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Republicans Agonize Over Supporting Bipartisan Border Bill They Insisted On
(www.huffpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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I've yet to see this claim substantiated. As far as I can tell the border "crisis" is entirely fabricated by republicans...and I guess embraced by democrats now.
Crisis is a pretty flimsy term to begin with. I think it meets "crisis" definition just based on the pictures of the camps on the other side of the checkpoints. Based on the ridiculous appointment/app system. The backlog.
I think it's a crisis. The ridiculous idea is that this is a crisis caused by immigration. It's not. It's a crisis caused by cruelty and incompetence on OUR part. The immigrants have, by and large, done nothing wrong.
Our own unwillingness to invest in the bureaucracy of legal immigration (which includes nearly all southern border immigration -- refugee is a legitimate immigration status and refugees are not "illegals" even if you care about that kind of thing) has caused it. We just can't manage the number of people coming in. And that unwillingness and inability to process the immigrants has CAUSED the crisis.
We could handle it. We could send reservists and national guard to get down there and process paperwork. Organize the logistics of bussing and all that. And longer-term, we could also invest in that bureaucracy. We know -- and should fucking pray -- that immigration will not stop any time soon. We know this is a service the government is going to need to provide for the long haul. We can't keep pretending the border is a thing we can shut down -- not to even mention how ridiculously good for the economy population growth through immigration is. How massive the ROI is for these kinds of services.
We could also set up single payer healthcare, sweepingly reform housing policy, pass a new and updated NLRA, and so many things that would ultimately make this a stronger, better country and improve things for everyone. But the right-wingers prefer suffering and cruelty to progress, and the progressives we have are too busy fighting among themselves and trying to compromise with uncompromising psychopaths to get anything done.
I agree with almost every word you said, but I think you're wildly underestimating the problems.
We're looking at an additional 3,141,000 souls coming in 2024 (my extrapolation based on current numbers), and that's only from the Southern border. That's more people than live in our 3rd largest city (Chicago)! That's a stunning number, and significantly up from previous years.
Let's pretend we let every human in from the Southern border, everyone, no exceptions. And let's pretend we had our shit perfectly together in 2021, everything running smooth. Could we have ramped up to an additional 1,407,000 immigrants from 2021 to 2024?
Adding another "Chicago+" worth of souls, in a single year, is not a simple matter of political will and throwing money at the problem.
tl;dr: Whether we stop or encourage immigration, we got a humanitarian crisis on our hands.
Climate change is going to make it much much worse. Once Mexico and Central America experiences a couple wet bulb days then it'll be an actual migration.
We can't stop 200million. We can't stop .0005% of that if it all came at once. For the love of God bullets can NOT be the answer to that.
Bullets are America's answer for everything I'm afraid.
I haven't really spoken to the problems. I agree, they're profound.
It's going to take a massive and meaningful logistical build-out just to process and transport these people in a remotely equitable way (meaning spreading out the burden so it does not all fall on just a few specific cities). We already cannot process the numbers coming -- so of course we cannot handle larger numbers.
But also, there's no choice but to do it. We aren't going to stop people from coming through domestic policy changes other than guards in gun towers shooting everyone who comes near. We do not control the domestic policies of the countries they are fleeing, but clearly things in those countries must be pretty fucking bad because people do not uproot and abandon their entire life and history lightly. We couldn't shut it down even if we wanted to, and every attempt is just another expensive human rights disaster.
It's the same crisis from the last election.
Remember the migrant caravans that evaporated on November 3? Same thing.
The only thing I've seen is people posting numbers showing how many more arrests the border patrol is making compared to years past. I've yet to see anything saying how more arrests means they're doing a worse job.
You can parse this lots of different ways, directly on the site, but for this conversation, we're looking at totals.
Nothing to do with arrests. This is what the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and Office of Field Operations (OFO) are seeing.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
See my more detailed comment above.
tl;dr: Yes, we got serious issues on the Southern border. My hypothesis is that immigrants are flooding in ahead of a possible Trump win.
Its almost as if they have a complete inability to craft a narrative of their own..
If they go along with Republicans' narrative, it means they get to throw a group of vulnerable minorities under the bus.
Substantiation, here ya go:
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
If we extrapolate the numbers from the current year-to-date, we're looking at an additional 666,000+ migrants for 2024 vs. 2023 (3,141K vs. 2,475K). Also, note the Nov.-Dec. spike in the first graph.
Our government, society and infrastructure is not geared to take that many people that fast. It's already a humanitarian crisis and it's getting worse by the minute. We cannot take a major American city worth of people every year, we just can't. Hell are we to do with an extra 3M+ souls?!
And keep in mind, we're only looking at Southern border crossings. Plenty of immigrants coming from other quarters, including my wife, and hopefully soon, her son.
I suspect everyone is hauling ass to American ahead of a possible Trump win. Wouldn't you? I'd sure as hell get my family in as fast as I could.
I strongly suspect, and think any history would confirm, that most immigrants don't think much at all about internal US politics/policies when making the decisions to abandon their entire lives and flee to this country.
Maybe once faced with the brutality at the border they'll start to get interested, but on the whole? No way, I just don't buy it. We do not control the conditions that cause people to want to flee their homes, but they are not making that decision so lightly.
You honestly think they're clueless about American politics on a macro level? Maybe they are, but how else would you explain the surge at the border? Perhaps there's new/sudden unrest in our Southern neighbors I'm ignorant of?
It doesn't take that much to explain a 20% increase in numbers. I know you tried to frame it like it was some ABSURDLY huge increase, but I don't consider an extra person for every five to be such a mind-blowing spike.
The same economic stagflation/recession happening everywhere else, including here. The states being emigrated from are continuing to decline and populations continue to grow. There's going to be YOY increases. Probably not 20% YOY increases, but there will definitely be increases.
To be clear, I basically agree with you that it is more than we can handle. I've posted as much elsewhere in this thread. And I agree that we already are failing to take care of our own people, and having extra mouths is going to stretch our failing social welfare programs even more taught.
To be clear though, even just regular birthrates in the US are around 12 per capita -- that is 4M new people per year that we can "handle" already. And just as before, I don't consider ~1 extra person for every 5 to be a mind-blowing figure.
None of this is the reason we're failing to get the "crisis" deflated. We're not processing these immigrants because we both hate them and have weaponized our incompetence against them. Basically the same bad faith and weaponized incompetence that have brought us into our own domestic crises -- housing, healthcare, labor rights, and all that.
Easy peasy! There isn't. I don't trust the CBP numbers in the slightest.
"I don't believe in gOvERnMenT numbers I don't like! I don't believe the CDC! Masks and vaccines are boolshit!"
Take that conservative thinking back to FB. Adults are talking.
Do you have a source with numbers from before the pandemic? This site only includes numbers for the past four years, which have to have been increasing because immigration almost ground to a standstill in 2020-21. We need an accurate starting point in order to have this conversation.
hmmm, yeah that's pretty substantiated.