Bulletins and News Discussion from August 12th to August 18th, 2024 - Marshall Plan: Now As Farce - COTW: Ireland

without doxxing myself: I can say with certainty that they are paying hotels to house migrants to keep the hotel market from collapsing. The city is overflowing with vacant apartments, commercial buildings have floors and floors of open floor plans with bathrooms that could be converted, but the landlords don’t care and are NIMBY. A hotel is typically leasing a building instead of owning, so they will happily take a government contract to house migrants if it means they are booking up rooms.

It’s also preferable for the city as a hotel is full of tourists instead of voters, has staff to check in, has private bathrooms, is full of cameras, and again there are like thousands upon thousands of vacancies. If you have the money, you can probably get a room night of anytime or anywhere in the city.

My job has me visiting lots of different types of buildings and the landlord class makes me sick.

My father wont either. Republican fearmongering and Brainwashing machines are very effective and they go right to xenophobia.

I've grown so tired of the bullshit from the conservatives in my family i've stopped trying to reason. You coukd try to reason as to the base cause of mass immigration from nations we overtly and covertly fuck over. But their infused outrage puts blinders on them. So I come to the logical end point for them:

Melt down the Statue of Liberty then

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Melt it down because you arent able to take a sober look at how our politicans and our sanctions and our policies drive them here. You don't believe in it, this sacred American Value and symbol that's plastered over everything immigration that faces the world. Melt the damned thing down then.

Shuts them the fuck up.

That and both Ds and Rs offer nothing that isnwhy they are digging so hard into xenophobia and Red Scare tactics and I thought were were smarter than that but nope. Melt the thing down if that's all you care about. Remove the welcome mat. It wont help inflation. It wont help housing costs or your grocery bill. But if you feel vindicated and upset on that then melt down the Statue to Liberty and be honest about it.

Reframe the issue. The majority of recent migrants are from Cuba and Venezuela, two of the most the most heavily sanctioned countries in the Americas. The migration specifically increased because Trump ratcheted up sanctions with the explicit purpose of trying to destroy the economies of those countries. John Bolton publicly admitted the Trump admin expected that the sanctions would increase the number of migrants. If your mom wants the migrants to go away, then she needs to be against sanctions on the third world, specifically Venezuela and Cuba. Maybe call it the "MAGA Migration" or something, I don't know. But otherwise if she isn't willing to support ending sanctions/the embargo, then this is the price.

I can find actual sources to back this stuff up if you really want it.

A short book - Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, in which she recounts her experiences as an interpreter for migrant children in New York. I don't remember the solid numbers (in any case the events are several years old now, from the Obama years) but it puts the children's stories and experiences in the foreground. An excerpt (CWs for violence against children)

Numbers from the NYC comptroller's report, focuses a lot on how immigrants pay more taxes than they receive benefits, if that's your mother's supposed priority

I just had dinner with a friend from there. Midtown where a couple of these hotels are, like the Roosevelt.

Friend is supposedly Democrat but sounds Republican on so many things.

He was like, I support immigration (migrants and asylum seekers) but why should we have to pay for it!! He said there were extra taxes and surcharges in NYC, like for the subway I think. (I looked it up and couldn’t find evidence of this.)

He said there’s increased crime, specifically drug dealing.

Oh and he mentioned the cut-backs on library spending.

Remember Adams closed them all on Sunday a while ago.

Meanwhile they spent blobs on surveillance tech that was probably made in Israel.

He is first gen Indian immigrant. Naturalized citizen. He said everyone in his neighborhood shares his POV.

I also would appreciate this

It is true that there are many hotels across NYC that have been repurposed to house newly immigrated people. The people living there are mostly from Latin America, but also there are hotels of people just from sub-saharan Africa, so it’s a diverse mix.

I am in contact with someone who works directly on managing new immigrants for NYC. From what they’ve told me, it is a serious crisis for the city, since they are constantly looking for increasingly creative ways to house everyone. Their allocated capacity would run out and they’d have to scramble to accommodate new arrivals.