…ok…so a guy you’d barely heard of got shot & the temptation to compare it to that unfortunate business with arch-duke ferdinand went into overdrive

Robert Fico was shot five times, an act of violence that left Slovakia’s populist leader “fighting for his life” and the country reeling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/15/robert-fico-shot-slovakia/

…but it sounds like he’s going to make it…which rather breaks the analogy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/15/robert-fico-shooting-what-we-know-so-far

…&…well…analogy may be the wrong lens, anyway

‘He is borrowing from Trump’: the rise of Robert Fico, Slovakia’s populist leader [Guardian]

…I know I’ve heard more than one wag be all “see, political violence isn’t solely a threat from the right”…even though mall security guards in their 70s aren’t famously left-winger types…still…hard to see how one winds up gunning down their PM without it being “politically motivated”…so…interesting times?

Israel and Egypt are embroiled in a growing diplomatic row over the Rafah border crossing after Israel’s takeover of the Gaza side of the crossing, amid warnings Cairo may be planning to downgrade relations.

In recent days Egypt has announced it will no longer participate in allowing the transit of aid into Gaza and said it planned to join the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel at the UN’s top court.

…&…any attempt on my part to understand this shit gets tripped up by shit like “as part of getting on board the idea that what’s happening in gaza qualifies as genocide we refuse to participate in efforts to alleviate it through provision of aid”…mixed signals would be one way of looking at that…perverse incentives probably get a look in, even

The Rafah crossing between Egypt and southern Gaza has been a vital route for aid to the coastal territory, where a humanitarian crisis has deepened and some people are at risk of famine. On 7 May Israel seized control of the crossing as it stepped up its military campaign around Rafah. Since then aid has accumulated on the Egyptian side.

Israel said it was up to Egypt to reopen the crossing and allow humanitarian relief into Gaza, prompting Cairo to denounce what it described as “desperate attempts” to shift blame for the blockage of aid.

…could be there’s one or two things that might be more helpful than playing pass the buck with the blame…but…that seems to be the name of the game

Israel’s capture of the crossing is widely seen as being in breach of the Philadelphi accord, which was added to the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 2005 after the evacuation of Israeli settlements in Gaza and was designed to regulate the border between Gaza and Egypt.

Prior to Israel’s takeover of the crossing, Egyptian officials warned publicly that any such move was a red line that would put the peace treaty at risk.

“The key to preventing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now in the hands of our Egyptian friends,” Israel’s foreign affairs minister, Israel Katz, said in comments released by his office.

Katz said he had spoken with his British and German counterparts about “the need to persuade Egypt to reopen the Rafah crossing”.

Egypt has said the crossing has remained open from its side throughout the conflict that began between Israel and Hamas on 7 October. Cairo has been one of the mediators in stalled ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. But its relationship with Israel has come under strain during the conflict, especially since the Israeli advance in Rafah.

The UN and other international aid agencies said the closing of two crossings into southern Gaza – Rafah and Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom – had virtually cut off the territory from outside aid.

On Wednesday Israeli media reports said Cairo, whose general intelligence directorate has long acted as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas, could withdraw from ceasefire negotiations.

“The situation with Egypt right now is the worst it’s been since the war started,” one official told the Haaretz newspaper. “At the beginning of the war, the Egyptians showed understanding toward our position. Now they work deliberately to get in our way and to try to force an end to the war on us.”
[…]
“There is a great deal of anger. Whereas in 2014 there was a lot of public expression of antipathy towards Hamas that is not visible in this conflict,” said Hellyer, who is in Cairo. “If there is a quandary it is because Egyptians want to help Gaza but the overwhelming political consideration is that Egypt does not want to be seen as complicit in ethnic cleansing or complicit in putting to bed the Palestinian cause, which is what would happen if the population of Gaza is cleared out.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/15/israel-egypt-diplomatic-row-rafah-border-crossing-gaza

…so…lot of walks getting walked that seem at odds with oh, so much talk getting talked

There are so many possible approaches to Trump. “Ignore him and maybe he will go away” (some say this has never yet been tried). “Try to hold him accountable through the legal system” (this is being tried, but not as quickly as might be helpful). I hope the second works better than the first.

Okay, but how is Biden not more popular than the guy who stands accused of paying off a porn star to keep quiet about having sex? Is Biden’s unpopularity his own doing?

Biden is an incumbent at a time when people are feeling sour and disgruntled. That plus his age plus Gaza adds up to his poll numbers.

But what’s tricky is that Trump is effectively an incumbent here, too, yet people seem to think things would be better with him back!

…I mean…sure…they say there’s no accounting for taste

I was looking at a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from earlier this month and discovered that only about 45 percent of people said they were paying close or somewhat close attention to the trial, whereas 55 percent were not. I wonder if those 45 percent are drawn from the percentage of people who have yet to pick their candidate of choice. (The same poll also found that about 64 percent of registered voters know the candidate they are voting for.)

…& anecdotally I can fairly easily think of people who report being proportionally happier day-to-day by avoidance of the news…but…not least when this sort of thing passes for strategic

Yeah, people aren’t totally plugged in. If Trump spent a night in jail, which seems like his goal given the way he keeps talking about the judge, then people might tune in.

…it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around that being successful to the point that this sort of thing pertains, to be honest

I am someone whose job requires staring into the abyss of the news cycle every day, so my meter for figuring out what is normal to pay attention to is completely broken. But I am fascinated by the percentage of folks who have managed not to have an opinion at this point! It reminds me of the difficulty obtaining jurors in this trial. Who in the year of our Lord 2024 still does not have a strong opinion about Donald Trump?

How in the world is Trump’s trial not hurting him? [WaPo]

…it’s…I dunno…probably a me problem…but…I’d probably be feeling I could rest a lot easier if more people had an informed opinion than a strong one…same as it ever was, I guess?

Top Republicans are showing up at Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial not just to help him skirt his gag order, but also with a message: Not only is this a sham, but it’s a sham everyone can see.
[…]
This does not in fact appear to be the case. Polling has consistently shown that Americans, while somewhat skeptical of the proceedings, are not adopting Trump’s claims of persecution.

…it’s hard for me to imagine…but…if I try to imagine having been living in an echo-chamber where the guy who keeps telling me how rich he is & how many millions he’s got to cover all his debts without any help had been spamming my inbox with shit begging for my meager contributions without which america is totally screwed…would I for real be feeling like that was joe’s hand in my pocket…& loving my alleged messiah?

We regrettably don’t have a ton of recent polling as Trump’s trial has kicked into gear over the past couple of weeks.

…really? …damn…you’d think we had just about every conceivable poll out there at this point…although…I guess somehow never the sort that preface their stats with a copy of the questionnaire & a breakdown of the sample in terms of representative distribution & (self-)selection criteria…which…feel like they’d be…informative?

what we do have is a new Yahoo News/YouGov survey released Tuesday, which showed new highs in the percentages of Americans who believe that:

• Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels (52 percent).
• He committed a crime in doing so (47 percent).
• This crime warrants the indictment and trial (40 percent).
• The trial is worthy of their approval (49 percent).

…of the hypothetical slim majority of folks who don’t think this particular trial is worthy of their approval…gotta wonder how many would say the other thing about the ones we haven’t got to a day in court about…because of all the shit it’s pretty clear he’s done in the shady-business arena…lying about cheating on his mrs with a professional sex-having lady & then lying about that some more in a few different formats…seems pretty small beer compared with trifles like fomenting insurrection & dabbling in dissemination of nat-sec material…& generally self-enrichment through abuse of executive power…it’s about the only way the analogy about being “like what they did to capone” holds…it’s not that he’s innocent or that arguing he is somehow sounds plausible so much as we all know he’s done so much worse it can feel hard to care?

Just 22 percent, for example, say Trump didn’t falsify business records. So while Americans said by a 19-point margin in March 2023 that Trump falsified the records, they now say so by a 30-point margin.

…ironically…the math seems to suggest that despite apparent clarity on that part…& the way the law works meaning that if that’s the case then he had a case to answer & the answer is he did that shit & that makes his ass guilty as charged…going on 25% of respondents contradict themselves…or potentially out themselves as not having looked at the way the law sees it…by claiming “falsified the records” is different from “committed a crime”…presumably because…since it seems to have been a separate question…he falsified that shit for some other reason than the in-kind campaign contribution angle that upgrades it to a federal offense…I dunno…the whole thing confuses the shit out of me so I guess anything is possible?

Americans saying by a 30-point margin that Trump did the thing he’s accused of would seem to, at the very least, undercut the idea that this is all a baseless exercise.

Additionally, just 24 percent say either that Trump didn’t falsify records or that he did so but it’s not a crime. The margin by which Americans say Trump committed a crime has increased from nine points in March 2023 to 23 points today.

…uhhhh…congratulations…what took you lot so long?

Perhaps the most striking new number, though, comes with respect to Trump’s gag order and the jail threat he faces.

While these Republicans have sought to highlight the idea that Trump’s free speech is under attack — including by saying precisely the things that have gotten him in trouble — that view doesn’t appear to have caught on in any significant way.

In fact, a YouGov poll last week for the Economist showed Americans saying 51 percent to 34 percent that jail would be an appropriate punishment should Trump continue violating his gag order.

…if we could skip along to the part where it stops being expedient to try to turn catch-22 into a featured bug…that’d be great, honestly…because even if the wheels of justice eventually steam-roller over the defendant & turn him into orange roadkill…in the performative theater where going to jail for contempt of court while campaigning to be president is a putative asset to this asshat…reality is the fairy tale…& that is fucking with me, frankly

Trump going to jail for violating his gag order is supposedly something of an un-crossable line for his prosecutions — and the apparent impetus for Trump’s allies arriving in droves at his trial. But the data we have suggest Americans would be good with such a drastic step by a double-digit margin.
[…]
It’s also worth acknowledging that concerns about the fairness of the trial persist for many Americans. A New York Times poll released Monday showed voters in six key states said 49 percent to 45 percent that they didn’t think Trump would be able to get a fair trial. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll last week showed Americans said 44-39 that they didn’t think the trial had been fair to that point.

…I mean…this whole article is about polls…& even it acknowledges that they’re unhelpfully opaque

But these and other polls suggest some of that concern comes from the left, which worries about Trump being given special treatment and/or evading accountability yet again. So it’s not all people worried about Trump being railroaded. And even if it were, that’s not a majority view.

…& yet…here as in so many places…we apparently have no choice but to remain in thrall to the minority that is all about the-quiet-part-only-loud-as-all-hell

This suggests that the tale being spun by these Trump surrogates outside the courthouse hasn’t caught on. Americans might not be huge fans of this prosecution, but they apparently see the basis for it.

Which might explain why the surrogates are suddenly so keen to show up and drive that message — and even to say the kinds of things the judge has warned could taint the proceedings.

Trump allies call trial a ‘sham.’ Public opinion isn’t cooperating. [WaPo]

…anyway…as far as the pages of the post go…if you can get it to load for you there’s a sort of multimedia scroll-a-thon thing all to do with this part

Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

…so the shit the shit-gibbon flings on this tip is hardly unprecedented…I mean…this one was from the 20s…& those internment camps were a WWII thing

Treating Japan in the same way as “white nations,” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “rights given white immigrants.”

…so…they title the whole thing

How America tried and failed to stay White [WaPo]

…& it’s kinda fascinating to see the demographics of the flow of huddled masses yearning to breathe free over the decades which they do as the scale shifts on a natty graphic…& it could be it has a point or two worth making…&/or noting

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.

Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

…they may not have “worked”…but…they were pretty major obstacles in their time

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”

…&…it was a different time…when the international eugenics conference had upped sticks from london for new york…where it could still draw a crowd in the 30s…but…melting pot…simmering resentment…kinda seems like the two fit together in the analogous sense…so probably best not to over-think the thing

Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.

…or indeed, how much of the mythos of the wild west & the western european types that tamed it might have been a tame version of the times

The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.

In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

…which…funny story

…99% by ’79…sounds pretty good, no…& that was nearly 50 years ago…so…that’d be zeroed out now, right?

• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
• 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
• Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.

…USA…number…uhhh…what now?

The US ranks 36th in literacy.

…not as catchy when you’re chanting, though

The nexus between poverty and literacy is pronounced, with these two challenges often interlinked. In impoverished regions, educational opportunities are frequently scarce, exacerbated by the necessity for struggling families to prioritize immediate income generation over sending their children to school. The majority of countries with the lowest literacy rates are concentrated in South Asia, West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, regions also characterized by a prevalence of the world’s poorest nations.

A discernible gender gap further compounds the issue of literacy, as nearly two-thirds of the approximately 781 million globally illiterate adults are female. This disparity is particularly evident in less-developed countries, where societal expectations often confine women to domestic roles, caring for the household and children while men pursue employment opportunities. In contrast, developed nations exhibit higher literacy rates with narrower, if any, gender gaps. For a comprehensive overview of global literacy rates, refer to the table below, which presents the latest and most reliable information available.

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now

…huh…well ain’t that some counter-intuitive shite in the face of the counter-programming about the educational program…what with a lot of the problem allegedly stemming from kids reading things?

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded, as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

…admittedly…it depends a whole hell of a lot on when exactly immigrant folks stopped not being natives after the original influx largely evicted the…ummm…natives…but…let’s not quibble about who has a quarrel with who about what…or how much this has to do with that uptick in literacy as the 70s approached

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.

…or how nonsensical the evolving definition of “white” has been viewed along the arc of history

There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote. “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”

And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign born in 1960, but only 10 percent in 2022.

The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

…so

Fifteen percent, Mr. Chishti suggests, might be the tipping point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

…less than the proportion of illiterate people out there voting their conscience…in a race between apples that keep the dr away & oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.

Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.

The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties.

…& it’s all been one big game of happy families ever since…right?

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.
[…]
That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

…yeah…but they say that about the civil war & people still wanna wave that cross about while quoting the 2nd

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million.
[…]
Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.

Immigration has re-engineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats. Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

…it’s like playing no true scotsman…only…apparently “true” americans have broken from reality…or think it’s subject to claims of eminent domain or some shit

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth, even while helping keep a lid on inflation.

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s—hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

…that’s the end but I already left the link up there somewhere or other

…sure…only…conversationally speaking

Once Trump took office, no widespread deportation effort followed. He took a hard line on immigration, certainly, but fell short of the sort of widespread effort to uproot undocumented immigrants that he promised. His supporters seem not to have minded.

On the 2024 campaign trail, though, Trump has revisited the idea — thanks, in part, to the increase in immigrants to the United States under President Biden that has made the issue a centerpiece of campaign rhetoric. Speaking to Time magazine this year, Trump again promised that he would launch a massive deportation effort modeled on Eisenhower’s.

“I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us,” Trump said, “with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out. Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions.” (This claim is not substantiated.) He indicated he would be willing to deploy the military as part of the effort. Immigrants weren’t civilians, he insisted, but an invading force “like probably no country has ever seen before.”

The odds are good that this is simply Trump using exaggerated rhetoric to amplify his arguments about the Biden administration. But some of the extreme promises he made before 2016 ended up being Trump administration policy. So it’s worth considering just what a massive deportation program would look like — and how it would upend an enormous part of American society and the economy.

…spoiler alert…man-full-of-shit has for-shit plan…film at 11…but fluid contexts are a bitch

One challenge is that Trump’s allies ignore the nuances here. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) appeared on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” where he endorsed Trump’s deportation policy.

“President Trump and I have talked about this at length,” Johnson said. “But the challenge we’ll have is finding them, Brian. As you know, they have been spread out everywhere.” The speaker called the prospect of finding undocumented immigrants the “greatest challenge of our generation.”

The Brian to whom he was referring was co-host Brian Kilmeade.

“Well, we know where the hotels are,” Kilmeade replied. “We could point you there and we can help in New York City.”

His colleague Ainsley Earhardt added that “the 16 million number that you said under Biden, that could be a lot higher.”

You can see the misinformation here: There aren’t “16 million under Biden” and those housed in hotels in New York, like others “spread out everywhere,” are often individuals awaiting asylum claims.

But Johnson is right in one sense. Figuring out how to rip 10 million to 15 million people out of the United States — 3 to 4 percent of the entire population — would be an enormous and expensive challenge.

…weird…swear I heard the asshole say it was a “day one” kinda deal

Let’s consider Queens County for a second, Trump’s birthplace. Located just over the East River from Manhattan, it is home to about 2.3 million people. In other words, the estimated population of undocumented immigrants in Queens in 2019 was equal to 1 in 10 borough residents.

The Trump proposal is to uproot 10 percent of Queens, 8 percent of the Bronx, 5 percent of Manhattan, 3 percent of Staten Island and 6 percent of Brooklyn. Trump and Johnson want to detain 1 out of every 11 residents of Los Angeles and remove them from the country.

…great way to balance that budget, boys

In 2005, the Center for American Progress published a report looking at the cost of implementing a national program aimed at deporting every undocumented U.S. resident. That report estimated that the cost of such a program — targeting 10 million people — would run $41 billion a year for five years, assuming that a fifth of undocumented immigrants left of their own volition. That’s a total cost of about $321 billion in 2023 dollars. It’s more than a third of the entire budget request Biden submitted this year for the Defense Department.

It includes a lot of grim details, reinforcing the scale and severity of the proposal.

…uh huh

Trump and his allies have lots of chest-thumping rhetoric about building military installations in the desert to house migrants or sending the National Guard on excursions into blue states to round up undocumented immigrants. The intent is to present the image of a president who abides no undocumented immigration, given the danger he suggests those immigrants present (both explicitly and implicitly).

But the scale and complexity defy that bravado. Imagine police going door-to-door in Queens, trying to determine whether the person with whom they are speaking is a citizen and, if not, whether that person is waiting for adjudication of their asylum claims or have U.S.-born kids. Imagine that person being arrested, put into a van, as the officer moves three buildings down the block or two floors up in the same apartment building. Imagine this happening in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Denver, Atlanta. Imagine the outcry on social media, from neighbors, from employers.

Perhaps there’s a reason Trump didn’t do this the first time around.

…sure there is…same reason he goes so hard on the dog whistles but wouldn’t know a working dog if it bit him on his prodigious ass

The incomprehensible, unattainable scale of Trump’s deportation plan [WaPo]

…ah…fuck it…time’s up…whatcha got?

[…I’ll think of some tunes in a minute…or…maybe after more coffee?]