Barackface: 2: Russia

Tuesday, December 02, 2025

2: Russia

Going after undocumented immigrants is a fool’s game Squads of federal agents descend on the city one night in September, cordoning off an eight-block area in which they are confident they will find illegal aliens. Some 200 men — none white — are rounded up, with hundreds more to follow in subsequent days. .......... Some are dragged from their beds. All are taken to the federal building. Interpreters are summoned, and those able to prove they entered the country legally are eventually let go. But 68 without papers are arrested, arraigned and taken to jail. ........... This all happened in New York exactly 100 years ago. The 1925 dragnet was a classic case of racial profiling before the term had even been invented. And the feds weren’t after Hispanics or Blacks. Their destination was Chinatown and their targets Chinese. .............. Americans have a sad history of demonizing latecomers, especially when they are poor, their languages are unintelligible, their customs are foreign and their skins are darker. Going after those who enter illegally can play well with voters, and it is a favorite tactic of populist candidates and elected officials. But they know — or at least they ought to know — better. Because however popular banishing these people may be, doing so mostly works to our detriment. ...............

In short, what was bad policy in 1925 remains bad policy in 2025.

.............. What happened a century ago, and what is happening today, is the expulsion of many law-abiding and hard-working people who contribute significantly to the national economy and who have never spent a day on the public dole. ........... Setting aside the abject cruelty of separating children from parents or extraditing people who have never known any home but the U.S., the fact remains that these deportations hurt America. ............ The wholesale expulsion of undocumented Chinese laborers a century ago did little to stop crime. Nor did it free up many jobs for citizens, because Chinese in that era generally did work nobody else wanted. It did not halt illegal immigration. But it did deny America these people’s productivity and the potential contributions of generations of their descendants. .............. A Pew Research Center study identified Asian Americans, of whom Chinese Americans account for 25 percent, as the highest-earning, best-educated group in the U.S. We sent those expelled back to China to set up businesses, forge new industries, make scientific discoveries, create jobs and pay taxes, which they and their descendants could have done here instead. ........... Today’s undocumented workers, mostly of Latino origin, hold about 8 million jobs in the U.S., according to Pew. They account for 5 percent of the workforce and are concentrated in such critical sectors as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and transportation. Nearly all pay taxes in one form or another, and with few exceptions they do not receive aid through Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Nor are they eligible for food stamps, housing subsidies or unemployment insurance. .............. arresting, detaining, processing and removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants is not inexpensive; it is estimated to cost about $70,000 per deportee. ............. Mass deportation of undocumented Latinos would create serious labor shortages. One-fourth of U.S. farm workers and 15 percent of construction workers would disappear. Production would slow and the ripple effect would put tens of thousands of American citizens out of work. Federal, state and local tax revenue would shrink, as would GDP, which would decline by as much as 6.2 percent, depending on how many are expelled. ............. However they got to America, most are making their lives, and all of our lives, better. Go ahead and deport the murderers and the rapists — that will make us all safer. But let the hard-working, law-abiding immigrants stay, for their sake and for our own.

Trump is threatening to attack a country with more oil than Iraq

How big tech is creating its own friendly media bubble to ‘win the narrative battle online’ If you are looking to hear from some of tech’s most powerful people, you will increasingly find them on a constellation of shows and podcasts like Sourcery that provide a safe space for an industry that is wary, if not openly hostile, towards critical media outlets. Some of the new media outlets are created by the companies themselves. Others just occupy a specific niche that has found a friendly ear among the tech billionaire class like a remora on a fast-moving shark. The heads of tech’s largest companies, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella and more, have all sat for long, cozy interviews in recent months, while firms like Palantir and Andreessen Horowitz have branched out this year into creating their own media ventures. ............ “At Arena, we don’t cover ‘the news.’ We cover The New,” a letter from the editors stated in its inaugural issue. “Our mission at Arena is to cheer on the people who are, slowly but surely – and sometimes very quickly! – bringing the future into the present.” .......... The letter echoes a sentiment shared by its founder, who has criticized publications like Wired and TechCrunch for being too critical in their coverage of the industry. ............ As with many developments in tech, Elon Musk was an early adopter of this style of pro-tech media appearances. Since the billionaire bought Twitter in 2022, the company has throttled links to critical news outlets and set up autoreplies that return poop emojis when reporters reach out for comment. He has seldom given interviews to established media outlets, but appears for long sit-downs with sympathetic hosts like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan, in which his opinions go largely unchallenged. ......... Film and album release press tours have long been tightly controlled affairs, where actors and musicians go through a gauntlet of easily vetted, low-stakes interviews on shows like Hot Ones. Politicians have embraced a similar model – as was evident during Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign tour of podcasters like Theo Von, or California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, launching his own politics podcast earlier this year – which offers them both access to new audiences and a safer space for self-promotion.