I don't understand "abolish ICE" - we're going to have an executive agency enforcing immigration and customs... who cares what it's called?

I'd say I'm a liberal progressive with conservative lesbians.

Why can’t immigration crime be dealt with by general law enforcement?

Also, having them in mainstream networks of authority and accountability will restrain them from being a law unto themselves.

Also also, sometimes you gotta sweep away an institution and start again from scratch, it’s so broken.

General law enforcement still has special branches normally, right?

Sure, but hiving something off and giving it institutional autonomy is a powerful bureaucratic method of evading control and oversight. So reversing that process is a good plan to rein in something out of control.

Ok so it sounds like you have the same criticism of AOCs tweet that I do then

"I'm a communist but what REALLY grinds my gears is someone who is going to easily be the most liberal member of the House."

before ICE, we had the INS

A lot of evil governments do is from not caring. ICE is actively evil. It's not an accident. They view every immigrant as the enemy and they want to crush the enemy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...mp-ice/565772/

This article opens with discussing an Ohio community of immigrants who were being killed and enslaved when they fled to the US 20 years ago. Before they were accepted, now ICE wants to deport them all.

The article describes the changes within ICE, how they view their mission. How their enforcement has changed. They have a huge budget, hatred of immigrants, and a shortage of actual bad people to target.

Abolish ICE is too kind.

lol you say “liberal” like it’s a good thing?

"Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations. The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract workers from the backward countries.

There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth. "

I don't think the AOC tweet should be taken to imply the belief that ICE should be reformed rather than abolished. Birdman, I think maybe you didn't see this?

Engels continues:

This division seems “natural” to us, but it costs a prolonged struggle against the old organization according to generations or tribes.


Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.

We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men, because the public power which is an attribute of every state “does not directly coincide” with the armed population, with its “self-acting armed organization".

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the attention of the class-conscious workers to what prevailing philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual thing, hallowed by prejudices that are not only deep-rooted but, one might say, petrified. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. But how can it be otherwise?

From the viewpoint of the vast majority of Europeans of the end of the 19th century, whom Engels was addressing, and who had not gone through or closely observed a single great revolution, it could not have been otherwise. They could not understand at all what a “self-acting armed organization of the population” was. When asked why it became necessary to have special bodies of armed men placed above society and alienating themselves from it (police and a standing army), the West-European and Russian philistines are inclined to utter a few phrases borrowed from Spencer or Mikhailovsky, to refer to the growing complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so on.

Such a reference seems “scientific”, and effectively lulls the ordinary person to sleep by obscuring the important and basic fact, namely, the split of society into irreconcilable antagonistic classes.

Were it not for this split, the “self-acting armed organization of the population” would differ from the primitive organization of a stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive men, or of men united in clans, by its complexity, its high technical level, and so on. But such an organization would still be possible.

It is impossible because civilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose “self-acting” arming would lead to an armed struggle between them. A state arises, a special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class struggle, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters.

One of the biggest things - and I say this from experience having worked in contracting with several government defense agencies with 3 letters - is that they work really really ****ing hard to justify their existence. So, in some ways, literally just having ICE around as a separate entity will result in both spending toward and execution of extraneous policies that I think you and I both disagree on.

As Engles and Lenin point out, the state develops as a result of class antagonisms. It must exist to “mediate” the conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie (but more accurately we say that the state is an instrument of class oppression of one class over another—in the case of capitalism a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat). The state uses special bodies of armed men (military, police, ICE, etc) to enforce this dictatorship. And the more intense the class antagonisms, the larger and more forceful become the special bodies of armed men.

Lenin further remarks that immigration to the imperial center is a result of dire poverty in the periphery in spite of or more often as a direct result of Imperialsim. Opposition to this immigration is reactionary because immigration and the spread of capitalism heightens contradictions

Sorry, yes I would end legal distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. As I showed in the Lenin quote, to do otherwise would be reactionary.

I'm coming around to replacing ICE to eliminate its culture.

BM, doesn't cheap, migrant labor actually serve the capitalists' interests?

This is a pretty funny turn of events:

https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/...ighur-muslims/

I think it’s more complex than being able to give a yes or no answer and this was the point Dustin was trying to make before. US corporation do want some amount of illegal immigrants to come to the US because it means they can pay “Mexico wages” without actually having to move to Mexico. And deporting all the immigrants would end up just making corporations have to move to Mexico (it wouldn’t suddenly create tons of jobs for Americans because they are too expensive). But corporations also do not want completely open borders because then you start to have issues that intensity the contradictions of capitalism. Bringing more of the world into capitalism and bolstering the ranks of the proletariat strengthens the proletarian cause and weakens the middle class/labor aristocracy which is a bulwark for the bourogisie against the proletariat.

If you abolish deportation then you have no reason for ICE or any other such org to exist

Should anyone who comes here without borders be eligible for public assistance?

Some people here may even consider it slavery

Sure why not?