I want to throw out a quick tactic in rhetoric for this particular line because it is so common but is often bungled by comrades online and in real life and the counter is easy. Allow me to illustrate through a hypothetical conversation between a comrade © and a liberal (L):
L: I don’t hate immigrants, I’m against ILLEGAL immigration.
C: Okay, what if I could pass one law that would get rid of all illegal immigration overnight and there would be no more in the future ever again. Once you hear it you’ll understand exactly why illegal immigration could be eliminated this way. Would you support it?
L: Sure, sounds great.
C: I would make ALL immigration legal. Every immigrant would from now and forevermore be automatically approved and put through the process to longer term residency or citizenship status.
Posing your fix to immigration like this immediately exposes the lie that they don’t hate immigrants. The next sentences out of their mouths will be why some immigrants are not worthy or how this is unthinkable (even though it has been the norm for 99.9% of human history). It’s such an easy retort. It’s leftist. It jumps right into the contradiction their ideology holds.
Now of course they will try and dig into details but it’s important not to ever get bogged down in details of how such a policy would work. Of course, as a mental exercise for yourself it might be fun to think about but the details of the policy are irrelevant. The point here is they hate ILLEGAL immigrants. You can propose to get rid of the ILLEGAL parts. Would they welcome all immigrants who are LEGAL? No, of course they will not. It is important to keep reiterating, “but they will be legal and those are the immigrants you like.”
As with all rhetorical tools it will not convince most people. The goal with using rhetoric and responding to rhetoric is often not to convince the person you are interacting with. It is to put them in an uncomfortable position while appealing to an audience.
I like this one because it plays into everything most liberals and even many conservatives don’t want to admit: their anti-immigration ideology is racist and they can try and hide behind the law all they like but they cannot once that shield is stripped from them. Of course, that means that this kind of rhetorical retort is useful in for some other policies as well. I often like to propose legalization when someone says they don’t like the ILLEGAL aspect of something. They are almost always using that to shield racism, classism, or some other form of sociological bigotry.
Hope this helps.
My usual strategy is to bait them into implying that the border is the issue and then hit them with the racist card.
C: How do you propose we fix it?
L: Tighter border controls.
C: But most illegal immigrants don’t come over the southern border - they’re visa overstays that came here legally, and they’re mostly from the UK, France, and Spain. So why are you proposing policies around right-wing racist tropes about immigrants and not the reality of the situation?
This not only makes them uncomfortable, but also shows the audience that liberals are in fact just sanctimonious idiots.
I think it would be useful if we had a comm where we could discuss rhetoric like this. People could make posts just like this and we could discuss the finer details, and try to make our arguments a bit more airtight. A lot of you are more articulate than me, and it’s good to see points made in a more coherent way.
Might be nice but I’m too ADHD to manage one. I would lose interest too much and let it get stale. We could always post them here on Chat. I don’t mind if people do that and I also don’t mind if people see them and try and argue against them. Rhetorical devices get sharpened like that.
I’ve thrown this one out before and yeah it’s a lot of fun.
I have a client who wants tighter restrictions on illegal immigrants to prevent terrorism, and I have no idea how to rebute that whilst promoting immigrants
Good question.
All major terrorism in the United States has been orchestrated either domestically or by completely legal immigrants. Immigration controls have not prevented a single incident of terrorism. Furthermore, making all immigration legal and getting all immigrants in the process of residency or citizenship puts them “in the system”. Liberals love that idea. If they are up to no good, we got an eye on them, whatever that means. But again, the main point here is not to get bogged down in specifics of the policy. You have to redouble back with something like, “were the 9/11 hijackers illegal immigrants? No. Where the Boston bombers? No. What about Oklahoma City? No. Atlanta Olympics? Not there either. So how does cracking down on Latino immigrants on the southern border address that fear?”
Of course, the smart-ass reply is, “Afraid immigrants are going to take away good paying terrorism jobs from hard working American terrorists?”
Country with regular mass shootings committed by home grown right wing chuds more often than not, literal terrorism, is afraid of immigrants cause they might be terrorists. Other countries should be hesitant to allow Americans is anything, the people leading the world by a wide margin in terms of domestic terror.
The Mexican presidential debates were wild about this stuff. Criticizing Americans for coming over the border to engage in sex tourism and sex trafficking. Our violent culture. The fact that cartels exist to sell to us. You love to see it.
This reminds me of my “compromise” on sex education that highlights the underlying motivation with the abstinent-only argument: teach kids to wait until marriage, then teach them all about contraceptives with the explicit instruction to only use them once they get married.
