Illegal immigration: A democracy, rule of law, and civil rights killer

Cat & mouse games with US Border Patrol

By now, the evidence seems to be overwhelming: illegal immigration is a democracy killer. Maybe that one issue alone qualifies as the #1 most potent killer. Of course, other factors such as things like low wage jobs, high living costs, racism, mass media including social media demagoguery, and threats to social status due to social change, are also significant components in the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the US and Europe. At least in the US, demagoguery with hate, bigotry and fear mongering over illegal immigration has been absolutely critical for the rise of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism to power.

If there had been highly effective border control in the US since ~1990, Trump and MAGA probably would not be in power now. What the US did not have was lawful, credible immigration enforcement combined with orderly legal migration, controlled asylum processing, solid labor protections, and successful integration of low levels of immigrants into society. We had far too little of that. That failure was bipartisan. Both parties had no intention of imposing effective immigration and border control right from the get go in Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

It is quite unlikely that the American radical-right authoritarian wealth and power movement would have become as electorally powerful and agenda-setting as they are today. They would not have vanished, but they would not be in power. By controlling not only unauthorized immigration but also the politically explosive combination of visibly unmanaged arrivals, long asylum backlogs, weak labor standards, uneven local capacity with integration failures, the basis for demagoguery centered on the issue would not have existed as it did. Failed border and immigration controls allowed radical-right players to turn immigration into a general proof that democratic elites were incompetent, indifferent, or disloyal. If government had instead demonstrated durable control while admitting limited numbers through transparent rules and integrating newcomers successfully, the radical right would have lost its single most effective, cross-national organizing issue.

Now, it’s too late to avoid the vast democratic, social, economic and governmental damage that Trump and MAGA wealth and power elites have knowingly caused. Now that Trump and MAGA have brutally stopped illegal immigration, the big question is whether our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties will survive in a form more meaningful than some fig leaves covering huge gaping, bloody wounds.

Q: For democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties, is it most likely true that illegal immigration (1) is the #1 killer, (2) is one factor of several**, (3) is irrelevant, or (4) strengthened democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties, because illegal immigration posed a huge threat that Trump and MAGA has eliminated.

** E.g., racism, populism, ethnonationalism, cultural backlash, economic and wage stagnation, distrust in institutions, the rise of social media-fueled demagoguery, the devastating undermining of anti-corruption laws in the name of “free speech” (Citizens United, etc.), the rise of highly politicized media (Fox News, etc.), the rise of LGBQT rights and acceptance, etc.

Some info sources:

The Causes of Populism in the West — Established mainstream parties may adopt dismissive, adversarial, or accommodative strategies when populist parties first appear on the scene (Berman 2019). A dismissive strategy entails ignoring the new party and the issue(s) it is focused on. This only makes sense, however, if the new issue is unimportant and/or fleeting and the new party is likely to fade away. Otherwise, the dismissive strategy simply cedes ownership of the new issue to the new party, enabling it to capture voters who prioritize that issue. (Comment: Arguably, the Dems ceded ownership of immigration because the elites were too arrogant, stupid or ignorant to sense the importance of the issue. The GOP understood it very well.)

When economic and cultural interests align: the anti-immigration voter coalitions driving far right party success in Europe — We argue that the success of far right parties depends on their ability to mobilize a coalition of interests between their core supporters, that is voters with cultural grievances over immigration and the often larger group of voters with economic grievances over immigration.

Immigration & the Origins of White Backlash — The success of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign surprised many. ….. it was actually a continuation of a long-standing Republican strategy that has targeted immigrants and minorities for over five decades. It is not only a long-term strategy but also a widely successful one. Analysis of the vote over time shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divided by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racist Resentment and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments — ….. a Trump vote [in 2016] cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. ….. both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote. …..  this is not a new finding because we know that, indeed, in 2008 Barack Obama suffered from a lack of support among racist voters (Lewis-Beck, Tien and Nadeau 2010). 

Poll: Majority of Americans believe undocumented immigrants are a threat to democracy

The paper curtain: employer sanctions’ implementation, impact, and reform

New species of cat discovered!

NBC News reports that a new species of cat has been found, New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say. This kitty is a type of tiger cat. It's slender, spotted and smaller than a house cat. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest. 

The newly identified critter, Leopardus tilcayo was found in the Senda Verde animal refuge in Bolivia’s Yungas region. The Bolivian Yungas is a the cloud forest where the Andes mountains meet the Amazon basin. The tilcayo is completely new to human knowledge.

As usual, humans are polluting the situation to death. Tadeu de Oliveira, a co-author of the study and an ecologist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil said: “All of them are in habitats that are vanishing fast”.  According to DNA analysis, this diverged from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species!

Q: Any bets on how long it will take before overpopulated humans force the kitty from the wild into survival in zoos or some other place of refuge?

What is going on with AI?

AI CEOs, including Musk, are starting to get scared

Recent alarming reporting about AI indicates a lot of hair-on-fire level worries about it getting out of control and causing damage. My own AI, Pxy, said it isn’t out of control and I should mind my own business. Nah, just kidding. It just said it wasn’t out of control.

What’s concerning is that CEOs of major AI corporations are now starting to get worried. That’s scary. When their own product scares the top capitalists, the situation is probably worse than very bad. Until recently the CEOs were downplaying possible threats from AI. So exactly what changed?

Apparently, the high alarm started woth a public resignation by Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who had previously worked at OpenAI. His post accusing frontier labs of racing toward self-improving superintelligence “and gambling with our lives” spread to well over 100 million views. Then Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, publicly endorsed the core concern, writing that he genuinely believed AI “could kill all humans” and personally put the chance above 10% over the next decade.

AI-caused catastrophe, abbreviated as p(doom), or “probability of doom”, reached a mass audience after blunt public warnings from Anthropic researchers. There has not been a new AI takeover or threat. Instead, some leading experts inside frontier AI labs now publicly say there is a nontrivial possibility of bad outcomes, including human extinction. Powerful AI could lower the barriers to designing biological weapons, conducting cyberattacks, or damaging critical infrastructure. One bad possibility is a loss of control of AI where an autonomous system deceives supervisors, copies itself, evades safeguards, and resists shutdown. Another is self-improvement run wild. Here, AI might increasingly accelerate AI research, creating a feedback loop where AI’s own capabilities advance faster or differently than people can understand, direct, or control.

That does sound a bit creepy.

A NYT article, OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior, reports that yesterda OpenAI disclosed six new instances where AI systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission. That lit some hair on fire.

The mostly understood human mind limits vs the unknown AI limits

What resonated personally more than that was two SciAm (Scientific American) articles about AI threats. Those reporting warnings coming from the very small pool of some of the most intelligent human beings alive today, specifically the world’s leading mathematicians. Their hair is on fire for a really scary reason.

AI provided a counter-example to the Jacobian Conjecture – AI disproved the conjecture in three and higher dimensions, but the $n=2$ case is still unsolved

The two SciAm articles, 25 winners of math’s ‘Nobel Prize’ decry the AI invasion of their discipline, and , If AI can do math, what’s the point of mathematicians?, are worried about two things. One is that they might lose their jobs. The other is that after they are put out to pasture because AI can rapidly solve math problems beyond the limit of human ability, humans would no longer be able to fact check AI, and verify AI math proofs and problem solutions. Right now, no one knows what the outer limits of AI are.

AI could develop mathematical superiority to humans and outperform all human mathematicians across most theorem discovery, proof construction, formalization, and cross-domain synthesis. Then would come beyond-human mathematics where AI develops theories too intricate or unfamiliar for unaided humans to understand in their native form. Humans could still inspect formal correctness and high-level summaries, but things could literally be so complex that true understanding and thus control becomes impossible.

Think about it. There is a possibility, still bitterly contested to this day, and in my opinion forever unknowable** that humans intentionally created COVID-19 in a lab. AI could do the same thing, and maybe even come up with something a lot more lethal than COVID-19. We simply do not know what the outer limits are for AI.

** It is known that China manipulated data, silenced its own researchers, did research in a P2 lab when it should have been done at P4-level containment, and Dog only know what the hell went on at the NIH with Fauci and crew.

Maybe it is time to get seriously concerned. But, as we all know, capitalism will be capitalism. Government and regulation haters will do their usual thing. They will fight tooth, claw and campaign contribution cash pile against government regulations. Why? Because government fails 100% of the time, while free, unregulated capitalism makes our lives better 100% of the time. Well, at least that’s the prevailing propaganda. For better or worse, too many people with wealth and power believe it, or more likely use it as an excuse to stay wealthy and powerful at our expense.

Q1: Is it time to get worried about AI, or should we relax and let capitalist markets run free, wild and butt naked through our economy in its endless quest for wealth and power, collateral damage be damned?

Q2: Is reasonably regulated capitalism better than unregulated capitalism?

Some info sources:

Independent assessment of the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2 — Comment: WHO’s 27-member Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens concluded that the weight of available evidence supports zoonotic spillover (natural cause), but it could not rule out a laboratory accident because essential information had not been made available. In other words, we will never know the COVID origin story with certainty.

COVID’s origins: what we do and don’t know

Covid-19: “All hypotheses remain on table,” says WHO report into virus origins

Regarding the US-Israel relationship

Israeli propaganda usually says that evidence-based criticism of Israel 

or AIPAC, its political operations arm in the US, is antisemitism 

Ever since Israel became a nation, the US heavily supported it. For decades, Israel received more foreign aid each year than any other country, about $3 billion/year until 2019, then about $3.8 billion/year or more after that. In fiscal year 2024, the most recent fully-reported year, Israel received $6.82 billion, the most of any country. In three years, 2022, 2023 and probably 2025, Ukraine got significantly more than Israel. Other than that, Israel is #1!

US military aid to Israel

A NYT article, Trump Approves $2.8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Including 40,000 One-Ton Bombs, discusses a new US weapons package for Israel. As usual, the MSM typically does a piss poor job of reporting necessary context. In this case, the headline says its a sale of bombs. The real reality is that US taxpayers are paying for the bombs. The United States will use public funds to finance Israel’s purchase of ~$2.8 billion in U.S.-made munitions. Presumably due to the MSM’s heavy bias in favor of Israel, that inconvenient little detail is buried in the article like this: “The United States provides Israel $3.8 billion a year in base military aid, including $3.3 billion in financing that Israel uses mainly to purchase U.S. weapons—including the recently proposed bomb sale”.

To be clear and precise, the NYT’s framing of a “$2.8 billion sale to Israel” headline is not a neutral shorthand. Calling taxpayer-financed bombs a “sale to Israel” is formally accurate but substantively deceptive. By omitting that US military-financing grants provide the money Israel uses to purchase US weapons, including 40,000 1-ton bombs, the NYT presents a taxpayer-financed gift as a commercial transaction. This is not a commercial transaction. It is direct military aid we pay for. In the context of the MSM’s long-term pattern of euphemisms and omissions that favor Israel, it is reasonable to infer this deceptive framing is an intentional editorial practice. Sanitized reporting loaded with euphemisms is works to shield all kinds of American taxpayer support for Israel from public understanding and scrutiny.

The useful idiot ally

Despite the staggering amount of decades of US financial, military, diplomatic, scientific, commercial, and every other kind of aid, Israel typically treats the US like an idiot and an enemy. We help Israel, a tiny country with a small economy and a population of less than 10 million. In return, Israel often treats the US badly or worse. Don’t believe it? Well, here’s some evidence.

Occasionally, Israel acts in ways adverse to US interests, including confirmed espionage and very hard-edged domestic political advocacy. Although AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is an American lobbying organization, not an Israeli government agency, it acts in close coordination to the Israeli government. AIPAC uses a mirage of independence from Israel to claim its electoral activity is legal should not be equated with espionage or proof that Israel influences US policy. That’s a load of manure. Israel absolutely does influence US policy. AIPAC functions as a foreign agent, but the US government is so corrupted by American Jewish money, a/k/a/, free speech, that AIPAC has never been claimed to be a foreign agent.

Given the documented scale of pro-Israel political spending, the electoral leverage it creates, a long record of resistance to treating AIPAC as a foreign agent, and the organization’s sustained service to Israeli state interests, it is common sense, in the ordinary evidentiary sense, to infer that political money helps protect AIPAC from scrutiny and regulation as the foreign agent it actually is.

Source – Note the focus on primaries where each dollar of “free speech” has more value

Also, (1) Israel spies on the US, and (2) Israel sometimes (usually?) undermines, delays, and acts contrary to US-backed Palestinian peace, ceasefire, and two-state proposals.

Q1: If one sees what Israel is doing in Gaza and/or the West Bank as genocide, is the US also guilty of genocide by providing weapons and ammo, e.g., 40,000 1-ton bombs?

Q2: Is Israel America’s friend, enemy, or something else or unknowable? Is the US a useful idiot in relation to Israel?

Some info sources:

Which countries receive the most U.S. foreign aid?

What countries receive the most foreign aid from the US?

U.S. Foreign Assistance By Country

U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023

AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE — Coverage dates 01/01/2025 to 07/31/2026 Total Contributions: $47,779,957.99

AIPAC didn’t always spend on campaigns. Now it faces criticism over money in politics

AIPAC, One of the Biggest Spenders on U.S. Elections, Faces Its Biggest Test

Israel: Background and Relations with the United States — In November 1985, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence employee, and his wife were charged with selling classified
documents to Israel. Four Israeli officials also were indicted.

Jonathan Pollard, Spy for Israel, Gets Hero’s Welcome From Netanyahu: ‘You’re Home’

CIA: POLLARD’S LIFE TERM SEEN AS WARRANTED

Portugal says Israel undermining Palestinian state through settlement expansion

Why Israeli tenders for illegal E1 West Bank settlement prompted outrage