[justrealist]

I mean. Ok.

The majority of human beings are not people who hold values I want in this country. Do I want someone who thinks that heretics should be killed? Women should be circumcised? China should be sterilizing minorities in Xinjiang?

Liberal democracy works when the population has a common baseline of enlightened values and mutual respect for the system they work within, I am not apologizing for attempting to maintain that.

[kmeisthax]

Liberal democracy is already under threat by American citizens, and you don't need to immigrate to America to attack American values. You just go online, register a few hundred troll and bot accounts[0], and push your narrative about how we need to persecute a specific group of people in blatant violation of the 1st Amendment.

The thing about America is that it's very good[1] at passing on its politics to immigrants and their children. This is why you get lots of immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind themselves and ban immigrants, which is a hilariously illiberal policy that would actually harm themselves. The far-right Islamofascist nutters who want to kill heretics and forcibly mutilate women's vaginas will, given enough time, absolutely break bread with the far-right Christofascist nutters who want to ban books they don't like from schools and ban trans people from public spaces[2]. Given enough time, even tankies[3] could get in on this and form a pan-authoritarian cult of illiberality and oppression.

Insamuch as this necessitates any compromise of liberal values for the sake of the continued existence of liberalism in the United States, such a compromise should be limited to the least invasive change necessary to preserve human rights. Banning immigrants for having grumbles about the US smells like collective punishment, and we don't actually need that. Illiberal and far-right thinking is spread by very small numbers of influential and socially connected grifters, and targeting just them would be less invasive.

Furthermore, we don't actually know what speech US ICE is using to deny visas, just that they're using machine learning to scan for some kind of speech. They might be solely targeting foreign liberals because that's what they consider a security threat to themselves.

[0] Aided by Elon Musk selling bluechecks and algorithmic boosts on Xitter for $8/mo

[1] Relative to other countries, of course, who basically don't even try

[2] We don't have to get into why they would do this - or how they'd excuse it given their mutual hatred for one another. Crank magnetism is a powerful force.

[3] Far-left authoritarians.