You Can’t Compromise with Bullshit

Following from my post a few days ago quoting Chris Hayes on the root of the imaginary immigration problem, this from Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift: You can't compromise with bullshit.

First, Muder talks about Mulligan's dehumanizing language and trotting out of crime victims as akin to the anti-Jewish blood libel that happened for years, decades, centuries before the Nazis. Facts do not affect people who believe in something like the blood libel. Graphs like this make no difference:


(And I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of money that the victims of that relatively high number of homicides by undocumented immigrants are members of their own racial/ethnic group, not "innocent" white girls who make good TV.)

But the policy-makers we've had for the past 20 years have tried to compromise with that irrationality:

Both Presidents Bush and Obama imagined that they might be able to compromise with anti-immigration hardliners by strengthening enforcement. And so over the last 20 years we’ve had more and more fence built, more and more agents manning the border, more and more deportations. And what they’ve gotten in exchange is exactly nothing, because the border that matters, the one that murderers and rapists and drug mules are streaming across at will, isn’t in the real world at all. When the problem that motivates someone is imaginary, there’s nothing anybody else can do about it.

Some people, Andrew Sullivan for example, appear not to have learned this lesson. Just one more real-world effort, they think, and Trump’s irrationally fearful supporters will be satisfied [quoting Sullivan, who wrote last week about the wall (!): "He won the election. He is owed this... it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control..."]

But why will they be reassured by a wall that doesn’t get completed and won’t work? Why will they be reassured by anything that happens in the real world? Won’t there still be examples of whites who get killed by undocumented immigrants? Won’t there still be unemployed whites who blame Hispanics with jobs? Won’t demagogues still tell them that subhuman vermin are streaming by the millions across our open borders? Build the wall, open concentration camps, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight — what changes?

You can’t compromise with bullshit. It isn’t just that it’s not smart; it simply doesn’t work.

Of course, Mulligan is also advocating for the suspension of due process rights under the Constitution... you know, that document he swore to uphold. As Ron Klain put it on Twitter:

If Trump can deny due process to those allegedly here unlawfully, ICE can grab YOU, allege you aren’t a citizen and deport you without a hearing.

And then:

To everyone who has tweeted back, "Not me, I can PROVE I'm a citizen" — you miss the point. Without due process, who will you "prove" it to? Where will you show your proof? A right to a hearing / judicial review protects ALL of us.

Of course, a white person might be able to show their birth certificate to the person detaining them and be believed and released... but a black or brown person, not so much, right? Let's Make America White Again!

At this point I settle back into disbelief and recommend two other pieces of reality:

• What people in Brownsville, Texas, have to say about conditions there (from the New York Times). "'We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years, and the numbers are getting better every year.'... Asked whether the city's population of unauthorized immigrants was committing the widespread crime, [the police chief] said they were most definitely not."
• Thoughts from a former immigration judge on the current situation (from NPR). Whoa, what an idea... talking someone who actually knows something about it!