked, and someone else has the key.

It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs. Today, some of these entrepreneurs stand for office; others, using opportunities that weren’t available in previous eras, monetise the anger, making a fortune through their social media outlets.

Understanding the tradition these demagogues follow, which long predates the rise of fascism in the 20th century, should help us to develop a more effective response to them. We begin to see this in Kamala Harris’s intelligent campaign, which, in contrast to Joe Biden’s, is starting to land heavy blows on Trump and Vance,drawing attention to their creepy intrusions on people’s private lives and their attacks on fundamental freedoms. If we want to anticipate and stop rightwing authoritarian rule, we should seek to comprehend its eerie consistencies.

[humanrightsupdates]

India: Renewed Ethnic Violence in Manipur State

Authorities Should Protect All Communities, End Divisive Policies

(New York) – Indian authorities should urgently intervene to address renewed violence between ethnic groups in India’s northeastern state of Manipur, Human Rights Watch said today. Both the Manipur state and central governments should take prompt measures to resolve disputes, investigate abuses, and appropriately punish those responsible.

Armed groups from the predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo community and the mostly Hindu Meitei community have engaged in deadly violence, which has reportedly killed at least 11 people. Students and others have protested the violence, and some have clashed with security forces and attacked government buildings. On September 10, 2024, the Manipur state government imposed a curfew in three districts and suspended the internet in five districts until September 15.

“The state government’s response to increasingly violent ethnic clashes in Manipur has just caused greater harm,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Right Watch. “Instead of protecting vulnerable communities and upholding the rule of law, the authorities have deepened longstanding anger and distrust among the communities through polarizing policies.”

Manipur’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government, led by Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, an ethnic Meitei, has replicated his party’s divisive policies used nationally to promote Hindu majoritarianism. He has publicly claimed without any basis that the Kuki were providing sanctuary to illegal immigrants from Myanmar and engaged in drug trafficking, deforestation, and militancy.

Since May 2023, over 200 people have been killed and hundreds injured. More than 60,000 people have been displaced and are living in cramped shelters. Several Kuki women have reported sexual violence and rape by Meitei mobs. Homes, businesses, villages, and places of worship, mostly targeting the Kuki community, have been burned down, attacked, and vandalized.

[random-thought-depository]

"Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling.

It's falling! This one is on the union leadership. Unions are sitting on gigantic warchests that they are resolutely not spending organizing the workers who are clamoring to join unions:

Unions have historic high cash reserves and are doing historically low organizing. This part is the unions' fault:

Or rather, it's the union bosses' fault. Union leadership in America, broadly speaking, sucks. Bosses love shitty unions, and the biggest unions obliged bosses for decades, with leaders who established suicidal practices like "two-tier contracts." That's a union where all the workers have to pay dues, but only the senior workers get protection from the union those dues fund:

If you sat down and said, "Let's design a union contract that will ensure that every worker hired from this day forward hates unions," this is the contract you'd come up with.

Those shitty union bosses? They're on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried to steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union's own rules and keeping the vote going:

Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a general strike.

That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it's going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.

Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you're not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there's some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle.

...

Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won't be easy. Workers won't be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:

But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.

The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn't call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:

McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers' strike, the teachers didn't just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students' parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.

In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that's how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can't deliver and workers don't vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I am a terrible graphic designer and can't draw a stick-figure, and yet, daily, I set myself the weird chore of illustrating highly abstract news stories, using public domain sources and CC work.

Sometimes I nail it though, and feel indecently proud, like today's transformation of a 19th C editorial cartoon opposing literacy tests for immigrants into a 21st C editorial cartoon opposing the RESTRICT Act's Tiktok Ban and instead calling for sweeping privacy laws that apply to US and Chinese companies alike. 

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

[girlactionfigure]

The dark-haired girl on the right with the impish smile, her name was Eddie Lou, she was about 8 years old when this photo was taken in 1909. The picture was taken at the Tifton Cotton Mill, Tifton, Georgia. The girls worked there.

The photograph was taken by Lewis Hine, who visited factories such as this mill and took photographs of the children who worked there as evidence for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).

In another part of the country, Mary Harris Jones, also known as "Mother Jones", led a march of children from Philadelphia to New York in what would be known as the March of the Mill Children, a three-week trek by striking child and adult textile workers on July 7, 1903.

Children had been forced to work in coal mines and mills, when their fathers were killed or injured, unable to support the families. As a result, many children suffered stunted growth and were injured, maimed. Mother Jones described the children, "some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten years of age, the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve years of age."

“Since 2000, for nearly two decades, the world had been making steady progress in reducing child labour,” according to the United Nations. “But over the past few years, conflicts, crises and the COVID-19 pandemic, have plunged more families into poverty – and forced millions more children into child labour. Economic growth has not been sufficient, nor inclusive enough, to relieve the pressure that too many families and communities feel and that makes them resort to child labour. Today, 160 million children are still engaged in child labour. That is almost one in ten children worldwide.”

This is an update of a series of stories that have been posted for Labor Day. You can find those stories in the Peace Page archive or Google the information on your own to find out more.

~~~~~

“Over 100 years ago, the National Child Labor Committee used photos of children doing industrial work to demand change in America. Several states adopted child labor laws, and after much debate and several setbacks, the Fair Labor Standards Act became law in 1938. Its protections included the nation’s foundational child labor laws, including restrictions on the age of workers and hours they can toil,” wrote Michael Lazzeri, regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in Chicago

Max McCoy of the the Kansas Reflector wrote today on September 3, 2023:

“After more than a century of progress, you might think child labor is a thing of the past, something we condemn other countries for but that we don’t need to worry about here. Tragically, that shadow army of workers is still with us, and many of those workers are children. These underage exploited are often immigrants . . .”

“In February of this year, a cleaning company was fined $1.5 million for employing children ages 13 to 17 at meatpacking plants in eight states. The firm, Packers Sanitations Services Inc., was the target of a federal Department of Labor investigation that found 102 children working illegally, including 26 at the Cargill meatpacking plant at Dodge City.

“Appallingly, many states are now racing to loosen — not tighten — child labor laws.

“Arkansas, for example, in March did away with the requirement that the state’s Division of Labor had to give permission or verify the age of children under 16 to be employed. Although those under 14 still cannot be employed, the ending of age verification requirements is an invitation to child labor abuses.

“Other states are making similar moves.

“Iowa, for example, has made it legal for teenagers to work in meatpacking plants and children as young as 16 to bartend. New Jersey and New Hampshire have also lowered ages for some types of work. The argument goes that work builds character and that overly restrictive laws prevent young people from fully developing their capacity to earn a living.

“But such arguments stink like the stuff you find on a slaughterhouse floor.”

~~~~~

"In the early 1900s, Hine traveled across the United States to photograph preteen boys descending into dangerous mines, shoeless 7-year-olds selling newspapers on the street and 4-year-olds toiling on tobacco farms. Though the country had unions to protect laborers at that time — and Labor Day, a federal holiday to honor them — child labor was widespread and widely accepted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed," according to the Washington Post.

Mother Jones would say after the march, "I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the future citizens of the nation."

Many industries hid the fact that they employed children. They took advantage of poor families, such as Eddie Lou's family. Eddie Lou's father had died and left her mother with 11 children and no income. Her mother was forced to work at the cotton mill for $4.50 a week. Eddie Lou and four siblings also worked there and they were all together paid $4.50 as well. Eddie Lou and her youngest siblings would eventually be sent to an orphanage because her mother wasn't able to provide for them.

“If we don’t hold the line on child labor, we risk losing one of the things the has sets us apart as a nation founded not only on laws, but of morals,” wrote McCoy. “Of course children provide cheap labor, but business profits should not be the gauge of our society. In addition to the mental and physical tolls that children suffer in jobs that are inappropriate — and can you really imagine a 16-year-old wiping down the bar and asking what’s your poison? — there’s also a danger these children will become primary breadwinners for their families, with their educations coming a distant second.”

The children at the march carried banners that said, "We want more schools and less hospitals" and "We want time to play."

~ jsr

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

[english-lessons-bolzano]

Eh (/ˈeɪ/ or /ˈɛ/) is a spoken interjection used in many varieties of English. The oldest Oxford English Dictionary defines eh as an "interjectional interrogative particle often inviting assent to the sentiment expressed. Today, while eh has many different uses, it is most popularly used in a manner similar in meaning to "Excuse me?", "Please repeat that", "Huh?", or to otherwise mark a question. It is also commonly used as an alternative to the question tag "right?", as a method for inciting a reply, as in "Don't you think?", "You agree with me, right?", as in, "It's nice here, eh?" (instead of "It's nice here, right?"). In the Americas, it is most commonly associated with Canada and Canadian English, though it is also common in England, Scotland, and New Zealand. It is also known in some American regions bordering Canada, including the area stretching from northern Wisconsin up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Similar interjections exist in many other languages, such as Azerbaijani and Italian and Dutch.

The spelling of this sound in English is quite different from the common usage of these letters. The vowel is sounded in one of the continental manners (as in French, only missing the apostrophe), and the letter h is used to indicate it is long, as though the origin of the spelling were German.

While evidence suggests that eh initially may have been considered as an onomatopoeic sound, the earliest uses of eh found so far, date back to Early Modern English in 1662, but first mentions of it are found in Middle English. In 1707, it was first used in a play, functioning "to create or confirm agreement. Later, in 1773, its earliest quotation, s.v. "eh" was in a play by Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith.

It can also convey a lack of strong emotion and a neutral response. For example, if when asked how a movie was one replies with "Eh," this indicates that they did not find it particularly great or terrible. In this example, eh is used as a way to convey a middle-ground feeling or invite further discussion.

English

United States

Eh is also used in situations to describe something bad or mediocre. In which, it is often pronounced with a short "e" sound and the "h" may even be noticeable.

It is quite prevalent in the New York area to use the term "ey" as a general substitute for such basic greetings, such as "hey" or "hello".

In the Upper Midwest, it is used to end sentences.

Canada

This section may be too long and excessively detailed. Please consider summarizing the material. (August 2023)

History

The first clear evidence of eh's usage in Canada was in 1836, through the writings of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova-Scotian district judge and comical writer. Eh was first recognized as being a marker of being Canadian in 1959 by Harold B. Allen; he stated that eh is "so exclusively a Canadian feature that immigration officials use it as an identifying clue." However, despite mainly being perceived as a stereotypical marker of Canadian identity, eh was not recognized initially as a Canadianism in the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-1).Chief editor of the DCHP-1, Walter Avis, argued that it should not be included due to its historical use in British English and its frequency in American, Australian, and New Zealand English. However, despite eh's origins, it has become more frequently used in Canada than in the UK and the US, and in a broader variety of contexts. Due to this frequency, it has since been included in the DCHP-2 as a Preservation of British English that is Culturally Significant.

Uses

According to the DCHP-2, there are five main uses of eh with four subtypes. The first is used to elicit confirmation (1a),which can be used in sentences like "So that's what he thinks, eh?" A subtype of this use is to elicit acknowledgement (1b).This applies to the acknowledgment of a fact in contrast to belief or opinion.For example, one could say "I have a new dog, eh?" The second subtype (1c) is to confirm agreement. This is used to increase the chance of acceptance of a suggestion, toning down statements.The fourth, (1d), is used as an exclamative over a shared experience, for example "What a great game, eh?" The final (1e) is to confirm compliance, like asking "Will you?" The belief is that this tones down a command or request.

The second main use of eh is as an expression of disbelief to express one's surprise over the offered information . Use 3 is to elicit repetition, and is referred to as the "Pardon eh." It is used synonymously with "I beg your pardon?" in the sense of asking for a repetition of what was said. The fourth use is a distinctly Canadian use, identified as the narrative eh. It is a rarer form, and is claimed to be found primarily in oral evidence of Canadian origin. The final use of eh is as a metalinguistic commentary to express a link with Canada or rural Canada .

Due to English and French being Canada's official languages, the popularity of eh's usage in Canada is believed to be influenced by French. The French Canadian hein sounds similar to a nasalized Canadian eh, and the two share similar functions. Due to this, the increased use of eh in Canada may have been influenced by the frequent use of hein in Canadian French.

The term is used most frequently among blue-collar workers, and the most popular form used is for opinions and exclamations.While there is a prevalent stereotype that men use eh more than women, survey results suggest similar use frequencies. Overall, between both men and women, the pardon-eh is used much less than the observation-eh.The most positively viewed usage of eh is the imperative "I know, eh?" form with the exclamation-eh and opinion-eh close behind. The most negatively viewed usage is the anecdotal, narrative-eh.This perception is due to opinions surrounding the speakers of the narrative-eh, who are categorized as uneducated, lower-class, rural, and male, akin to the McKenzie brothers from the comedy sketch "Great White North," which first appeared during Second City Television's (SCTV) third season.

Regionally, while usage is similar across the ten provinces, with the use of eh not having changed significantly over the past 25 years, there is some variation. For example, in Quebec, respondents use eh for 'pardon' more than other Canadians. While usage has not changed significantly across Canada, the overall frequency of eh has declined among speakers born in the 1960s or later. This decrease has been prevalent in big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.Despite this decline, there have been high recognition rates and uptake of the Canadian eh among immigrant populations.

Iconography

Eh has gained such recognition among Canadians that it is used consciously and frequently by newspaper journalists and others in informal articles and reports. Also, eh is attributed freely in reported conversations with all men, including athletes, professors, and politicians, such as Pierre Trudeau.

The prevalence of eh in Canadian iconography is strongly associated with its recognition as part of the Canadian national or regional identity. In print, it is used primarily to signify 'Canadian,' with many websites incorporating eh into their URLs to indicate a Canadian connection. It is also popularly incorporated into Canadian-targeted marketing campaigns, such as when Smarties' Canadian-themed packaging was labelled "SMARTIES eh?"

The usage of eh in Canada is occasionally mocked in the United States, where some view its use as a stereotypical Canadianism. Such stereotypes have been reinforced in popular culture and were famously lampooned in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Singer Don Freed, in his song "Saskatchewan," declares, "What is this 'Eh?'-nonsense? I wouldn't speak like that if I were paid to". There are many products displaying the phrase, such as T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Future usage

The future of eh in Canada is vague but promising. Three critical factors that will shape the future of this expression include speaker attitudes, the possible replacement of the expressions by young speakers, and new Canadians' adoption of eh. Students account for a large percentage of eh users and continue to contribute to the growing community.Because of this projected increase in the usage of eh, the previous negative connotation surrounding the narrative-eh will most likely dwindle. The future of eh is quite optimistic and there is room for expansion due to the various uses possible. In addition to the popularity amongst students, immigrants are essential to the future of eh. Survey results on immigrant recognition of eh show that immigrants had high rates of recognition for most types of eh, with opinion-eh and exclamation-eh at the top.The data shows that while the usage of eh in immigrant countries is different, it is still common. This shows that even though native speakers still use eh more frequently, the future of eh is still optimistic. Altogether, Canada's link with bilingualism has contributed to eh's seecommon usage, and its recognition amongst immigrants shows that eh will continue to be prevalent in Canadian culture.

New Zealand

While not as commonly lampooned as the Canadian eh, there are few features that are more eagerly recognized by New Zealanders as a marker of their identity than the tag particle eh (commonly spelt as ay, although this has been contentious). New Zealanders use eh much more than Canadians, who are more famous for the word.[12] This commonly used and referenced feature of New Zealand English (NZE) is one of great controversy to many communication scholars as it is both a mark of cultural identity and simultaneously a means to parody those of a lower socioeconomic status.The use of eh in New Zealand is very common all demographics.

Communications scholar Miriam Meyerhoff describes eh as a "validation checker" to create connections between speakers. She says that there are two main uses of the phrase: to signify a question, such as "You went to school in Christchurch, eh?"; or to confirm that the listener understands new information, such as "He was way bigger than me, eh". It is believed that eh became common in New Zealand due to similarity with the Māori word nē, which has a similar use.

A 1994 study by Meyerhoff sought to examine the function of eh in New Zealand culture. She hypothesized that eh did not function as a clarification device as frequently believed, but instead served as a means of establishing solidarity between individuals of similar ethnic descent. In her research, Meyerhoff analyzed conversations between an interviewer and an interviewee of either Pākehā or Māori descent and calculated the frequency of eh in the conversation. In order to yield the most natural speech, Meyerhoff instructed the interviewers to introduce themselves as a "friend of a friend", to their respective interviewees. Her results showed Māori men as the most frequent users of eh in their interviews. As Māori are typically of a lower socio-economic status, Meyerhoff proposed that eh functioned as a verbal cue that one reciprocated by another individual signified both shared identity and mutual acceptance. Therefore, in the context of Meyerhoff's research, eh can be equated as a device to establish and maintain a group identity.This phenomenon sheds light on the continuous scholarly debate questioning if language determines culture or culture determines language. In New Zealand eh is used more often by males than females, more by younger generations than older generations, and more by the middle class than the working class. Māori use eh about twice as much than Pākehā, irrespective of their gender, age or class.

England, Scotland and Ireland

The usage of the word is widespread throughout much of the UK, particularly in Eastern Scotland, the north of England, Northern Ireland, and Wales. It is normally used to mean 'what?'. In Scotland, mainly around the Tayside region, eh is also used as a shortened term for 'yes'. For example, "Are you going to the disco?" "Eh". In Aberdeen and the wider Doric Scots speaking area of Grampian, eh is often used to end a sentence, as a continuation or sometimes, inflection is added and it's used as a confirmation, or with different inflection, a question. For example, "I was walking home, eh, and I saw a badger, eh", "It was a big car, eh" or "We're going to the co-op, eh?".

Rest of the world

Eh? used to solicit agreement or confirmation is also heard regularly amongst speakers in Australia, Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom (where it is sometimes spelled ay on the assumption that eh would rhyme with heh or meh). In the Caribbean island of Barbados the word nuh acts similarly, as does noh in Surinamese Dutch and Sranantongo. The usage in New Zealand is similar, and is more common in the North Island.[citation needed] It is also heard in the United States, especially Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (although the Scandinavian-based Yooperism ya is more common), Oklahoma, and the New England region. In New England and Oklahoma, it is also used as a general exclamation as in Scotland and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. It is occasionally used to express indifference, in a similar way to meh.

Since usage of the word eh is not as common in the United States as it is in Canada, it is often used by Americans, and indeed Canadians themselves, to parody Canadian English.

The equivalent in South African English is hey. This usage is also common in Western Canada.

Eh is also used in Guernsey English and Jersey English.

Eh is very common in the English spoken in the Seychelles.

Silvio Pasqualini Bolzano inglese ripetizioni English insegnante teacher

[head-post]

Texas Gov. signed immigration law permitting US state to arrest illegal entrants

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an immigration bill into law on Monday, allowing the American state to arrest illegal immigrants crossing the southern border.

Starting from March 2024, the Senate Bill, SB4, will make it a criminal offence to enter Texas illegally from a foreign country. The move would allow state law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants, with repeat offenders facing up to 20 years in prison.

The goal of Senate Bill 4 is to stop the tidal wave of illegal entry into Texas. The bill provides a mechanism to order an illegal immigrant to return to the foreign nation from which they entered.

Abbott cited the surge of illegal immigration at the southern US border with Mexico, stressing that Texas handled most of the influx

Read more HERE

[sixty-silver-wishes]

Florida no-shade law endangers airport workers, farmworkers (usatoday.com)

It's no secret that our governor is a sack of shit. But I just wanted to talk about this law, because GOD does it piss me off. DeSantis' lax policies towards COVID restrictions in a densely populated and tourism-heavy state, as well as his targeting of queer people and immigrants in a state with a heavy immigrant population (more on that later) have already put lives at risk, but this is a new low, even for him.

So, this is Florida. The state notorious for being very fucking hot in the summer. And with climate change getting worse, our weather is only getting hotter. So DeSantis and co decide to strip heat protections from workers?? The article states that this was a move to target Miami-Dade, a progressive-leaning county, which was the only one to require heat protections to begin with. Miami-Dade also has an especially high population of Latin American immigrants, whom DeSantis has also targeted- there was, of course, the issue of Florida and Texas transporting Venezuelan migrants to progressive states possibly without their knowing consent, and a law that invalidates the drivers' licenses of undocumented immigrants- which is currently causing an exodus of immigrant workers from the state, to whom Florida largely owes its prominent agriculture industry- 37% of Florida agricultural workers are immigrants, as well as 23% of construction workers and 14% of service workers. Agriculture alone is a huge industry in Florida, with the agricultural sector contributing over $7.74 billion to the economy in 2021. Not only is this new law discriminatory and inhumane; it's also putting a large segment of the state's economy at risk, with many immigrants forced to find work elsewhere in a state that's becoming increasingly hostile towards them. In 2023, according to sources cited in the article I linked at the top, 2,000 people across the US died of heat-related illnesses, with an 88% rise in Florida between the years 2019 and 2022. With worsening climate change, that number will likely continue to rise.

I've been haunted today by something that happened this morning. My mom was out for a walk, and she came home dizzy and feeling like she was going to faint. She said it was heat exhaustion, and she'd passed out from it before. Thankfully, we brought her some water, a washcloth, and a sports drink, and she was fine, but she was out for a short exercise in 95 F (35 C) weather and was already experiencing health issues. I couldn't imagine how much worse it would have been to be performing intensive manual labor all day in this weather, without any protections. I've lived here all my life; I know Florida weather, which is why I believe a law like this should infuriate anyone who's spent any amount of time here.

[uyu-boba]

Someone people got upset with me on Twitter a while back because I said Revachol reminded me of my own city, even though I live in the Americas.

I took a drive near the Detroit river today. It was frozen over with a bunch of birds sitting on the ice. On the other side I could see the tall buildings of Detroit, and on our side I saw abandoned buildings, distilleries, big piles of asphalt, and so many cranes.

If I stood on the frozen beach and looked a little to the right I would begin to see… absolutely nothing. The snow is white, the sky is white, and the river is white. It looked like my world was still loading in. That’s the pale. When I played Disco Elysium for the first time it was February 2023, and the game looked exactly like it did outside.

Windsor, Ontario is the automotive capital of Canada, most people I know work at some sort of assembly plant, my husband has worked at several tool and die shops. Unfortunately because of this, a lot of the city is not walkable, public transportation is severely lacking, and… it is also known as one of the unemployment capitals of Canada. During the time that I was playing the game, I had just left my position in the IWW, which seemed to be the final straw in the entire union crumbling into dust.

I only moved to this city six years ago. I came from a much smaller town in southern Ontario, one that wasn’t very diverse in terms of anything. A lot of people who live in Windsor aren’t from here. A lot of them aren’t from Canada, either. They’re just kind of stuck here, living paycheque to paycheque and hoping one day they can afford to move to Toronto where there may be better opportunities (cue Fallen Leaves by Billy Talent). A lot of people blame the immigrants and international students for the high unemployment rate and the housing crisis. Of course, you have to understand that the reason they are getting jobs is because employers are legally allowed to pay them less than minimum wage, and a lot of the buildings that aren’t totally abandoned have been renovated to accommodate too many international students in a basement that isn’t up to fire code. My husband knew a kid in his engineering class that died in a fire because of this reason. Our landlord is actively trying to coerce us to move out of our small apartment so he can add more bedrooms and charge more. I cannot get the mold fixed unless I agree to him getting rid of our kitchen.

But as I said, I am from a small town, and I love Windsor. I love the people in it, I love how I get to meet people from so many different aspects of life. I would have never met my husband or my best friend had I not come here. I never had anything to do in my hometown, I was the only nerd, the only queer. I feel like my D&D friends are my family, I feel loved. I want to make this place better. I look over at the beautiful buildings of Detroit and think of all the Americans terrified of the new presidency and what it will bring and I want to hug them, I want to make things better.

Playing Disco Elysium and being in Revachol for me was refreshing. Instead of a lively bustling city, or a quiet little countryside, I got to see an industrial town that was struggling, but beautiful in its own way. One that had a rich history and people who weren’t giving up on it. The things I saw on my screen; the big cranes and the sea ice and the pale… they were outside my window.

I’m not going to understand the experiences and relationships European people have to this game. I hope someday I won’t be too impoverished to explore the world, but I’m not sure I ever will. Still, a lot of this game meant something to me, and this is one of the aspects. I won’t be apologetic about it, (sorry? 🇨🇦) and I hope maybe you will open your mind to the possibility that someone across the world does have something in common with you.

[beardedmrbean]

In an exit interview with NBC News, current acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director P.J. Lechleitner said President Joe Biden should “absolutely” have acted sooner to tighten border security to reduce the flow of migrants into the U.S. 

Lechleitner, who became acting director in July 2023, said the number of incoming migrants meant ICE had to give staff to Customs and Border Protection to help them, leaving ICE unable “to do our own core mission adequately.” He also said he was not alone in feeling Biden should have moved faster. 

“I think the career people in DHS would have liked that,” he said. “And all of us in DHS, quite frankly, I don’t know if anybody in DHS wouldn’t have wanted that earlier.”

Lechleitner was referring to executive action Biden took this June to restrict immigrants who crossed the border illegally from claiming asylum. By September, the monthly total of illegal border crossings had dropped to 54,000, the lowest since Biden took office. The drop brought the numbers in line with pre-pandemic Trump levels from the fall of 2019. And the numbers have continued to fall, with only 46,000 migrants crossing illegally in November. 

The change was so rapid that Texas Governor Greg Abbott could no longer find migrants to fill buses to send to cities like New York and Chicago as he had done earlier in the Biden Administration.

Lechleitner’s opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview with USA Today published earlier this week, Biden was asked if he had any regrets and he did not mention the southern border. Lechleitner says he’s not surprised that Biden has not identified the lack of action at the border as a regret.

 “It’s unfortunate because I think we could have done more,” he said. 

Pressed for specifics, he added, “We could have put more resources to it, either at CBP, for the border itself, and with ICE. And we could have went and tried to get more of these individuals in the non-detained docket,” he said, referring to arrests of undocumented immigrants outside of ICE custody. 

“We could have detained more people, and we could have removed more people. And I think we could use more resources and support. We could have done that in the last four years,” he said. 

Lechleitner has been with the Department of Homeland Security since its inception in 2003 and has served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. After being appointed as acting director of ICE by the Biden administration last year, Lechleitner said, he often asked for more resources for an agency that, according to him, was chronically underfunded. 

ICE deported a little over 47,000 migrants in fiscal year 2024. Lechleitner said ICE could not have deported any more than that using the same resources. “We’re burning hot,” he said. “We’re at maximum resource capacity. At this point, we’re going to need more money and resources to increase and with more money and resources, we can increase detention, we can increase removal operations.”

Lechleitner also said he wishes the Biden administration had been more transparent with the American people about immigration issues and that it had given his agency the freedom to be more vocal and public about its work and concerns, in part because more communication could have reduced misinformation.

 “They should [have] allowed us more opportunity to explain what we’re doing and explain the hard work that ICE is doing and CBP is doing,” he said. “Let us talk. Let us demystify. Because if not, people are going to just make their own stories up about what’s going on, and it’s going to be more problematic.”

According to Lechleitner, higher-ups prevented his team from doing monthly press conferences that were initially announced. 

“I don’t know exactly why they stopped,” he said, “but you know, we were only allowed to do so much.” 

Another source of frustration Lechleitner identified was cities that adhered to sanctuary policies under which they will not tell ICE when undocumented immigrants are being released from jail. 

“It drives me nuts when our local and state partners, you know, won’t cooperate with us on some of these immigration issues,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Come on, man, these are public safety, national security threats. And why? Why can’t we just cooperate and just do this to protect the American public?’”

Lechleitner said he wishes the new administration well but cautioned that if they are serious about prioritizing the arrest of migrants with criminal backgrounds it will be expensive and difficult. 

“The American people have spoken, and hopefully, knock on wood, we’re going to get a lot more support for the workforce to do our job in a more, you know, meaningful way. But we need resources. Give us more resources. Give us more personnel, give us more support, and we can do more.”

Backup link

[darkmaga-returns]

10 shocking stories the media buried today.

The Vigilant Fox

Nov 19, 2024

#10 - One of the most vaxxed counties in America faces a heart attack crisis.

98% of people in King County, WA (Seattle) took at least one COVID shot, and the data is not looking good.

A peer-reviewed study has found a jaw-dropping 1,236% surge in excess heart attack deaths among King County's 2.2 million residents.

2020: 11 excess heart attack deaths

2021: 75 excess heart attack deaths

2022: 111 excess heart attack deaths

2023: 147 excess heart attack deaths, a 1,236% increase compared to 2020.

Moreover, cardiac arrest deaths, in general, rose about 25% from 2020 to 2023. In the same time frame, King County's population shrunk slightly.

Reflecting on this alarming data, Dr. Peter McCullough said, “So it looks like the vaccines are the smoking gun.”

“This is now fully peer-reviewed in the emergency medicine literature. We've messaged the Medic One unit in Seattle. They clearly need to do more research to figure out how soon these vaccines were administered and to whom.”

Follow 

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

 and 

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

 for more details on this study and breaking news about the COVID-19 injections.

Courageous Discourse™ with Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake

Peer-Reviewed Study Reveals 1,236% Surge in Excess Cardiac Arrest Deaths Among 2 Million COVID-19 Vaccinated Individuals

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH…

Listen now

6 days ago · 262 likes · 49 comments · Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

(See 9 More Revealing Stories Below)

#9 - CNN’s Elie Honig Says There’s ‘Real Possibility’ That Judge Could Imminently Close Trump’s New York Case

“It sounded like they tended to view it the way that Donald Trump’s team views it, which is because he’s the president-elect, it’s now over. But we’ll see for sure today where the DA stands.”

Read More: https://dailycaller.com/2024/11/19/cnns-elie-honig-possibility-judge-close-trumps-new-york-case/

#8 - CNN Shockingly Admits Musk’s X Now Represents U.S. Voters ‘Far Better’ Than Ever Before

"Look at this. The party ID among those who regularly use X/Twitter for news——Back in 2022, 65% of those who regularly used Twitter/X for news were Democrats. Just 31% were Republicans."

"Look at where we are today. Just a completely different picture. Now it's basically split between Democrats at 48%, Republicans at 47%."

"Now, this new overall makeup matches the overall electorate FAR better."

So, it turns out that the X platform really does represent what the American population is thinking and feeling.

Video: https://x.com/overton_news/status/1858903608906981414

#7 - Furious French farmers take their anger to the streets, using machinery to dump waste behind the gates of the Rodez prefecture.

Video: https://x.com/LucAuffret/status/1858871469440180319

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#6 - Gen. Flynn Warns This Drastic Step Needs to Happen NOW to Stop World War III

#5 - Biden-Harris Administration Helped Laken Riley’s Killer Move to Georgia

A taxpayer-funded initiative by the Biden-Harris regime facilitated the transit of a known gang member, leading directly to the murder of 22-year-old University of Georgia student Laken Riley, according to courtroom testimony of the suspect’s roommate during the second trial.

Laken Riley, an aspiring nurse from Augusta University, tragically fell victim to a brutal attack by Jose Ibarra, a 26-year-old illegal immigrant from Venezuela and alleged member of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.

According to court documents, Jose Ibarra not only killed Riley but also “disfigured her skull” in an act of unimaginable violence.

Read More: https://conservativeroof.com/biden-administration-helped-laken-rileys-killer-move-to-georgia/

#4 - Vivek Says DOGE Will DELETE Entire Government Agencies

#3 - The Senators Who Will Vote On RFK Jr. Have Raked In Millions From The Pharmaceutical Industry

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada was the highest recipient of pharmaceutical money among Democrats on the committee, having gotten nearly $460,000 over the last five years. Cortez Masto was followed by New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, who got more than $360,000, and Oregon’s Ron Wyden, who took in nearly $352,000.

On the Republican side, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has benefitted the most across all members of the Finance Committee with more than $679,000 in contributions. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana came in a close second on the committee with more than $667,000 in pharmaceutical receipts, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina came in third with nearly $564,000.

Read More: https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/19/the-senators-who-will-vote-on-rfk-jr-have-raked-in-millions-from-the-pharmaceutical-industry/

#2 - Multiple DOJ, FBI Officials Weigh Lawyering Up in Fear of Being ‘Criminally Investigated’

Some career Justice Department officials cried after Trump won the election, according to the report, due to the realization that Trump would likely try to rid the administrative state of a cesspool of corruption.

Read More: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/11/19/report-multiple-doj-fbi-officials-weigh-lawyering-up-fear-being-criminally-investigated/

#1 - Speaker Mike Johnson drops the most savage statement he has ever spoken.

"Let me be unequivocally clear. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman."

Video: https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1858950486222581824

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BONUS #1 - Scott Jennings Schools CNN Guest on Trump’s Deportation Plan

BONUS #2 - Elon Musk’s Ultimate Mission: The ‘Not So’ Hidden Plan Behind His Empire

BONUS #3 - Jen Psaki PANICS When Reminded That the Current HHS Secretary Is Not a Doctor Either

BONUS #4 - Mega-Corporations Are Coming for Your Healthcare Supplements

BONUS #5 - DISTURBING: Google AI Threatens Student with Bone-Chilling Message