Or so Biden claims? And yet if one welcomes them in through the door, processes them and sends them into the USA until their court date. That seems like a pretty open and inviting border...
And though Trump did stack potential immigrants and asylum seekers up at the border, Biden's actions are certainly providing people with false hope. Remember that the majority of these folks will not qualify for asylum.
So it seems that Biden's plan is to feed the hope of these folks, encourage them to risk there lives to cross Mexico, let them enter for awhile before sending them home.
I understand these are for the most part nice desperate people who are just seeking a better life for themselves and their children. However opening the flood gates is not a sustainable answer, especially when we have plenty of poor under-educated under-skilled and/or lazy citizens of our own.
19 comments:
What a Mess
It's a wedge issue. Politicians don't want a solution, they want the problem.
--Hiram
Like abortion... I am not sure if there is a good solution...
Let them in a draw millions more?
Block them and children suffer?
Send billions South into corrupt countries?
The options pretty much suck...
As with abortion, there are a lot ways to address the issue. The problem is that you have to give up the wedginess of it. You have to stop using the issue as a way of gaining a political advantage. But as with all wedge issues, those most directly affected are politically the weakest. Very often they are poor and in no position to hire lobbyiests. As hysterical as Republicans are about vote fraud, they aren't really concerned about high turnout among illegal alien voters voting against them in off year elections. In D.C., no child in a cage ever hired a lobbyist to take an influential senator out for a three martini lunch.
--Hiram
"there are a lot ways to address the issue"
Please provide one. You tend to enjoy being critical and rarely offer solutions? :-)
The first thing is to build prosperity in the countries that send us illegal aliens. Open up trade, allow factories to be built that create good jobs in other countries. Shift jobs abroad. Create pathways where people can enter this country legally. There are a ton of things we can do, but nothing comes without a cost. Whenever a wealthy country is next to a poor country, there will always be those who want to move from one to the other. There is nothing a politician can do about that.
--Hiram
Intractibility is an extremely desirable quality in the search for web issues. If we are going to invest all that time and money and effort focussing on that which divides us, we don't want to choose issues that can be easily resolved or suddenly go away. That's what so attractive about illegal immigration as an issue. It is divisive, but it is also, arguably, unresolvable. While there are many ways we can address the issue, none of them are without costs, and many of them are themselves wedgy. It is based on the fear of the other, and other fear is something demagougues have always found attractive.
--Hiram
Well your solutions sounded pretty weak...
- we already strengthened Mexico through trade deals and gave them a lot of American jobs.
- we have a legal immigration policy that allow ~1.5 million people in each year.
It seems that politicians can simply close down the border? I am pretty sure we have the technology and personnel to do this if we wished.
So maybe it is the DEMs who want to keep the issue unsolved?
I am a bit curious what these are?
"we don't want to choose issues that can be easily resolved or suddenly go away"
"It seems that politicians can simply close down the border? I am pretty sure we have the technology and personnel to do this if we wished."
So your solution is to militarize the border?
Did the CBP become part of our military?
Responses to illegal immigration will always be weak because it isn't a strong issue. Illegal immigration, mostly, is not a crime, so the way we use force is limited. Illegal immigrantion, if not the illegal immigrants themselves, has strong support across the political spectrum from those who benefit from it. The humanitarian issues will always out weigh the policy issues. These are reasons why the issue isn't going away but they aren't reasons why it can't be addressed.
Pretty much any wedge issue is one that isn't going away. This has to do with practical considerations, we can't tell people who to love, for example, but also because they become poltiicized as politicians use them for political advantage. Wedge issues in America are not always wedge issues everywhere. Abortion is a much bigger wedge issue here than it is in Europe for example, where it never got politicized.
--Hiram
If "we have the technology and personnel" to "simply close down the border", then why hasn't it gotten done? We had a GOP administration that said that's what they wanted to do, but they didn't do it.
This is typical Appelen-world nonsense: blame Democrats for a problem Republicans could have solved but chose not to.
For all of Trump's down sides, he had done pretty good at slowing illegal and asylum crossings. And the better pedestrian walls were definitely not a bad thing.
It will be interesting to see if Biden's wish washy approach leads to even more problems than in 2019.
He is off to a BAD start...
"For all of Trump's down sides, he had done pretty good at slowing illegal and asylum crossings."
Trump was largely able to accomplish that by asserting public health concerns over the last year. That's not going to hold up legally much longer, and we will be required to follow the law as written (or change the law). Again, this is something Republicans could have accomplished in 2017 & 2018, but chose not to.
I don't think so... It was a policy issue so they would have needed 60 votes in the Senate.
Lord knows they all tried... Again...
And we never got a ruling on the Remain in Mexico Policy.
"I don't think so... It was a policy issue so they would have needed 60 votes in the Senate."
I was told the President of the United States at that time was supposed to be the greatest dealmaker in the history of dealmaking. (I should also point out that the problem with getting an immigration reform bill in 2018 wasn't Democrats, it was divisions among Republicans, who were never able to coalesce around one proposal.)
I think we are all in agreement that Trump was / is a worthless deal maker.
Hopefully the DEMs can offer an immigration deal that get 10 GOPers to vote for it.
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