[ryandrake]

Many of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.

[mattmaroon]

That is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.

[thinkingtoilet]

The goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring. It's all a distraction and there are enough hateful Americans for it to work for now.

[OkayPhysicist]

It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.

If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.

[handedness]

OkayPhysicist wrote:

> No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. ... They are simply worse people...

You should apply to the DNC to help with their messaging efforts, clearly they're missing an important voice!

[dpc050505]

There's like what, 15 to 20% of americans actively trying to trigger rapture? You've got a lot of religious nuts in your country, and they really are bad people.

[handedness]

Clearly you also learned the messaging principles so clearly demonstrated in the great Basket of Deplorables debacle of 2016. Maybe you can be GGP's deputy.

Anyway, do you have a source for that? My understanding of American evangelical protestant theology is that they don't view rapture as triggerable in nature. Not being one, I can't state that confidently, so I'd love to see your source for your stats, and understand your definition of what it is they feel they can do to trigger rapture.

[CoastalCoder]

> Self deportation is the goal.

Perhaps.

GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.

[mattmaroon]

It doesn’t even matter anymore, being anything less than a full citizen puts you at risk. In my community, we have a bunch of Nepalese people whose TPS is going to expire and they are going to be deported. Not far away is Springfield, where a community of Haitians, who are mostly liked by the people in their community, and who even the Republican governor is asking the administration not to deport, have seen their TPS expire.

There are a lot of non-criminals who are here legally, but still very concerned about their future. If I were one of the Haitians in Springfield, I would be looking for another country to take me in.

[ryandrake]

Every one of them are legal permanent residents who don't feel welcome here anymore. Some are afraid they're one mistaken identity away from ending up black bagged and sent to El Salvador.

[insane_dreamer]

We're now heading in the same direction -- will take more time than I would like to work it out, for various reasons, but this is no longer a country where I want to raise my kids (despite us being citizens and having the "right" color skin), and as much as I want to be hopeful for change it's really hard to see the damage being undone any time soon.