Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest
Money(and power)
ICE at it’s core is a jobs program
It’s shitty but this is one way that fascism has historically rooted itself into a nation.
It shores up support by creating a defacto jobs program for disaffected, immiserated, and angry people that buys their loyalty by providing them a good salary and the promise of social status as an enforcer of the regime. And for others it is a job that was hiring in a economy with a precarious job’s market. Which creates a golden handcuff problem under capitalism.
And the other side of this is that for many supposed “pragmatic” oppositional politicians they recognize this co-dependency and are scared of dismantling it. In part cause they might risk losing voters(see Talarico in Texas) but also cause they will simultaneously be beholden to their own oligarchical dependencies, typically thru the donor system or party disciplining, that prevent them from offering what is actually needed which is a replacement jobs program, or wholesale economic restructuring that deals not just with this problem but the larger driving forces of broad economic immiseration, alienation, and disaffection. But because that runs afoul with many of their donors(and in some cases constituents), they box themselves into this “reform” posture both toward ICE and larger economic fixes.
Which just ends up as someone being another do nothing Democrat.
And while this author gives good analysis to this economic relationship and offers some tactical advice for the oppositional movement, it similarly fails to offer a deeper fix for the underlying class and economic problems that not only risk still remaining, but actually risk intensifying if not addressed simultaneously.
It’s not a bad litmus test under current US politics.
It is about the most powerful third rail in politics right now that exposes the contradictions within the Democratic Party and their voters
Someone that is an Israel First Democrat is basically a 1 for 1 for being corporate captured on other issues as well.
And a willingness to call Israel a genocide, an apartheid, and support a full arms embargo(including defensive weapons) is also a good clue they won’t be speaking half measured on healthcare policy, housing, wealth taxes, universal childcare, fighting Trump, ending Citizens United, supporting unions, banning AI data centers, a living wage, and any other issue that faces internal contradictions with Establishment corporate Dems and their voters.
And sure enough, Ossoff is problematic on all those domains as well.