Trump plans to charge asylum seekers a fee and limit work visas

[pbrower2a]

Such a decision could get people killed in the wake of some religious persecution, very much a danger in much of the world. Religious bigotry kills! Most people facing religious persecution are destitute even if they used to be doing well -- regimes that persecute people for their faith usually rob their victims.

I do not want such a decision separating families simply because the family can afford the fee  for only one or two of an eight-person family.

Just imagine the consequences of applying such a fee to people, many of them Christians, who fled Commie rule in Cuba and Vietnam. If one is a devout Christian, then one must hold Donald Trump accountable.

(It is also anti-Islamic, as might be the case in which one group of Muslims persecutes another group... I may not be a religious person, but I prefer devout people to people like Donald Trump who seem to believe in nothing except themselves).

[pbrower2a]

The title made me think this was about curbing rampant H1B abuse and I got way too excited for a moment.

Employers should be obliged to pay American scale to people who get work on H1B visas. I would also like to get such people on the fast track to US citizenship. I want them  in our gene pool!

[pbrower2a]

This is good for the American workers and the American people.

Putting the lid on Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany and countries that fell under Nazi rule was a horrible decision. Part of the cause was to reduce competition among workers, and part may have been to keep Hitler from deciding to rob the Jews and cast them out, destitute,  to the United States. It took more time for people to realize that Hitler meant every venomous word that he wrote or uttered about the Jews, beginning at the least with Mein Kampf.  

higher wages for us!

Those jobs do not exist, or Americans potentially capable of holding those jobs are ill-matched by their geography from taking those jobs. Remember -- nothing matters in the American economy except that the economic elites get whatever they want through monopoly power, control over labor markets, and their power over the political process.

One is not going to get a well-paying job in eastern Kentucky as a software engineer, but if one wants such a job  one must go to a place where a landlord devours fifty percent of one's pay -- and one had better have three month's rent saved up for such. Except for countries in which the ruling family owns the oil wealth and there are few other ways to make a living than to be the servants or enforcers for those ruling families, the USA is the purest plutocracy in  the world. This country is a landlord's paradise where there are well-paying jobs, and a banana republic elsewhere.

Why should we help the world?

Because of our shared humanity!

[pbrower2a]

I know an older man in my community that met Ivana Trump right before a funeral in Florida, recently after her divorce from Donald. This guy swears to me up and down that Ivana told him that Trump owns a copy of Mein Kampf and he doesn't exactly hide it away in a storage contauner somewhere.

Do I believe the story? I lean towards no. These types of things make me wonder sometimes though...

My Dad was about the age of Fred Trump, the President's father.  We had a case of books.  We had Mein Kampf there, along with Berlin Diary (by the war journalist, William L. Shirer), The Book of Mormon, and a few others.

Many who have copies of the Communist Manifesto and Capital are anti-Communists who see the need to examine the Beast. (I see the Communist Manifesto and Capital as obsolete except where the existing rulers sweat workers for the gain of elites ).

That generation was far more serious about history.  In addition, people read books to understand history.  Just because you had a book didn't mean you signed off on the author's point of view.

That generation didn't have video as we do. I would not trust all video any more than I would trust every book. Video is now a good source for history so long as people examine it critically.

My parents were liberal Adlai Stevenson Democrats, who would be considered liberals for their time on most issues.  They never voted Republican, except for Nelson Rockefeller (who gave my Dad, a civil servant, generous raises).  I know this is unfathomable to many folks here, but my Dad was a WWII veteran, so people figured he was smart enough to know what he was reading.  And he was quite knowledgeable on current events.  If he were alive and sharp today, he'd tie most of Atlas in intellectual knots.  (I do wonder what color avatar he'd have, though.)

The Armed Services encouraged soldiers to read, and supplied soldiers with inexpensive paperback books. There was little else to do between battles that could not bring trouble.  Remember also that the GI Generation fully grew up without television, which means that it had to rely more heavily upon reading as information and entertainment. American soldiers could get much education from their recreational reading.

To this day, to be fully informed one must read. Not all reading is in books; there is the Internet, and reading a literary classic off Project Gutenberg may or may not be the same experience as reading a dead-tree edition.