False Equivalencies, Logical Fallacies and Memes That Work "Too Well"

A friend posted this complaint about the plethora of memes defending President Trump's immigration policies, particularly putting immigrant in protective custody of DHS while their parents are being processed. Note I didn't use the words "atrocity" or "humanitarian crisis" as my leftist friends do. My friend claims that every one of the memes he's seen uses a "false equivalency" logical fallacy as "proof." This approach, he says, has become the go-to method of influencing public opinion. People simply pass these memes along with no regard as to whether or not the information is factual or misleading. And the frightening thing, he says, is that it seems to be working!

Yes, it is frightening that the left can't make this horrible situation stick to Trump. The trouble with my friend's argument is that the false equivalencies that I have seen are heavily on the rabid anti-Trump side. The media and Democrat side would have you think that suddenly Donald Trump started ripping children from their parents for no reason other than to be mean. This is not true. 

Here's why:

(1) The policy was started under Bill Clinton and expanded under Obama. Bush tried to close the border and create a guest worker program, but neither party was having it.

(2) It was a good policy to place kids in custody of DHS (which does the same thing if American parents are arrested). Trump started processing illegals as misdemeanor offenders. You don't leave kids in detention facilities with adults who may be smugglers, sex traffickers, drug mules, cartel enforcers or terrorists. It's not safe and ICE doesn't have enough family-friendly facilities to handle the surge of illegals.

(3) The kids are only kept until the parents are processed and then they are reunited and returned to their home countries. I think it's that "returned to their home country bit that's causing the Democrats to have the flutters.

(4) The hyperbole about kids whose mothers are in Mexico and the kids still in the states? That kind of thing happens when you write a phone number on the kid's forehead and send him across the border alone or you bring a whole undocumented family across illegally and can't prove the kids are even yours. Sometimes kids are over here along because Mom never crossed the border in the first place but came alone or with a "friend" or was abducted by traffickers. That's one of those things where you need to know the rest of the story. I know ICE agents and they aren't cruel people. 

Children of illegals thrown into "jail".  This was 2015 in
California. Want to guess who was president and
over the ICE at the time. Want to guess. I'll give you a
hint:  Big ears, goofy grin, wants to fundamentally change
America? How did that work out for you anyway?

(5) One reason kids get separated from "parents" is because they are "undocumented" and DHS is reluctant to reunite kids with adults who may not actually be their parents. An immigration attorney in Texas just got through sending out the word through the Associated Press that if you have a child with you, ICE won't prosecute you. She just encouraged drug mules, cartel enforcers, terrorists, sex traffickers and such to grab a random child before they cross the border to protect themselves from prosecution.

(6) ICE is overloaded because after 8 years of catch and release under Obama, Trump is talking a border wall. Illegals are rushing the border to try and get across before he builds a wall. That's why the facilities for detaining illegal immigrants are overcrowded and inadequate.

(7) If you want to talk about false equivalency, check how many of those pictures of kids behind chain link were taken back in 2014 under the Obama Administration. The mainstream media did a spate of investigative reports on ICE separating kids from their parents and tried to pin it on the GOP. The stories died very quickly when the blame didn't stick with Republicans but started to fall on President Obama. Obama "solved" the problem by transporting illegals and their kids north and deeper into the US and then releasing them with instructions to come back for "processing" later. Guess how many showed up with their kids to be processed.

(8) Trump is being blamed for a problem he inherited from Obama. And the left is busy wailing about Trump refusing to take responsibility and that conservatives are blaming Obama. Takes a lot of nerve when Bush blaming got so bad under Obama that it became a joke that every time Obama had a problem he would blame George Bush for it. Sad really.

(9) The left is mad at Trump now because he's announced an Executive Order to "handle the problem" of separating kids from incarcerated parents. Have you read the order? There are all these phrases like "as far as possible"; loopholes salted into the thing that leave the President and ICE free to continue incarcerating parents and putting the kids under the protection of DHS as they should be. That's an old Democrat trick to issue some fine-sounding paperwork to make people feel better and then leaving yourself an out to do what you want. Trump learned that when he was a Democrat.

(10) Democrats like Chuck Schumer are advising Democrats to oppose any attempt by the House and Senate to deal with the problem, lest it make Trump look good. That's the real humanitarian issue here. Immigrant kids being used to try and unseat a President and to seize political power.

Colonias in America - no water, sewer or electricity.

This is about memes alright, but it's not the relatively tepid memes defending Donald Trump that are the worst offenders here. I'm sick of the exploitation of the misery of those seeking to escape the horrors of life south of the border. We could do something but the political parties are too busy struggling for power.

Actually President Bush had the answer but he couldn't get either party to come together on the solution. The solution is simple and powerful and frees illegals from what is virtual low-wage slavery her in the US.

(a) Close the border tight. Until we stem the flow, we're fighting a losing battle.

(b) Create a guest worker program. If we need workers for jobs Americans won't do, let's make a legal way for them to come over and do those jobs.

(c) Register illegals already in the country. If they're obeying the law and willing to work put them in the guest worker program. If not, deport them.

(d) Make companies, farms, dairies and others which depend on migrant labor pay a fair wage, taxes and it should at least reach minimum wage for even unskilled labor. That takes care of the whole "jobs Americans won't do" argument.

(e) Close the colonias and arrest the people who profiteer off the fear and isolation illegal immigrants face trying to dodge ICE. If we make them legal through a guest worker program you solve the problems that promote poverty, crime and disease in immigrant communities. Once they are no longer illegal, they are protected by the American justice system from exploitation.

(f) Cut off all aid to nations sending their surplus populations north until they stop it. Let them participate in the guest worker program and let them receive an economic boost from the money that guest workers send back to their countries. The money will got to poor families rather than being filtered through corrupt governments that take 3/4 of all aid money to cover "administrative costs" so that only the tiniest trickle ever gets through to the people it's intended for.

East Texas colonias look like this. Rose growers, dairies, and
chicken plants send pickups to bring the men to work.

I worked for 40 years with kids, adults, the disabled, seniors, poor families and immigrants - illegal and otherwise. I saw the conditions in the colonias firsthand, the exploitation of illegals by chicken processors, rose growers, farmers and dairymen (all good Democrats contributing regularly to their congressmen, senators and such to buy protection for illegal immigration and what amounts to slaver labor and exploitation of illegals).

The Democrat party claims to have undergone this big change back in the 60's and renounced white supremacy and slavery utterly. I don't see it. They just changed their tactics for keeping minorities enslaved and on the plantation. I saw too much over the past 4 decades to buy the memes about Democrats being for the working man. I served during the time the Democrats were in power in Texas and watched the rise of the Republicans. Things got better under Governor Bush and his successors, let me tell you. And like with Trump, the Democrats ran the most shameless disinformation campaign trying to discredit the GOP in Texas that you ever saw. I was part of efforts to disrupt the Democrat good old boy networks and for a time I had to check under my truck before I started it up in the morning to see if there were any funny wires under there. I was warned. 

Don't kid yourself, the movement behind leaving our current system
in place is about cheap labor and keeping migrant workers living
in fear of ICE in order to keep them submissive to the bosses.

Democrats, I found in my years working in human services, are about accumulating power above all else. They will tell you it's all about having the power to "make things right". But they never do. Things always seem to get worse. Too many country club Republicans, though, have become afflicted with the same lust for power and are afraid to do what's right lest it cost them an election. Shame on them too.

It's time someone really helped these people for a change. I just don't hold out a lot of hope. Slavery is too handy a tool for hanging on to your wealth and power. And I am here to tell you, that what unrestricted illegal immigration is all about is virtual enslavement of minorities, particularly Hispanic "undocumented" immigrants. The term "undocumented" is kind of revealing. If they aren't documented, you don't have to pay them much and they can't complain because ICE might catch them and send them back to where they were starving or being murdered in their beds. The workers may earn a pittance for their very hard labor, but they are still slaves in my books.

That's the humanitarian crisis. Remove the fear and create a legal means for refugees to cross the border and you'll solve the problem. The trouble is, if you remove the fear, you remove the necessity to vote Democrat and if you're a good Catholic or Christian and a documented worker so you don't have to be afraid of ICE, you might just vote for a party that shares your family and Christian values, opposes abortion, disapproves of gay marriage, promotes religious and family values and espouses greater opportunity to rise in the world if you are poor.

No wonder Dems support catch and release. It keeps the fear in place and makes it easier to keep "undocumented" workers down on the farm and subservient.

© 2018 by Tom King