Few residents of this Wisconsin small city have seen a migrant but some are blaming Biden for an ‘invasion’ regardless and elsewhere in the state an influx of foreigners is not all it seems

Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.

But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.

“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”

Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.

Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      31
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Migrants and unauthorized immigrants are ineligible for most state funded social services like welfare. To be eligible, they need to register as immigrants with a plan for naturalization.

      https://www.nilc.org/issues/economic-support/overview-immeligfedprograms/

      Unauthorized immigrants and migrants are also ineligible for legal employment in the US. The jobs they may get would be “off the books,” which is a crime committed by the employer, not the immigrant.

      If you want to discuss language designating an immigrant “belonging,” I have some bad news for you. The US does not have a national language.

      https://www.usa.gov/official-language-of-us

      Out of curiosity, how many Native American languages did your ancestors learn when they arrived?

      • Amoxtli@thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        29
        ·
        6 months ago

        So immigrants are just left out in the street and have no taxpayer hotels, food, and water, cell phones? That is misinformation there. It is all over the news about migrant hotels and migrant schools. And if they do qualify as a refugee, some of them will undoubtedly well get welfare. I never said the US has a national language, but a country is not a country if it is fractured by languages. Look at Europe, look at Ethiopia, look at Somalia, look at the violence between Francophone and Anglophone factions in African countries. How many intellectual resources will you find in Spanish available online? There are whole databases of intellectual and academic information available in English. If you are assuming I am a white supremacist, let me clear up things that show how much of a straw man you are: I am not white, I am dark, and I don’t look white. Another thing, why do you insinuate my race? What’s next, you are going to assume my gender too? I never said English is the official language of the US. Even the state of Texas has no official language. You think you know more than me? You are straw man…

        • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          16
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Unauthorized immigrants are just left out in the street, yes. Registered migrants are provided with one year emergency shelter for asylum. During that time they are to decide if they are choosing the path of naturalization by becoming a registered immigrant, or moving to another nation. The emergency shelter expires after the year regardless of their choice.

          I’m not going to address your claims about “intellectual resources” being exclusive to English other than calling them incorrect and racist.

          I did not assume your race or language, I just assumed it wasn’t Native American. It was a statistical likelihood.

          Lastly, an example of a “straw man argument” is if I said blue is the best color, and you said you like red better, so that means I must hate the color red. My responses have not misrepresented your assertions. They’ve simply disproven them.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          6 months ago

          Illegal immigrants alone pay over $12 billion in taxes every year despite receiving basically nothing from the state in return.

      • Amoxtli@thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        16
        ·
        6 months ago

        It is called reading. How do you know the Armenian Genocide happened or not if you weren’t in Turkey, or Armenia? How about the Holocaust? Were you there? Are you implying you don’t think the Holocaust happened because you weren’t there? Smug comments like these crack me up.

    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      6 months ago

      what does this tell you about the quality of people coming to the border? Not very good.

      By this metric Republicans don’t belong here. Are we going to deport everyone with < 120 iq who isn’t wealthy, neurotypical, and highly motivated?

      • prole@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        I’m so fucking tired of seeing this “quality of people” bullshit too. As if they’re not all humans who deserve a decent life.

        Plus we all know that the “quality” these people refer to is directly related to the amount of melanin in the person’s skin.

        I’ve never seen this “quality of people” argument about Scandinavian immigrants. Weird.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Do you expect we learn his language so he can feel welcomed?

      Yes, I do, because I believe the US is meant to be a dynamic shifting idea and that means we should commit to extending a curious hand of welcome to every new group of people that finds their way here.

      Yes we should learn that new persons language, why not? It is good for your brain, studies have shown learning languages is extremely stimulating and healthy for your mind so I don’t see the issue here?

      The incredible diversity of bomb ass food, art, ideas and general life that a diverse community of migrants brings to a city is invaluable to the citizens that live there who are local. Learning how to say a handful of words in another language is a tiny optional price to pay for all of those benefits.

      • Amoxtli@thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        19
        ·
        6 months ago

        Life isn’t about learning languages. You only need one good language to be productive. The languages with the most intellectual capital are Western European languages like English, German. East Asian languages like Mandarin are growing intellectual capital. Let me provide more misinformation with links. Misinformation? You be the judge.

        Adams cancels upcoming budget cuts amid migrant savings - POLITICO - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/21/adams-budget-cuts-migrants-00142501

        National Youth Gang Survey Analysis: Demographics | National Gang Center - https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis/demographics

        Quote from National Gang Center, which is a US federal government website:

        Race/Ethnicity of Gang Members

        Respondents provided information regarding the race/ethnicity of gang members in their jurisdictions.

        >Law enforcement agencies report a greater percentage of Hispanic/Latino and African-American/black gang members compared with other race/ethnicities.
        >The most recent figures provided by law enforcement are 46 percent Hispanic/Latino gang members, 35 percent African-American/black gang members, more than 11 percent white gang members, and 7 percent other race/ethnicity of gang members.
        

        I am not going to say migrants commit the most crimes, but that is a very narrow-minded view of the impact of immigration. It says nothing of the subsequent generations that come later on. I have been to American school. Absolutely terrible, a lot of kids are in gangs. I turn on the news about 14 year olds shooting each other. I can tell you as a grown man who reads a lot that a gang member is from a totally different culture from an uppity middle class or rich person. They provide a safe environment for kids, some of them teach theirs kids to be polite, and treat everyone with respect. Parents make sure their child devotes time to reading. In contrast to other neighborhoods, I have never seen anything like this while I was growing up. There are such things as different people. Believing everybody to be the same is quasi-religious stuff. I don’t associate with that culture and actively avoid it. As a matured person, it is just insanity. I can tell you other things about the way they think. But the politically correct theory is that white dominance is responsible for crime and poverty of the minority, in spite of evidence that Asians are very tiny and are an outlier to such a claim.

        • eran_morad@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          6 months ago

          You just straight up ignorant and antiintellectual. You’re the rot that is destroying America.

        • vulpix@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Western European languages like English, German

          … and Spanish? Do you forget that Spain exists, is in Western Europe, and is where Spanish spread from, or? Spain alone produces around as many scientific publications as France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada, Russia, etc. depending on the year – impressive considering it’s both less populated and poorer than those countries – and including Latin American countries like Chile, Mexico, and Colombia makes Spanish surpass all languages other than Chinese and English in amount of scientific literature. I’m also not sure where you got the idea that the German language contributes more to human knowledge than Chinese, China produces far more scientific output than the US and around 4-5x as much as Germany.

          Something tells me you don’t speak any 2nd language, you’ve never left the country, nor are you involved in academia or qualified scientific research at all, and you’re trying to speak about things you don’t know about. You’re some sort of pseudo-intellectual who has no qualifications or talents, but thinks you’re on the same level as actual philosophers by copy-pasting links of news articles about problems you don’t actually know anything about to Reddit and Lemmy.

          I work in a computational natural science and much of the general humanities, philosophy, linguistics, and psycholinguistics literature I’ve read from the modern era is in Spanish, and plenty of Spanish papers are incredibly rich & high quality despite them. It’s impossible to ignore non-English languages’ significant contributions to scientific knowledge, and especially the Spanish-speaking world’s impact on modern science.

          Regardless of that, the amount of papers about iguana mating written in a language isn’t relevant at all to migrants. If anything, a population speaking different languages is a good thing for science, because that kind of separation encourages thinking about and discussing problems in a different way, and adopting different focuses or techniques. Throughout history, many divides in science coincided with language divides, with the most prominent scientific breakthroughs often coming from people in different “camps” which coincided with the language they spoke, e.g. the Arabic-speaking world would have their own views on a specific problem or field which eventually turned out to be the dominant view, and the Italian-speaking world, and the Greek-speaking world, and the Latin-speaking world, and the German-speaking world, and the Judeo-Spanish-speaking world, and the Akkadian-speaking world, Hebrew & Aramaic speaking world, and the Chinese-speaking world, and the French-speaking world… many languages encourages many forms of thinking, and encourages innovation.

          The dominant languages in the US/UK/Canada, China, Germany, and France have the most scientific literature available because those countries’ governments are able to spend an extremely large amount of money to subsidize and drive scientific research, and have large relatively well-off and well-educated populations to become scientists. With the US seeing an increasing number of Spanish-speakers in their population, it’s likely it’ll eventually see a large rise in Spanish-language scientific literature produced in the country at some point.

            • vulpix@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              6 months ago

              … evidence that Spain is in Western Europe? Or that throughout history, diversity in scientific ideas and the progress brought by said diversity have come in large part from language divides? You know, like, the entirety of medical history and modern-day biodiversity sciences? Or evidence that China surpasses the US and Germany in scientific production? Or how Spanish-language publications are extremely prevalent in many subjects, like linguistics, philosophy, social sciences, and humanities like archeology where they tend to surpass othern non Chinese/English speaking countries, and where Spain tends to have more importance than every country other than China, the US, and occasionally the UK?

              It’s easy to tell from the actual data that there’s plenty of science in non-English languages, including Spanish, and many primarily Spanish-speaking countries have their own niches that they occupy (with Spain being one of the most influential forces in a lot of social sciences, humanities, and related subjects, and Argentina, Mexico, and Chile each especially pulling more than their weight in specific subjects).

              Where exactly are you confused?

                • vulpix@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  6 months ago

                  You must be blind or something because I linked real data that goes directly against what you said about Spanish scientific output. In fact, you were raving about all the “philosophy” Spanish doesn’t have, despite Spain with its Spanish language literature often being one of the most important and highest-producing countries in terms of publications in philosophy and other humanities. Convenient for you to ignore it I guess.

                  You also said this:

                  The languages with the most intellectual capital are Western European languages like English, German. East Asian languages like Mandarin are growing intellectual capital.

                  Very clearly you thought that Mandarin has less intellectual capital than English and German, and that Mandarin was just “growing” but not actually ahead. Which is just not true, definitely not for German.

                  I can tell you have no idea about how rich scientific literature in other languages is, because you aren’t involved in scientific literature and you don’t speak other languages.