> Low-dollar cross-border funds transfers have been used to facilitate or commit terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.
They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
>They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place? As for the people who are supposed to be here, but are collateral damage (ie. "which is destroying the used car market in latino communities") should we have sympathy for people in such situations? If a local casino is laundering money for drug cartels, but that casino funds the community because it employs workers, should we be against the FBI coming in and busting the casino? What if it's more benign than drug cartels, like run of the mill securities fraud?
Like any other system, the purpose is what the system actually does. Especially a system that's been around for decades.
We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
Plus, the drug trade coming in from Mexico is, in fact, a huge problem, not just for the US, but for Mexico itself. Mexico is run by cartels specifically because of how much money is made off selling drugs to Americans. This isn't some non-existent problem they are using as cover.
> "people without work visas"
is not the same legal category as
> "they're not supposed to be here"
Nobody knows what Melania was doing between the time she arrived and the time she met Trump. She only had a handful of photoshoots shortly after she arrived, and then nothing for 3-4 years until she met Trump at a social event.
Or is it prodromic to a "stop talking to guts and let us put the factors in a computational framework, where all targets and constraints and consequences are laid out with their demographics"? A Cost/Risk/Benefit for policies?
So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.
The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
Like, the "eating the cats and dogs" line, specifically targeted at Haitians, wasn't enough for you to think that maybe this guy didn't have your best interest at heart? Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
These people will see whatever they want to see until they get hit, so unless you're in a position to provide the hit, or somehow impart discernment that most elementary school kids have, they can only be contained and we should be happy if they pay their taxes and don't vote.
Retrospectively, looking at the various kinds of concentration camps set up all over the country, that might have been a bad choice to make. But that doesn't make it a less reasonable one at the time.
What proof do you have? On what planet would major banks piss off the most capricious and unrestrained president in modern US history? What possible upside could there be for them? Trump (34 time fraud felon known for scamming everyone he can and using his position in government to massively enrich himself) was almost certainly "debanked" because he is doing more of the same shady shit that he's known for and the banks are obligated by the law to treat him like anyone else.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/capital-one-close-trump-ac...
Capital One closed hundreds of Trump's accounts in 2021. Trump is suing them, claiming it's a political debanking. CapOne fighting back because they feel their AML team was correct to close those accounts.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/capital-one-says-it...
But i’m sure being charged an extra dollar at a small store that’s barely getting by (assuming this is true) is the real problem..
It's pretty obvious what they're doing.
Obviously sarcasm... But in all seriousness, it's scary how many people genuinely believe this.
There's a class of people that has to have "more" than the rest. And they do that by controlling access to everything. They spend tons of money on distractions and concepts like moneylending which makes everyone have to go through the "loan" and "approval" process - of course only some people get approved lol So nobody else gets a house!
Instead of trying to become better themselves and make new discoveries, and build genuine wealth they can give back, the gatekeeping/inheritance mindset is to stop others who are trying to better themselves. To knock them back. It doesn't stop at preventing others from attaining wealth and status, they don't even want you to have a roof over your head.
If they had it their way, you wouldn't have a bank, house, car, and barely any money. You'd be wearing some goofy uniform working for them living in poverty.
We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.
Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.
For example, when I was relatively poor and near 0 balance in like 2009 era I’d wait for my direct deposit to come so I could grocery shop and pay bills.
When it deposited, the funds would become available to use even though the transaction wasn’t cleared, pretty normal so far.
So say you pay 2 bills and grocery shop, come back on Monday and you’d see that your pending deposit vanished, 3 transactions cleared for 3 overdrafts, then your deposit cleared afterward.
This is just one that I know about because it happened to me. I wonder how many less blatant scams like this exist that most people aren’t even aware of.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
It's not just Mexicans. Cartels don't respect borders.
Even the weird state based legalization has caused the cartels to pivot into things like avocado farming and mining.
Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use. Probably shifting them towards lower risk choices (pot, ketamine) and aggressively crack down on dealers is a winning combo.
(A lot of low level dealers are just graduated drug users but the line between buying and selling is a large one and dealers do immense harm while also shielding more dangerous criminals. Incentives against dealing incl aggressive enforcement are powerful at dissuading low level dealers, which in turn starves the criminal organizations.)
Indeed, it is not.
But not for lack of trying. The biggest migration in history is the 10% of Mexico that has moved to the US since 1970. <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1trqnn8/he...>
As of 2024, 11 million Mexican-born people live in the US. <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>
Generally speaking, it makes sense to me that a society wants to make that difficult.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
No, it's not just a matter of alternatives: it is also a matter of principles.
For example: in europe, I am unable to make online purchases with electronic money, as all the payment devices are tracked, matched with a personal identity - they cannot be unidentified as they could be only a few years ago. There existed occasional cards for online shopping - now they ask you a local telephone number, identity tied. This under the excuse of "countering money laundering". So there you have "privacy" vs "financial monitoring" - with immensely disproportionate effects in a farcical manouvre.
This ignores that taxes are a thing that need enforcement. Its like saying basic necessities should be free, the world should be without pollution, or cancer shouldn't exist.
For taxes, I favor land value tax. Basic necessities can absolutely be free under it, as the super rich hold plenty of land. We can have a world without much pollution if we switch away from fossil fuels, and if we take the lifecycle of chemicals into account. Note that excesss carbon dioxide is pollution too. Regarding cancer, medical science is working toward it.
Given the type of things vocal people believe, no, posters must know we cannot assume people be joking.
In the current conversation, the policy could have been based on research about where and how cartels were doing their laundering, and designed in a way that minimized the impact on non-cartel immigrant communities.
In all of those cases, the system is the result of choices that lead to the current outcomes, and I think that's the part that's worth thinking about.
Right, but the original claim wasn't "the purpose of a system is what it can accomplish subject to the political and economic constraints placed on it", it's just "the purpose of the system is what it does".
What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260422
>We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
So if the city/state/federal government lets a drug addict/dealer population to exist for too long (despite their best efforts at cracking down), they'll eventually get grandfathered in, and we can't enforce anti-money laundering regulations or dismantle their crack dens?
Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
I can think of a more humane way: Prosecuting the employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers. The prospect of employment is what draws migrants here in the first place.
Don't employers already have to check for authorization to work?
(Let us not feel:) How many innocent economic actors does the regulation hit.
sarcasm or typo?
Alcohol is a drug with a huge amount of cultural significance going back millennia. Don't be a robot: it's in a different category and not a double standard.
Buy yeah, one easy solution to crime problems is just to make everything legal. Sure, it totally misses the point, but it seems very clever to the software engineer mind.
2. Practically speaking, how many people lack a work visa (or similar documentation), but are supposed to be here?
In fact, did you know, in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests? (This is a free hot tip for anyone wanting to live in Canada. It might be true in some other places too, but I don't know.)
Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.
Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!
Maybe we should stop treating these contradictions with Polyanna level of naivety. What is more likely: a.) these people did not seen the obvious contradictions or b.) these people are giving out publicly palatable sympathetic responses. It is all economic vote, except that conservatives were never good for small businesses.
What if these people are not as dumb as they pretend to be. What if they are actually attracted to the same thing that makes other men attracted to Trump - the male supremacy ideology and the racism against "not them exactly". The fun ugly part of it. The cruelty against homosexuals and trans. Saying that openly will still makes you look bad, so we get the "we had no idea, this was just economic vote" kind of nonsense.
Getting them to stop ignoring information they don't like is the problem.
What if we got proper stats instead of adding slices to the pie chart not knowing how big they are.
"What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
We have plenty of those, we are just ignoring them.
> "What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
There would be absolutely nothing remarkable about distribution of chances here. It is the most plausible and explanation. It is also completely consistent with all the data we have - including the fact that record of abuse never harms republican politicians. Instead, it raises their credit. It is also consistent with philosophies the leadership openly pushes for.
If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
1) People get loans against assets literally all the time.
2) People can live and work in different places.
Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income. You have to pay back the loan, after all. Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan, and having such documentation requirements would greatly inconvenience them. All this feels like a fig leaf for allowing workers lacking work visas to live and work in the US, while turning a blind eye.
>2) People can live and work in different places.
Again, is this something that actually happens, or is it just a contrived scenario? Is there really a large contingent of people working Mexico and then commuting back and forth to the US? They can't get a loan in Mexico?