Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.
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Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no?
To counter-quip: what is the goal? I genuinely don't have any idea in this circumstance how the reactionary right wing adherence to ideology does anything but harm the country they claim they're trying to improve.
I mean, do you want Hyundai to build factories in the US? Everyone seems to claim so. Yet here is a Hyundai factory that seems likely to be shuttered or delayed for years because of... ideology?
Please listen to the NYT podcast I linked. In 1950, immigration had been severely restricted for three decades, dropping the foreign-born population from 14.7% in 1910 to 5.4% in 1960. Then, Congress enacted Hart-Celler in 1965, but promised that it would not increase immigration. According to Gallup, public support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34% since that time, and from 1965 to 2000, was under 10%. But in that timeframe, the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century.
So no, continuing to ignore the immigration laws Americans voted for and have consistently supported is not a good prior.
That’s the problem! I am unpersuaded that the people of the present could recreate the America at which Alexander de Tocqueville marveled: http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-To....
American democracy is highly unusual in the world. Indians, for example, have figured out mass voting—within a society where people see government as a parental figure—but they don’t have anything resembling the bottom-up participatory democracy of something like the Iowa Caucuses.
I think it’s inevitable (and baked in) that democracy in America will degrade to what it is in most third world countries: masses of low information citizens with little sense of ownership and participation voting for daddy government to care for them.
Indeed it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through.
> Indians, for example, have figured out mass voting—within a society where people see government as a parental figure—but they don’t have anything resembling the bottom-up participatory democracy of something like the Iowa Caucuses.
Nor do they have gerrymandering. But such singular characteristics are not defining either. Both India, the USA and in fact much of the planet have issues in terms of government, participation and representation. It is however pretty rare to see a nominal democracy turn into an autocracy overnight. Rarer still that this is being cheered on by those that stand the least to gain from the change.
> I think it’s inevitable (and baked in) that democracy in America will degrade to what it is in most third world countries: masses of low information citizens with little sense of ownership and participation voting for daddy government to care for them.
That is one possible outcome. There are many others and quite a few of them a lot worse than that. Currently, based on how things are going we are not on a worldline (to use a popular term) where the outcome that you sketch is inevitable at all.
The Iowa Caucuses exemplifies the most important distinguishing characteristic of American democracy. India is a hierarchical society, where low-information masses select who will parent them. America, by contrast, is an egalitarian democracy. That doesn't mean maximizing the participation of the low-information masses. It means that Americans choose from amongst themselves people to represent them within a system of self-government. Americans have this ideal of self-government all the way down, from the President down to elected school boards and HOAs and church leadership.
> There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through.
I'll grant you one thing: American democracy is worse than it was when Reagan was running against Carter, and Trump is part of the reason for that. But the way in which it's worse is that it more resembles Indian third-world slop democracy!