Bernie 2016 (only in my dreams) - Page 2

#Bernout
Now the Bernie kiddies are saying they won't come out to vote if their guy doesn't win.

Shaking my head...

Just hoping I get my citizenship in January 2017

Are you getting your citizenship through MAVNI?

Hopefully

Been away for awhile... what's the consensus here regarding the next POTUS?
You guys really think Bern is going to win? I honestly, haven't heard much from him regarding immigrants. Pretty safe bet that baring any indictments, Hilary is going to win.

Only consensus being that it has to be a democrat. People like to debate Bernie v. Hillary, but in all honesty - it doesn't matter.
Neither will push for CIR (don't kid yourself kids), just people like to hate on Bernie for voting against the crappy 2007 bill ignoring any other (pro-immigrant) voting history, and ignoring the hoops they (or their parents) wouldn't jump through.

Not really, John found his way into the thread like 2 weeks later when the thread itself has finally died. I saw his response but I didn't feel like arguing with him. I have a voting history analysis, you have a quote from 9 years ago. Responding to it would give his argument any sort of legitimacy.
Only moral of the story is something I realized a long time ago, that everyone is a shitbag when it comes to immigration. Why can't republicans go back to lynching black people?

Actually, the thread shows that I "found" my "way into the thread" the day after it started. "2 weeks later" is quite an exaggeration (by a factor of 14, to be precise), like "He voted against it because guest workers were being abused" is quite an exaggeration (flat-out untrue, actually). And let's ignore the fact that you had no response to Pianoswithoutfaith either, because otherwise... where's the fun in that?

You have a voting history analysis without an *ounce* of context, and I have quotes ranging from 2007 to July of 2015 that provides that very context. But I guess at the point where I can provide context to how Bernie actually thinks on the topic of immigration (spoiler alert: it ain't pretty), all you can do is grandstand and stretch 24 hours into 2 weeks.

Here's another just a quote. But this one is from 8 months ago, or, as you'd like to call it, (8 months x 14 = 112) 9 years and 4 months ago.

"It would make everybody in America poorer — you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer."

And they weren't even talking about guest workers. You know what they were talking about? VISA EXPANSIONS (as in, increasing the limits on legal immigration, or even deleting the caps). Or, as Bernie calls it, "doing away with the concept of a nation-state".

As further context and reference point, here's Senator Jeff Session from April of 2015.

"It is not mainstream, but extreme, to continue surging immigration beyond any historical precedent and to do so at a time when almost 1 in 4 Americans age 25 to 54 does not have a job. What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.

But high immigration rates help the financial elite (and the political elite who receive their contributions) by keeping wages down and profits up. For them, what’s not to like? "

Bernie has voted time after time again against increasing work visa caps that doesn't affect us because guess what - you won't ever get said visa anyways. We had a few people eyeball getting H-1Bs, but that shit won't fly without an 212(d)(3)(A) waiver.

It's like you can want to legalize the ones who are already in the country and not want to import further indentured servants (H-1s, H-2s, etc), but for some reason that's a position you completely choose to ignore. You treat immigration as an all or nothing field, as do a lot of other people, and they like to lump us together with the indentured servants, even though they hate us because they think we took the easy way into the country.

He has a point, unemployment sucks especially when companies go around the law, delete stacks of resumes because they found a guy in India willing to do the work. Granted, the US applicants may be a little underqualified but it's rare to find someone who knows 100% of everything and in the end you have to train, even a little.
Maybe my own position is impacting my judgement here, but when me and all my college classmates are currently unemployed, or working part time jobs not in the field, and you see headlines like "Google/Microsoft calls for 50,000 more stem workers" from where, not from US that's for sure; you just can't help but laugh. They just shill for more worker visas and want more worker competition, and they enter in agreements to not take workers from each other to depress the wages.

So please, stop treating calls for less worker visas as some horrible anti-immigrant stance. Foreign workers aren't our friends here, we aren't their friends. We should focus on calls for our own legalization, and the indentured servants can fight their own battles because they sure as fuck won't fight ours.

Listen, Mr. Stockholm Syndrome. You are decidedly not in the same position as your college classmates on this topic. The basis of Bernster's argument is that immigrants = lower wages + less jobs (yes, this includes you), because we take away jobs from Americans (no, this doesn't include you). This is a Tantonite, anti-immigrant bullshit that has been passed around since the time of Alien and Sedition Act, and it has been debunked many, MANY times.

The economy doesn't work like Sim City 2000; "jobs" is not like a crate of apples. You being in America does not translate into less jobs and lower wages for Americans. In fact, if you're skilled/educated (like many of us are or are on track to be), you being employed here actually *generate* jobs.

So enough with the "we" shit. Your American citizen classmates and you are NOT in a same position as far as Bernster is concerned. When he's talkin about immigrants depressing wages and taking jobs away, he's talking about YOU.