Sen. Elizabeth Warren Latest Democrat to Call for ‘Replacing ICE’
30th June 2018
More virtue-signalling by people who aren’t going to suffer from the consequences of the silly thing they advocate.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren called for the abolition of ICE during a rally on Saturday morning. “The president’s deeply immoral actions have made it obvious we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and that works,” Warren said, according to The Hill.
I would agree that we ought to (not need to) rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, primarily because it is so sclerotic and bureaucratic that it takes damned near forever to immigrate legally, which is a large part of what is motivating people to ‘cut out the middleman’ and immigrate illegally. That bureaucratic tangle has given rise to a vast number of ‘abogados’, lawyers specializing in Working the System for immigrants both legal and illegal, which only makes it worse — when you’ve got a large group whose income depends on the system being difficult, they’re going to be a great stumbling block in the way of making the system less difficult. (Think tax preparers and the tax system.) This is what the slur-term Special Interest is all about.
The great flaw in Warren’s position (and that of those similarly situated) is that ‘replacing ICE’ is not the best, or even a useful, place to start. All of this ‘replace ICE’ blather is just grabbing a complex situation by whatever sticks out farthest and pretending that that’s the handle. These politicians (and the bulk of the ‘protestors’) are good examples of what Scott Adams called ‘child-like thinking’ — like children, they look at the people who are in charge and shout ‘JUST FIX IT’ as if that’s all it took.
The family-separation fracas is a very good example of this sort of thinking in practice: There are very good reasons, often having to do with the safety of the children involved and the proven fact that a lot of these children come north with people who are NOT their parents, for separating them while things are sorted out. But, according to opponents, you should just change everything immediately so that they are not separated — Hey, just sign a piece of paper and everything will be fine. Well, Trump showed them that you ought to be careful what you wish for; he ‘signed a piece of paper’, and whaddaya know, it didn’t fix it. And of course now it’s his fault that the magic didn’t happen.
These people are the intellectual equivalent of a boss who gives you an impossible task and says ‘Just do it.’ The overwhelming urge to Just Do Him speaks to the way people react to such stupidity. Do enough of that and things blow up good and proper, and that’s the direction in which we are headed.