I'm voting Biden out of harm reduction because I don't have the stones to walk away and be complicit in additional short term suffering/scapegoating/cruelty, but Biden just like Trump ultimately serves our owner class, and we need to collapse to have any hope of anything but living in this dystopic oligarchy.

The neoliberals and the fascists alike work to maintain the power of our owner class. We're only permitted a vote on how to address the social issue symptoms of our rigged economic system. I'd rather we not address those symptoms with scapegoating and fear, so Biden it is.

Don't mistake that vote for even beginning to solve anything though. This country is died under Reagan. Something new will eventually have to take its place for any gains to be made at this point, this corpse is too far captured, it has been reformed to maintain class occupation and maximum exploitation under both (D) and (R) representatives, both legally bribed and fully owned when it comes to legislating and protecting the long con that is our market capitalist economic system.

When capitalist induced, reckless growth/metastasis caused climate change is thinning our numbers due to hunger/thirst/deadly weather, maybe then, far too late, we will finally unite against our common enemy in their towers, golf clubs, and guard gated communities.

The progressive policy on immigration has been repeated for about a decade and a half now - path to citizenship for those who've grown up in the US, looser immigration restrictions, higher quotas, more judges to address backlog, etc. There have been a few attempts at implementation but all of them were ultimately shut down by Republican intransigence.

So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:

1. The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
2. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
3. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.

I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just fix the backlog without congress" or just making wild assertions like "oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to" or similar things that aren't how the federal government works?

I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help." But if it's just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he's a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that's all his fault, I'm not into that conversation.

Well, ultimately I want a utopian Star Trek universe with no borders but that's kind of a pipe dream right now, so I'm just throwing my arms into the air in the interim.

Again it's Biden way of trying to gain the Republican vote (which the Democrats know they can't win) rather than try gain progressive vote.

I think he doesn't want to be president and he's throwing the election

Also remember that the GoP, if they get in, will dismantle the system entirely and probably allow public executions of LGBTQ

It's not that people like Joe

It's that they want a democracy to remain

Hell, a lot are probably hoping Joe drops dead of old age shortly into a second term

I feel like he’s making these moves to try to bring in right-wing voters who say they care about immigration, but literally none of them will give a shit and they’ll still accuse him of being soft on immigration. All he’s doing is just pissing off people in his own party for no actual political gain.

It was never about the border.