Thread by @adamjohnsonNYC

"immigration crisis" news cycle gave us all the useless liberal tropes

1. Witness suffering and feeling bad about it while carrying out mass deportation anyway.
2. all the right humanitarian, anti-racist rhetoric front-loading... carrying out mass deportation anyway.
3. Optics!

https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1441405236254441487

a kinder, gentler deportation hand

when your ideology starts from a position of "what looks bad" rather than what is actually bad, your policy output will necessary be a meta one, focusing on what shows up on the evening news and NYT editorial board, irrespective of how your policies impact vulnerable populations.

the goal from the Biden WH and DHS from the beginning was to handle the **visual** of the immigrants corralled at the border. Just as mayors want to handle the **visual** of homeless people in public spaces. It's first and foremost about Making Things Look Good

and a central part of Making Things Look Good is assuring squishy liberals that when you are "forced" to deport immigrants or "clean out" homeless camps that when you do so you Feel Very Bad about it. And that your means will be marginally more humane than the other guys'

This is the way of liberalism today. See, for example, this WaPo editorial that a did next level cynicism: it criticized Biden for NOT CRACKING DOWN ENOUGH on Central American migrants then went on to accuse Biden of engaging in a racist double standard washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

to clarify, WaPo is accusing Biden of not cracking down on Central American migrants as hard as he has Haitian migrants (a fair point in its own right) but then, their solution, is to EQUALLY CRACKDOWN ON BOTH POPULATIONS. Brutally purge immigrants just don't be racist about it

In an editorial lobbying for Biden to not "incentivize" migrants coming to the border (read: stick with strict enforcement of Operation Gatekeeper's strategy of making the trek so violent and brutal it dissuades migrants from coming) they accused Biden of racism. Nothing matters.