i remember as a kid it being banged into my head how america was great because it was a giant melting pot… bring us your poor, tired, etc. the numbers bear out that first generation immigrants work harder, cause less crime than ‘natural’ citizens.
and its true, immigrants made this country. it is a country of immigrants… cuz, ya know, mass native population genocide and all.
but here we are… these conservative fuckwads have somehow convinced everyone the opposite is true.
if youre anti-immigration, youre just racist. thats it.
It changed around 2002. It’s interesting to me because that was when my “free thinking” parents changed their views.
No it didn’t. The US barred Asians from entering for multiple decades. This country has been anti immigrant(anti anyone not white moving here) since it’s inception
Non-white people moved here in droves. It looked like this
Wow, and that’s after “regulations” 😳
This country has been anti immigrant(anti anyone not white moving here) since it’s inception
Nah, until 1882, there was literally no restrictions for anyone moving to the US. If you could afford the journey or even successfully stow away on a ship or train or whatever, they’d let you in and let you stay.
When it came to CITIZENSHIP, though, you’re right about the criteria being super racist from day one.
I went to the museum at Ellis island last year. It was surreal because here was a purpose built facility for processing immigrants, meanwhile Venezuelans were lined up on the streets in Manhattan waiting to be processed. There were a number of exhibits showing the racist attitudes of the Americans in the 1870s to 1880s demanding a curb on immigration. Was an educational experience.
Those restrictions on non-whites, for starters.
Those were originally citizenship restrictions only.
Until 1882, there was no law to keep people of color (or white people, of course) out of the country, even as they were met with tons of discrimination and abuse and no rights.
Right after Sept 11th, 2001, huh
Yeah that makes sense
9/11 was a system shock to a lot of folks.
It’s wild how different it is now. Even the people who raised me with those same values (in this case, my parents) are now Trump supporters. Like what the fuck happened to you? YOU MADE MY LIKE THIS!
It’s a massive bummer.
Honestly, this is a reason that I am glad, in a fucked up kind of way, that my father died when I was young. He was intelligent but I’ve seen a lot of intelligent people go off the rails in the last decade as well as from a very religious family. I don’t know that I’d have coped as well as folks like yourself.
I hope that your parents come to their senses and own up to their mistakes.
spoiler: they won’t
Sadly, likely.
What first world country isn’t the country of immigrants? Look at any successful country in Europe. UK and Ireland especially, would sink to the bottom if not for the cheap labour it got in the 2000s.
From where I’m sitting, the USA was always a massive piece of shit on racial and gender prejudice issues. I guess some of us must have been more fortunate with the Independent School District Lottery.
Ever see Gangs of New York?
Yeah…
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I’m also 41 and that’s exactly what we were taught. Bring us the tired poor huddled masses.
Yep. I was taught that too. In Indiana, where I doubt people want that taught anymore.
36, taught that in Florida of all places. My history teachers must have been pretty good. Uh, for Florida, anyways.
I’m around your same age and have always been told immigrants generally good.
That’s not a generational view you have there. I’m willing to bet that immigrant is a synonym for ‘not white’ by whoever in your past has said this.
The people in my past who have said this have been the exact same politicians who are saying it now. This has been a major republican talking point all my life. Nothing has changed among them.
And then yes I’ve heard immigration bad from people as well of course.
I’m 37 and was generally raised with the melting pot mentality, but I grew up in Washington state. Out of curiosity, not judgment, did you grow up in a Red state?
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I am very close to your age and I was taught that. That’s literally the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Sounds like someone tried to brainwash you.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty is the famous poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. Written in 1883, it was mounted on a bronze plaque inside the statue’s pedestal in 1903. The most famous lines from the poem are:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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ill tell ya, +50 and originally from the north. are you from a
racistconservative area?
racist: Someone who believes that their race makes them better, more intelligent, more moral, etc. than people of other races and who does or says unfair or harmful things as a result:
- Two of the killers are known to be racists.
- She cannot understand how her husband could be branded a racist.
And what exactly does that have to do with anything? It’s comments like this that make it look like YOU might be part of the problem.
What killers?
What’s in the box?
Fuck off RIDF
Yeah, fuck rural infrastructure and the people that fund it!
I assume you’re getting downvoted because he meant the Indonesian RIDF, the Regional Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF), set up by the Indonesian Ministry of Finance in partnership with the World Bank
Federal Law has not changed in the US. Cannabis is illegal in all 50 States. The current system of not enforcing the laws did a lot to relieve social pressure on Congress or the DEA without the need for them to actually effect any change. Honestly, we need to stop talking about cannabis as if it were legal and remind people that the situation is actually a mess, so that there is some incentive to get pressure back on the Federal Government to fix this mess. As long as cannabis is in legal limbo, the Federal Bureaucracy is going to keep grinding people up in its gears when they slip into one of the cracks.
Yeah, I had almost forgotten how much of a mess it is, until I asked my newly adult son about it ……
All he ever knew is that pot is legal where we live. He knew to be wary of crossing state lines but had no idea about federal laws, or banking restrictions
The best time to de-schedule cannabis was 10 years ago
The second-best time to do it is now
Unfortunately, the War on Drugs is just Jim Crow 2.0, enacted shortly after the end of Jim Crow 1.0 (fun fact, Jim Crow laws remained in force until 1965, the War on Drugs started in 1971). In the end it was just a massive expansion of police discretionary authority, and in the beginning it was explicitly intended to give police the ability to crack down on political enemies of the Nixon administration- that is, black people and the anti-war left.
The GOP will never let cannabis be de-scheduled; they understand that without it more minorities won’t be convicted felons and will be able to vote against them (and never forget that convicts are slave labor and there’s a lot of money in that)
What a shitty future we inherited.
this sucks and I feel for her. But it also falls into one of those “duh” type things. How someone working in the field not know that it is federally illegal?
One thing, victim blaming, second thing, probably because the pot industry keeps literally telling everyone it’s legal when it’s actually just unenforceable by federal agencies. As in a federal agent can’t hunt you down and arrest you just for the weed, but they can deny banking services, deny licenses, citizenship, etc.
Do you see dispensaries saying that in their ads? I don’t.
Shit, I get ads on fucking YouTube trying to sell me “totally legal” mail weed that will absolutely get me arrested by my state, even if the Post Service doesn’t narc.
Fun Fact:
Many of the dispensaries in California operate without licenses, which they certainly don’t tell their employees, and the state doesn’t offer a resource to check even if you know this little fact, so California absolutely can and will arrest you for working in a “legal” weed shop.
And, finally, just get fucking real?
They’re not “working in the industry” unless they’re a grower or an owner. They’re a retail employee selling plants.
Now, sure, she, specifically, seems to be in a small business with her husband but even that doesn’t mean she should know the minutiae of federal immigration law in regards to cannabis.
Touched a nerve, asking for someone to not be stupid or show personal responsibility, it seems…
And not everything is “victim blaming”. The federal government has absolutely created a shit show around pot regulations the past 10 years. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t an idiot.
Contrary to what the echo chamber you’ve been living in is telling you. It is still and always has been possible for two things to be true. There is nothing that excludes both her being an idiot and the government being incompetent from both being true.
And FYI those “YouTube weed sites” are totally legal at federal level. They don’t actually sell weed they sell shit that has less then .03% of THC which is legal. So they are just scams.
This isn’t like “you shouldn’t have dressed like that” but rather “you shouldn’t have climbed into that gorilla enclosure”.
If I had my way, they’d be an American as soon as they expressed interest. I am a hardline radical for free movement of people and open borders. This specific instance is a no-brainer, though. This was a bad idea.
Still victim blaming.
You’re not a victim if you cause your own problem.
Victim doesn’t mean “bad thing happened.” Victim means “bad thing happened that happened during to external factors you had no input on”
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I believe you are posting in the wrong thread, my dude.
This is about a woman with a green card knowingly breaking federal law and then losing her green card
Still victim blaming.
I mean, what did she expect? Marijuana is still schedule 1 under the US Controlled Substances Act, and it’s a federal crime, regardless of whether or not a state legalized it. This is a known problem for anyone in the marijuana business; they often have serious problems with banking because they’re “drug traffickers” under federal law. Anyone that’s tried to buy a gun in the last few years has seen that on form 4473, 21.e: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana [emphasis added] or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance? Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medical or recreational purposes in the state where you reside.”
This is a known issue. Anyone that works in a state-legal marijuana business would have to be intentionally ignorant to not know that it’s still a federal crime, and that it’s still prosecuted at a federal level. So why would someone ever think that they’re going to be able to be obtain citizenship when they work in a business that makes them a federal felon?
Obviously the Controlled Substances Act needs to be repealed or amended, but it until it is, maybe don’t do shit like this if you aren’t a citizen and want to be?
It’s one of those when you think about it after the fact you guess that can make sense. But when you get the job, give them your SSN, and pay federal income tax on your wage, yeah you might not think boy this is a felony and will prevent me from getting citizenship.
Together, she and her husband managed to open [emphasis added] a small storefront in Ephrata […]
This wasn’t a case of her ‘getting a job’; she and her husband literally started the business. There’s no fucking way you can reasonably start and run a marijuana business and not know that it’s still federally illegal. There’s no reasonable way to plead ignorance on this.
Oh so I can add: Applying for and getting a business license that says you can legally operate this business.
So back to: One of those things you think about after the fact, that one branch of govt says yes but a different branch of govt (which didn’t say no, they just didn’t say anything) might think hey that’s felony and will prevent you from getting citizenship. Actually multiple branches of govt said yes, local says where you can operate stores, state says you can operate that business, etc.
If you don’t understand the core nature of the business you yourself are starting, then you shouldn’t be starting that business. That business license was probably granted by the state, not the federal government. And just because the state didn’t say, “hey, you might want to think this through” doesn’t mean she shouldn’t think things through.
I guarantee you she knew what the federal laws were in a rough sense and likely knew EXACTLY what the federal laws were. One of the most common questions customers are going to ask employees of a legal weed place is whether this is legal.
There’s just such a huge difference between getting a job in an industry and starting a business in an industry. She probably had to build a business plan to get a loan to start the company, and that is when she should have been researching the legalities of what she was doing. She probably had to consult a tax attorney to get her company’s books in order, and that is another time when she should have been asking about federal legality.
Nor do you expect that operating a lawful business might affect immigration process
If you’re not thinking about how your job will affect your citizenship application…I don’t know what to say.
When you give your SSN and start paying federal income tax you sure think it’s on the up and up.
You have to pay income tax even if your income is illegal, that’s how they got Capone.
Yeah but you obviously think this is legal, and your company is automatically deducting from your paycheck.
Maybe the system is different here in Canada, but whenever I’ve spoken to anyone who is in the Immigration system, they are hyper focused on how their occupation will look on their application. Many people delay becoming self-employed for the appearance of stability, others attempt to work in jobs that make them look like upstanding citizens such as public service or charity, etc.
Opening her own business in a “legally grey” industry just seems like asking for trouble.
On your note of paying income tax, even criminal activity is supposed to be taxed. That’s famously how they caught Capone! Just because you’re not committing tax evasion doesn’t mean you’re on the up and up!
Hey we’re hiring: Business analyst, accountant, IT support, operational manager, etc, etc. All good jobs that look good. Oh it’s at company X that…
Just told this to someone else: Yeah but you obviously think this is legal, and your company is automatically deducting from your paycheck.
See my prior reply. That’s not the way it went down. She was the business owner.
“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!”
Oh we playing that game? See my prior reply too. Cheers.
Anyone that’s tried to buy a gun in the last few years has seen that on form 4473, 21.e: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana [emphasis added] or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance? Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medical or recreational purposes in the state where you reside.”
This was ruled unconstitutional
earlier this yearlast year ( https://www.reuters.com/legal/drug-user-cannot-be-barred-owning-guns-us-court-rules-2023-08-10/ )I believe that case is being appealed. But it’s still not clear that this will be a binding precedent, given that one of the charges against Hunter Biden is that he bought a gun (which he then disposed of very badly) while he was a drug addict. (And if the prosecutor doesn’t drop those charges, it will put Hunter’s legal team in the unenviable position of legally challenging his father’s political policy.)
But, even so, it’s still on form 4473, so seeing that should at least make anyone involved in marijuana business at any level pause for a second.
Again: I’m not saying that I think that it’s right that marijuana is schedule 1. I absolutely support decriminalization of marijuana. But that’s still current federal law, and you aren’t going to get citizenship if you’re knowingly committing federal felonies.
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Yeah, I mean, that kind of thing is going to happen when cannabis is Schedule I.
“We didn’t think about the consequences of getting involved, or how the federal law was going to affect us,” Reimers said.
When you want US citizenship, it’s a federal level thing. You should maybe think about how federal law is going to affect you. I’m not saying that the laws around cannabis at the federal level are right, but they are the laws that exist.
I wonder if they had an immigration attorney or if they were doing it themselves. And if they had one, I wonder if the attorney was aware of this possible issue.
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Not sure where you’re getting that from.
The “legal” marijuana industry only benefits people in the investment class. It’s traded on the stock market, it’s sold in so many states over the counter and yet people sit in jail for it. Biden’s pardons aren’t even close to halfway there but the entire media had a field day with it like we were in some golden era of legalization. People’s rights are still subjugated on behalf of the war on drugs, specifically the war on smelling cannabis burning. None of the workers ever benefit from the runaway profits with certain companies earning six figures a week in revenue for a single state.
Things could be better, for sure, but it is pretty awesome for the average person in a legal state (or country) to be able to buy and grow weed legally. Give it time for the “war on drugs” generation to die out and things will be even better.
that is what the last generation said
have a story passed down through two generations of a woman in the 20s putting a towel under the door so the smell did not get into the hallway
and they were right. they grew up in an era where cannabis was completely illegal at all levels and the cultural push was to increase penalties. Now it’s legal in some form in the majority of states with others getting on board pretty quickly and the push as the federal level is to deregulate entirely and leave it up to the states. I think it will be legal for adults everywhere in the US at the state and federal levels in our lifetimes.
“I think it will be legal for adults everywhere in the US at the state and federal levels in our lifetimes.”
and that is also what the last generation said
That’s a good story. But it’s true that things are improving, right? Canada is now fully legalized and about half of the US states are legal-ish. Mexico will get there since their Supreme Court said the ban is illegal.
I’d say the problem is how some states have manipulated the market to only benefit big players.
Illinois, for example, has given out the fewest licenses to grow and made it illegal to grow for personal use.
I mean Ohio Republicans literally want to change a law that was passed by referendum, just to be assholes, but weed being legal in Ohio is still pretty kickass.
Things can be good and also not good enough.
Where are the “states’ rights” Republicans hiding?
Even if weed was federally full up legal, it’s going to take time to readjust the rules and regulations, and directives to make it all fine. The Devil is always in the details and seldom can be sorted at the snap of a finger.
420 up votes. We did it guys
legal at the State level and legal at the Federal level are two wildly separate things - the State cannot grant you citizenship, the Federal Government does that.
it’s her own damn fault
Its still illegal federally. What an idiot, squandering that kind of opportunuity so she could get high.
Is this account one of those where you try farming negative points?
Sure seems like it.
Unless I missed it while skimming the article, I don’t think it says whether or not she was using it, herself. Just that she got a job working with it.
