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US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1324

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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!

NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.

Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.


If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France7890 Posts
April 14 2019 06:55 GMT
#26461
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
April 14 2019 07:09 GMT
#26462
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:31 Introvert wrote:
We can argue about that later (like how that would just incentivize more of this). The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have a problem (a "crisis" we might call it). Slow and steady.

I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?
"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 07:29:52
April 14 2019 07:28 GMT
#26463
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:40 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
I don't acknowledge a crisis. Too few immigration judges and facilities is not an existential threat to the US. How has this crisis impacted your life? Because to me this feels like rather less of a crisis that the great KFC crisis the UK had last year. That certainly impacted the lives of far more people, and in a far more negative way.

Lots of people wanting to seek asylum in the United States isn't a crisis, it's a big country bordering a country with a cartel violence problem, you'd expect a lot of asylum seekers. This is the kind of routine day to day administration shit that we have a government to deal with. If they're fucking up the handling of it that still doesn't mean it's a crisis, it's just piss poor administration.

The opioid crisis is a crisis because it's one of the leading causes of death. People can name their classmates who died as a result of it. It's out of control. It's directly impacting the lives of Americans everywhere. The fact that the government didn't hire enough people to process asylum seekers is right there with KFC not buying enough chickens. They had a system in place and they fucked up the admin. Only the asylum thing isn't as bad.


Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 07:36:47
April 14 2019 07:33 GMT
#26464
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:52 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Expanding the definition of crisis to "[immediate] existential threat" is completely arbitrary. It's a crisis to those whose job it is to deal with it. How about their lives? They aren't " fucking up the handling of it," they are operationally incapable of handling it. You think that's solvable by more judges. If you won't take it from literally everyone involved (including the former head of DHS) then I guess you are hopeless. Just define it away! Meanwhile blame Trump while he's stopped at every turn by judges and the issue is ignored by the political party that controls a chamber of Congress.

Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Show nested quote +
Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

Show nested quote +
The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.

edit: it's not even about free-riding. They could all want to work 12 hours a day and it wouldn't matter in my argument.
"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 07:56:47
April 14 2019 07:42 GMT
#26465
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 11:56 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Well because a bunch of what he tries to do is, actually not doable legallly? Or overall popular with the whole country?


Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 09:01:23
April 14 2019 08:13 GMT
#26466
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:00 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Meh, these judges are creating new law out of thin air, but that's not even the point. To avoid calling the crisis what it is and then blaming Trump is ludicrous. As if Trump can declare "there shall be more immigration judges."


Lots if Democrat are doing what Kwark, Plansix, et al do. Just deny the problem exists, and then blame Trump for the non-existent problem.

Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

Show nested quote +
I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these facilities. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.

"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 09:12:57
April 14 2019 09:01 GMT
#26467
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:05 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
He's not meant to declare that there be more. That's not how government works. He's meant to have a competent guy working below him who has a competent guy working below him who in turn has a team of competent people in strategic planning who liaise with the budget people and the relevant department heads.

Government is complicated, but it's also their job. They're bad at their jobs. They need to be less bad at their jobs.


You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

On April 14 2019 12:05 Wombat_NI wrote:
[quote]
Are we talking about the same crisis? The one that was an issue but Trump made a crisis and now it’s everyone Else’s fault for being critical of his stance?



We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


Show nested quote +
These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
April 14 2019 09:13 GMT
#26468
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

[quote]


We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 12:16 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

You have got to spare me this garbage. With the resources they have they can't do the job that's required. Have not all the articles I've posted over the months displayed this? We have a DHS head from the last administration saying it, the NYT is acknowledging it, a few reporters at the WP have been describing it, and you are blaming administrative malfeasance. That's alternative facts, not what I'm saying.

[quote]


We're talking about the fact that almost 100k people are arriving at the border a month and the vast majority are families making asylum claims. This is not a situation the laws or these agencies were equipped to handle. The Democrat response, in so far as there is one, is to say that's not a crisis, or at least not a "real" crisis. I'm here posting from, not Breitbart, but the NYT, WP, and other places and we are still getting denialism. At the same time I'm told the Democrat party is very serious about immigration. Believable.

Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

Show nested quote +
More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.
"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 09:28:30
April 14 2019 09:24 GMT
#26469
On April 14 2019 18:13 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
[quote]
Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
[quote]
Sooooo the net migration rate in the US is below 3 migrants per thousand people per year, down from around 6 in the early 2000. It’s been going down regularly since.

source

Doesn’t quite sound like an effing invasion if you ask me. The only thing to fix is to give means to the administration to do a faster job when it comes to asylum seekers.

It’s funny, in France, Marine Le Pen also keep parotting that we are getting submerged by evil migrants (probably brown and muslim too) and that the borders are « open » (whatever the fuck that means) while our migration rate is historically low and that it hasn’t been as hard to settle in France since at least 70 years.

But then again, the advantages to have a base that ain’t interested in facts to start with.


The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.


Not "somehow"?

I made a pretty straightforward argument that the US sponsored, CIA orchestrated, coup in the 50's was a beginning of decades of US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, a UN recognized-US sponsored genocide, culminating in rampant poverty for marginalized people in the country of Guatemala. You too postulated this particular surge is a result of impoverished people seeking an opportunity to find refuge in the US.

The NYT article I cited said that 90% of those recently at the border are coming from that Same Guatemala.

You've asked if there was a more recent coup — there was and I mentioned it — dismissed my argument as unconvincing, and dismissed it again as "blaming everything happening in central or south american country , from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States".

Those can barely be considered counterarguments to the points I've raised in support of my arguments.

I've made clear what my argument is, and what I recognize as your counter argument to it. You may have other arguments you wish to address but I'll let our arguments stand on their merit.
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 09:44:16
April 14 2019 09:36 GMT
#26470
On April 14 2019 18:24 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 18:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. Those numbers include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month.


How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:31 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

The nature of the people crossing is entirely different. In the early 2000s it was mostly young single men. The numbers of those caught include many of these people who tried crossing multiple times and were caught. They were captured easily in small groups or alone, and could be deported quickly and easily as well. Today it's mostly family units making asylum claims at some point. They are also often sick and in need of medical attention. For the aforementioned reasons, they also have to be housed for longer. They also rarely get deported, so the percentage of people caught at the border being released internally is much higher. Neither the laws nor the facilities anticipated 100k such individuals arriving in a month. There is no precedent for this.

Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.


Not "somehow"?

I made a pretty straightforward argument that the US sponsored, CIA orchestrated, coup in the 50's was a beginning of decades of US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, a UN recognized-US sponsored genocide, culminating in rampant poverty for marginalized people in the country of Guatemala. You too postulated this particular surge is a result of impoverished people seeking an opportunity to seek refuge in the US.

The NYT article I cited said that 90% of those recently at the border are coming from that Same Guatemala.

You've asked if there was a more recent coup — there was and I mentioned it — dismissed my argument as unconvincing, and dismissed it again as "blaming everything happening in central or south american country , from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States".

Those can barely be considered counterarguments to the points I've raised in support of my arguments.

I've made clear what my argument is, and what I recognize as your counter argument to it. You may have other arguments you wish to address but I'll let our arguments stand on their merit.


Because your argument has a glaring flaw. There is no explanation for why this is occurring now. The article talking about Guatemala was about things that happened in 1999. Even if I assumed everything else you said was true, the causal linkage here is weak. and it's not like the US has been shy on aid to Guatemala.

I don't know how to counter the premise of an argument that is "and time passed." I will let your argument stand as well, I guess.

"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 09:44:38
April 14 2019 09:43 GMT
#26471
On April 14 2019 18:36 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 18:24 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 15:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]

How much of the emigration from south of the border do you attribute to US foreign policy contributing to the destabilization of the countries they are coming from?

That's to say would you think it fair to say there's more the US could do to prevent their desire to flee their home countries in the first place rather than simply detaining them and sending them back (as I presume you would prefer)?


Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
On April 14 2019 15:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:
[quote]
Net migration rate is people entering minus people leaving. If they were deported, that went into the number of people leaving thus lowering the rate.

There is simply in total twice less immigration today than 20 years ago. I know it sucks for your « nation under siege » narrative but that’s an unfortunate fact.


I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.


Not "somehow"?

I made a pretty straightforward argument that the US sponsored, CIA orchestrated, coup in the 50's was a beginning of decades of US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, a UN recognized-US sponsored genocide, culminating in rampant poverty for marginalized people in the country of Guatemala. You too postulated this particular surge is a result of impoverished people seeking an opportunity to seek refuge in the US.

The NYT article I cited said that 90% of those recently at the border are coming from that Same Guatemala.

You've asked if there was a more recent coup — there was and I mentioned it — dismissed my argument as unconvincing, and dismissed it again as "blaming everything happening in central or south american country , from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States".

Those can barely be considered counterarguments to the points I've raised in support of my arguments.

I've made clear what my argument is, and what I recognize as your counter argument to it. You may have other arguments you wish to address but I'll let our arguments stand on their merit.


Because your argument has a glaring flaw. There is no explanation for why this is occurring now. The article talking about Guatemala was about things that happened in 1999. Even if I assumed everything else you said was true, the causal linkage here is weak.

I don't know how to counter the premise of an argument that is "and time passed." I will let your argument stand as well, I guess.


I've conceded it's a confluence of complicated factors as to why so many, in this exact moment. You're argument was, as I suggested, reductive in that it reduced the consequences of decades of unconscionable US foreign policy and those escaping it into people exploiting a legal loophole to get into the country as if they don't have every right to seek refuge here anyway.

I don't mind disagreeing, but I'd at least like to be in agreement on what our positions are. To that point CAFTA was also mentioned in the article I cited which extends well beyond 1999.
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
Introvert
Profile Joined April 2011
United States4770 Posts
April 14 2019 09:49 GMT
#26472
On April 14 2019 18:43 GreenHorizons wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 18:36 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:24 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:09 Introvert wrote:
[quote]

Far less than I assume you would? I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years. Otherwise the crime/poverty rate, as far as I'm aware, is not outside historical norms. It fluctuates a lot. I think when you have bus services that offer different levels of comfort for thousands of dollars, it's clear that being poor is a bigger motivator than fear. That being said Central American governments are pretty terrible. In all the terrible years some of these countries have seen, this have never happened. Moreover, if they were fleeing for their lives they could conceivable stop in Mexico. Pretty clear why they are coming here.
[quote]

I'm really not sure why you are conflating so many things. Does it occur to you that net migration is not the same as what's occurring at the border?


Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

Fifty years ago, on June 27, 1954, the CIA orchestrated its first coup in Latin America. Dubbed "Operation Success," it fulfilled its mandate in overthrowing the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a moderate reformer.

In the midst of an intensifying cold war, the democratically elected Arbenz was perceived to be influenced by communists. As if to prove the point, he began enacting a serious land reform. This act threatened the unused land of United Fruit, a company with strong ties to members of the Eisenhower administration — most prominent among them Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state.

Once Arbenz was ousted, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to the world that Guatemala would serve as a model of U.S.-style democracy and freedom for the rest of Latin America. Instead, the country entered a nightmare that would only deepen in the decades that followed.

What happened in Guatemala was a triumph of ideology over reality. With each succeeding military government more violent than the last, a pledge of anti-communism was all that was needed to ensure continued U.S. support. The military and business élite was given carte blanche to rule in increasingly authoritarian ways. Gross human rights abuses mere minimized or ignored — particularly in the 1980s when repression escalated into wholesale slaughter and torture. President Ronald Reagan dismissed criticism of General Rios Montt, a coup leader and arguably the worst of a bloody lot of military rulers, as "a bum rap."


This part is especially important:

The UN commission documenting the violence in Guatemala concluded in 1999 that a genocide had taken place there. The numbers are difficult to comprehend. The military committed more than 600 massacres, 200,000 Guatemalans — predominantly Mayan peasants — were murdered, 400 Mayan villages destroyed and 1.5 million people displaced. Tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled to Mexico and hundreds of thousands have come to the United States. This is no showcase for freedom and democracy.

In a reversal of what might now be called the Powell doctrine ("if you break it, you own it"), the United States, which was willing to pay for the destruction of Guatemala, now refuses to cover the cost of rebuilding it. Instead, Guatemalans in the United States are bankrolling their country's reconstruction. In 2003 Guatemala received over $2 billion from the United States, but it was not from the U.S. government. The money came from the meager earnings of Guatemalans laboring in the United States.

In a letter to Congress, Alvaro Ramazzini, Bishop of the Guatemalan Diocese of San Marcos and president of the Council of Central American Bishops,wrote that CAFTA as drafted "will create greater inequalities between rich and poor in Central America."

A Guatemalan peasant in a remote village near the Mexican border told me recently, "The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people. And now? It is in Iraq. We know what that is like."


www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.


Not "somehow"?

I made a pretty straightforward argument that the US sponsored, CIA orchestrated, coup in the 50's was a beginning of decades of US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, a UN recognized-US sponsored genocide, culminating in rampant poverty for marginalized people in the country of Guatemala. You too postulated this particular surge is a result of impoverished people seeking an opportunity to seek refuge in the US.

The NYT article I cited said that 90% of those recently at the border are coming from that Same Guatemala.

You've asked if there was a more recent coup — there was and I mentioned it — dismissed my argument as unconvincing, and dismissed it again as "blaming everything happening in central or south american country , from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States".

Those can barely be considered counterarguments to the points I've raised in support of my arguments.

I've made clear what my argument is, and what I recognize as your counter argument to it. You may have other arguments you wish to address but I'll let our arguments stand on their merit.


Because your argument has a glaring flaw. There is no explanation for why this is occurring now. The article talking about Guatemala was about things that happened in 1999. Even if I assumed everything else you said was true, the causal linkage here is weak.

I don't know how to counter the premise of an argument that is "and time passed." I will let your argument stand as well, I guess.


I've conceded it's a confluence of complicated factors as to why so many, in this exact moment. You're argument was, as I suggested, reductive in that it reduced the consequences of decades of unconscionable US foreign policy and those escaping it into people exploiting a legal loophole to get into the country as if they don't have every right to seek refuge here anyway.

I don't mind disagreeing, but I'd at least like to be in agreement on what our positions are. To that point CAFTA was also mentioned in the article I cited which extends well beyond 1999.


I'll leave it there then. I think it was appropriate and sufficient in scope. No way I'm going down the SA/CA rabbit hole, I've seen what that looks like in this thread!
"It is therefore only at the birth of a society that one can be completely logical in the laws. When you see a people enjoying this advantage, do not hasten to conclude that it is wise; think rather that it is young." -Alexis de Tocqueville
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-04-14 11:06:40
April 14 2019 09:57 GMT
#26473
On April 14 2019 18:49 Introvert wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 14 2019 18:43 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:36 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:24 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 18:01 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 17:13 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:33 Introvert wrote:
On April 14 2019 16:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]

Interesting. Allow me to share a different perspective. This is part of a long legacy coming to fruition and the argument "they just want a free ride here" is ahistorical:

The United States is culpable of creating hell in this country and supported the military that burned down our village and massacred our people.

[quote]

This part is especially important:

[quote]

www.nytimes.com


You're going to have to do more to establish a link between then and what's been happening in the last year. I am well aware of your opinion of American involvement down there. Has the US been involved in any large genocides or coups there recently? In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men.


You yourself said that poverty is a main driver. I'm linking poverty in Guatemala to US sponsored genocide and authoritarian rule. I can more extensively show the link between genocide and authoritarianism and generational poverty if that's what you're asking?

While not in Guatemala, the US did recently support a coup from one of the other major drivers of immigrants/asylum seekers, Honduras.

Hillary Clinton used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.

These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.

EDIT: To your edit, let's take your quote so we're clear about we mean:

I think the biggest driver is the knowledge that arriving at the border, preferably with a tot in tow, is a way into the country with no possibility of removal for at least a few years


Well it seems they know pretty well that's not what's happening. That instead they are risking life and limb just to be thrown in cages and tent detainment camps.

Beyond that, I take issue with what appears to be the criticism of people escaping the wreckage of decades of authoritarian coups + a UN declared genocide sponsored and supported by the US and/or the criticism of those that say we owe them that refuge.


These types of things happen for a confluence of reasons that coalesce at unexpected times. While certain surges can be linked to particular headlines or events, the underlying conditions driving the emigration and destination of the US are generational imo.


I just don't find this convincing as an explanation for what is happening now.

As for that last part: it is what's happening. For all the hullabaloo, they spend very little time in these faculties. There are simply are too many and they are released into the country within days. Almost no one is turned around. And recall that, thanks to the current interpretation of the Flores agreement, families can only be held for 20 days max.



As whether they work or not doesn't matter to your argument, whether you find it a convincing explanation for what is happening now or not doesn't much matter to mine. My argument is that you have no moral, ethical, or natural right to even object to their seeking and finding refuge in the US in the first place. Whether this specific influx has satisfactorily been connected to the decades of coups, authoritarian rule, and genocide supported by the US for you is largely irrelevant. In addition you haven't offered any counter to it besides "I'm unconvinced" and "In 2004 the main source of illegal immigration was still single Mexican men"

As for your argument to what happens if they make it here. It's largely unclear what the Trump administration is actually doing at the border as many reports from them have been inaccurate to say the least. Best estimates to provide that many are released, whether that's within the statutory limits is less clear. The treatment of these people is notably deplorable according to many reports. This is for those that make it.

Once in the country, many aren't getting their asylum and being sent back. Before we go further we should make sure we're clear about what's been happening.

People are leaving their homes that have been indisputably devastated by US backed authoritarians and genocide with nothing more than they can carry. They then make a dangerous journey (even if on one of the buses you describe) to the border if they can make it. Upon arrival they meet a horribly inadequate immigration system (for any 21st century nation, let alone the wealthiest on the planet). Many are thrown into deplorable conditions, their "tots in tow" ripped away from them, everyone in tears. Many of those "tots" have been lost by the Trump administration. Hopefully in the guardianship of responsible people still, but lost in the sense they may never be reunited with the people they were ripped from. The people who had risked their own lives to make that journey.

After reportedly unconscionable conditions at a detainment facility they are released in country, provided they don't have any criminal record. Many are still essentially detained in-country, if not literally in various detention centers, by a society that doesn't provide them the basic necessities to survive once they've arrive. This leaves them at the mercy of migrant communities established in the US with their own various documentation statuses and such.

With all that in mind your position, imo, is rather ahistorical and/or callously indifferent to the consequences of known atrocities committed with the support of the US.

For those unfamiliar with the relationship between Guatemala, the original coup (and following US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, and genocide) and the border situation, this sums (combined with my previous posts) it up:

More than 90 percent of the most recent migrants are from Guatemala, according to the newly released data. The majority hail from impoverished regions, including the Western highlands, where conflicts over land rights, environmental changes and depressed prices for crops like maize and coffee are undermining the ability of farmers to make a living.


www.nytimes.com



Somehow you are going to blame the US for a surge that started last year on events from almost two decades ago, or more. Without arguing it, because I know there would be no point, I will say that I don't blame every bad thing happening in a central or south american country, from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States.

The conditions they are experiencing for the short time they are in detention are the result of an operational incapacity to deal with an entirely new situation. To the contrary, the BP and ICE are doing what they can, including providing medical care or taking those with disease or sickness to professionals. They are being housed in makeshift temporary camps because detention was always supposed to be temporary followed by swift deportation, and the scale was supposed to be much smaller. I know you said earlier you basically were for open borders, but I disagree that being poor is a legitimate reason to let anyone in. On that score Bernie Sanders is actually correct.

And also, they are being released into the country. Do I have to go dig up sources, or what? In the articles I've been posting they talk about transporting within the country and what's happening to border towns on the American side. Rest assured, they are coming in, not being forced out.


Not "somehow"?

I made a pretty straightforward argument that the US sponsored, CIA orchestrated, coup in the 50's was a beginning of decades of US sponsored anti-communist authoritarians, a UN recognized-US sponsored genocide, culminating in rampant poverty for marginalized people in the country of Guatemala. You too postulated this particular surge is a result of impoverished people seeking an opportunity to seek refuge in the US.

The NYT article I cited said that 90% of those recently at the border are coming from that Same Guatemala.

You've asked if there was a more recent coup — there was and I mentioned it — dismissed my argument as unconvincing, and dismissed it again as "blaming everything happening in central or south american country , from Guatemala to Venezuela, on the United States".

Those can barely be considered counterarguments to the points I've raised in support of my arguments.

I've made clear what my argument is, and what I recognize as your counter argument to it. You may have other arguments you wish to address but I'll let our arguments stand on their merit.


Because your argument has a glaring flaw. There is no explanation for why this is occurring now. The article talking about Guatemala was about things that happened in 1999. Even if I assumed everything else you said was true, the causal linkage here is weak.

I don't know how to counter the premise of an argument that is "and time passed." I will let your argument stand as well, I guess.


I've conceded it's a confluence of complicated factors as to why so many, in this exact moment. You're argument was, as I suggested, reductive in that it reduced the consequences of decades of unconscionable US foreign policy and those escaping it into people exploiting a legal loophole to get into the country as if they don't have every right to seek refuge here anyway.

I don't mind disagreeing, but I'd at least like to be in agreement on what our positions are. To that point CAFTA was also mentioned in the article I cited which extends well beyond 1999.


I'll leave it there then. I think it was appropriate and sufficient in scope. No way I'm going down the SA/CA rabbit hole, I've seen what that looks like in this thread!


Fair enough, I would say then, your position is necessarily ahistorical.

Edit:
and it's not like the US has been shy on aid to Guatemala.


You added this, and it's a relevant point so I'll address it. Worth noting that's a pittance compared to what the US spent, but you'll also notice the top activity in your link is a counter-narcotic program (drug war) and the top partner is the DoD.

I'll add a selection from a longer explanation regarding the generational devastation that came as a consequence of US foreign policy and imo layed the groundwork for the disrepair in the country prompting people to leave their homes in the first place (whenever sufficiently triggered by the confluence of factors I mentioned earlier).

+ Show Spoiler +
Economically speaking, Guatemala was almost entirely agricultural in 1944. The American United Fruit Company owned 550,000 acres of land, much of which was uncultivated. Guatemala’s main exports were bananas and coffee, but since the land that produced these was largely held by Americans, the Guatemalan economy received little benefit from production, aside from meagre wages for workers and the profits siphoned off by graft to the ruling classes. United Fruit and its sister company, International Railways of Central America, effectively held monopolies on two of Guatemala’s most important economic assets (fruit and cross-border transport,) and the profit from these monopolies rarely passed through Guatemalan hands. Furthermore, due to their immense influence, they were able to secure concessions meaning they paid low taxes and were free from regulation.

Land reform was the only way for the majority of the population to break out of what effectively amounted to serfdom, and land reform is exactly what the democratic governments of 1944-54 did.

. Arevalo, who came to power in 1944, supported land reform which would redistribute uncultivated land – much owned by United Fruit – to give to the largely landless general population. Land redistribution was not necessarily a ‘Marxist’ idea – the belief in redistribution was not set in the context of eventual communist utopia, it was simply seen as the only way to overcome the neo-feudal situation of land ownership Guatemala was suffering at the time.


But then...

In 1951, at the next election, Jacobo Arbenz was elected president, and oversaw a shift to the left. Arbenz went ahead with the land reforms that Arevalo was too moderate to legislate for. Decree 900, issued on June 27 1952, redistributed land to 500,000 landless peasants. If left alone, there is a good chance it would have succeeded in bringing Guatemala out of its state of neo-feudalism. But by 1952, the cold war was underway, the CIA had been established (and was in the process of planning its first regime change, in Iran,) and the US government had already experienced five years of lobbying from United Fruit, in reaction to the 1947 Labour Law.


thepanoptic.co.uk

And I already covered the CIA's coup and succesive US sponsoring of anti-communist authoritarians, military dictators, etc...

Your free to dismiss the preceding conditions as insufficiently connected to the current situation but that does seem to be the crux of our disagreement and your position seems to be predicated on the period from ~1999-just before this reached "crisis" levels in your view somehow negating that underlying premise with the recent addition of some "aid" to Guatemala. Which I may add has a bit of a dismissive tone coming from the country sponsoring their genocide.
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
ChristianS
Profile Blog Joined March 2011
United States3188 Posts
April 14 2019 16:20 GMT
#26474
You know, without even getting into GH’s claim that the conditions that cause so many people to seek asylum are our fault (I confess, I just don’t know enough central/South American history to comment), I’m sometimes a little amazed the religious right isn’t more motivated by a Good Samaritan-type moral imperative on immigration. I mean if the nature of the problem is “there are so many people in desperate suffering, not that far from our border, that we can’t muster the resources to process them all” then how does a (at least nominally) morally-rooted ideology not conclude “we have to help all these suffering people!” ?

Before people start dunking on the religious right, I’ll say that the religious right has sometimes demonstrated more moral concern for people more like them (iirc, wasn’t there some big political movement in the last couple years to help some Christian pastor get out of Iran’s prisons, even though Iran has had all kinds of political prisoners for years?). But I don’t see how that applies here? I mean, a good percentage of these immigrants are Christian (or at least Catholic, I know some Protestants insist Catholics aren’t Christians but still).

And it’s not like the religious right is incapable of caring about brown people. Seems like every time I talk to an evangelical they’re talking about some youth group trip to some poor Asian country to build a water filtration system and hand out bibles or something. Less anecdotally, one of the religious right’s big FP motivations is protecting Christian religious minorities that are being persecuted abroad, including in countries where those minorities would mostly be nonwhite.

So if morality is (at least rhetorically, if not actually) so central to the religious right’s ideology, how does the (im)morality of “let’s build a big wall to keep out all the suffering people so we won’t have to see/interact with them” not come up more?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." -Robert J. Hanlon
Plansix
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States60190 Posts
April 14 2019 16:42 GMT
#26475
It is also important to remember that the current administration cut aid to a bunch of counties in SA. Aid they were using to deal with the influx of refugees and migrants. He cut it because they were not doing enough to stop migrants, which caused them to do even less to “stop” aka house and care for migrants.
I have the Honor to be your Obedient Servant, P.6
TL+ Member
Danglars
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
United States12133 Posts
April 14 2019 17:20 GMT
#26476
On April 15 2019 01:20 ChristianS wrote:
You know, without even getting into GH’s claim that the conditions that cause so many people to seek asylum are our fault (I confess, I just don’t know enough central/South American history to comment), I’m sometimes a little amazed the religious right isn’t more motivated by a Good Samaritan-type moral imperative on immigration. I mean if the nature of the problem is “there are so many people in desperate suffering, not that far from our border, that we can’t muster the resources to process them all” then how does a (at least nominally) morally-rooted ideology not conclude “we have to help all these suffering people!” ?

Before people start dunking on the religious right, I’ll say that the religious right has sometimes demonstrated more moral concern for people more like them (iirc, wasn’t there some big political movement in the last couple years to help some Christian pastor get out of Iran’s prisons, even though Iran has had all kinds of political prisoners for years?). But I don’t see how that applies here? I mean, a good percentage of these immigrants are Christian (or at least Catholic, I know some Protestants insist Catholics aren’t Christians but still).

And it’s not like the religious right is incapable of caring about brown people. Seems like every time I talk to an evangelical they’re talking about some youth group trip to some poor Asian country to build a water filtration system and hand out bibles or something. Less anecdotally, one of the religious right’s big FP motivations is protecting Christian religious minorities that are being persecuted abroad, including in countries where those minorities would mostly be nonwhite.

So if morality is (at least rhetorically, if not actually) so central to the religious right’s ideology, how does the (im)morality of “let’s build a big wall to keep out all the suffering people so we won’t have to see/interact with them” not come up more?

Christians do give much aid to organizations that feed the needy in their own countries and medical missions and much more than other demographics within the US.

The problem is extending the parable of the Good Samaritan to governmental structures. Jesus didn’t command his disciples to lobby the Roman government for more state aid programs in Judea. The Good Samaritan didn’t sponsor legislation in his local council for more inns and aid workers.

The problem is applying spiritual law to systematic problems. The message wasn’t to import the world to rich “holy lands” for salvation. That’s almost an earth-born salvation theology. I know friends that literally moved to central and South America to apply the Good Samaritan lessons, and people support them as well as others. So while I do know there’s a contradiction if members of the religious right don’t personally give their time and money, I know this isn’t about loving humanity into a rich Ark: Part 2. Most of the theological criticism only takes biblical lessons that favor their argument, and not others.
Great armies come from happy zealots, and happy zealots come from California!
TL+ Member
ShambhalaWar
Profile Joined August 2013
United States930 Posts
April 14 2019 17:51 GMT
#26477
On April 15 2019 02:20 Danglars wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 15 2019 01:20 ChristianS wrote:
You know, without even getting into GH’s claim that the conditions that cause so many people to seek asylum are our fault (I confess, I just don’t know enough central/South American history to comment), I’m sometimes a little amazed the religious right isn’t more motivated by a Good Samaritan-type moral imperative on immigration. I mean if the nature of the problem is “there are so many people in desperate suffering, not that far from our border, that we can’t muster the resources to process them all” then how does a (at least nominally) morally-rooted ideology not conclude “we have to help all these suffering people!” ?

Before people start dunking on the religious right, I’ll say that the religious right has sometimes demonstrated more moral concern for people more like them (iirc, wasn’t there some big political movement in the last couple years to help some Christian pastor get out of Iran’s prisons, even though Iran has had all kinds of political prisoners for years?). But I don’t see how that applies here? I mean, a good percentage of these immigrants are Christian (or at least Catholic, I know some Protestants insist Catholics aren’t Christians but still).

And it’s not like the religious right is incapable of caring about brown people. Seems like every time I talk to an evangelical they’re talking about some youth group trip to some poor Asian country to build a water filtration system and hand out bibles or something. Less anecdotally, one of the religious right’s big FP motivations is protecting Christian religious minorities that are being persecuted abroad, including in countries where those minorities would mostly be nonwhite.

So if morality is (at least rhetorically, if not actually) so central to the religious right’s ideology, how does the (im)morality of “let’s build a big wall to keep out all the suffering people so we won’t have to see/interact with them” not come up more?

Jesus didn’t command his disciples to lobby the Roman government for more state aid programs in Judea. The Good Samaritan didn’t sponsor legislation in his local council for more inns and aid workers.


He didn't have to have his disciples lobby other people, he himself lobbied everyone to do that very thing for all people.
Danglars
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
United States12133 Posts
April 14 2019 18:30 GMT
#26478
On April 15 2019 02:51 ShambhalaWar wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 15 2019 02:20 Danglars wrote:
On April 15 2019 01:20 ChristianS wrote:
You know, without even getting into GH’s claim that the conditions that cause so many people to seek asylum are our fault (I confess, I just don’t know enough central/South American history to comment), I’m sometimes a little amazed the religious right isn’t more motivated by a Good Samaritan-type moral imperative on immigration. I mean if the nature of the problem is “there are so many people in desperate suffering, not that far from our border, that we can’t muster the resources to process them all” then how does a (at least nominally) morally-rooted ideology not conclude “we have to help all these suffering people!” ?

Before people start dunking on the religious right, I’ll say that the religious right has sometimes demonstrated more moral concern for people more like them (iirc, wasn’t there some big political movement in the last couple years to help some Christian pastor get out of Iran’s prisons, even though Iran has had all kinds of political prisoners for years?). But I don’t see how that applies here? I mean, a good percentage of these immigrants are Christian (or at least Catholic, I know some Protestants insist Catholics aren’t Christians but still).

And it’s not like the religious right is incapable of caring about brown people. Seems like every time I talk to an evangelical they’re talking about some youth group trip to some poor Asian country to build a water filtration system and hand out bibles or something. Less anecdotally, one of the religious right’s big FP motivations is protecting Christian religious minorities that are being persecuted abroad, including in countries where those minorities would mostly be nonwhite.

So if morality is (at least rhetorically, if not actually) so central to the religious right’s ideology, how does the (im)morality of “let’s build a big wall to keep out all the suffering people so we won’t have to see/interact with them” not come up more?

Jesus didn’t command his disciples to lobby the Roman government for more state aid programs in Judea. The Good Samaritan didn’t sponsor legislation in his local council for more inns and aid workers.


He didn't have to have his disciples lobby other people, he himself lobbied everyone to do that very thing for all people.

Oh yeah. All we need now is a state immigration policy segue.
Great armies come from happy zealots, and happy zealots come from California!
TL+ Member
Yurie
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
11847 Posts
April 14 2019 18:39 GMT
#26479
Think this short infographic for how people connect in congress shows the trend of partisanship pretty well. Doesn't help that it is there but gets more and more clear as time passes. Probably the biggest problem in the US political system is the two parties now having a gulf even if they think the same thing on most issues.

https://giant.gfycat.com/WellmadeShadowyBergerpicard.webm
GreenHorizons
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States23244 Posts
April 14 2019 20:01 GMT
#26480
On April 15 2019 02:20 Danglars wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 15 2019 01:20 ChristianS wrote:
You know, without even getting into GH’s claim that the conditions that cause so many people to seek asylum are our fault (I confess, I just don’t know enough central/South American history to comment), I’m sometimes a little amazed the religious right isn’t more motivated by a Good Samaritan-type moral imperative on immigration. I mean if the nature of the problem is “there are so many people in desperate suffering, not that far from our border, that we can’t muster the resources to process them all” then how does a (at least nominally) morally-rooted ideology not conclude “we have to help all these suffering people!” ?

Before people start dunking on the religious right, I’ll say that the religious right has sometimes demonstrated more moral concern for people more like them (iirc, wasn’t there some big political movement in the last couple years to help some Christian pastor get out of Iran’s prisons, even though Iran has had all kinds of political prisoners for years?). But I don’t see how that applies here? I mean, a good percentage of these immigrants are Christian (or at least Catholic, I know some Protestants insist Catholics aren’t Christians but still).

And it’s not like the religious right is incapable of caring about brown people. Seems like every time I talk to an evangelical they’re talking about some youth group trip to some poor Asian country to build a water filtration system and hand out bibles or something. Less anecdotally, one of the religious right’s big FP motivations is protecting Christian religious minorities that are being persecuted abroad, including in countries where those minorities would mostly be nonwhite.

So if morality is (at least rhetorically, if not actually) so central to the religious right’s ideology, how does the (im)morality of “let’s build a big wall to keep out all the suffering people so we won’t have to see/interact with them” not come up more?

Christians do give much aid to organizations that feed the needy in their own countries and medical missions and much more than other demographics within the US.

The problem is extending the parable of the Good Samaritan to governmental structures. Jesus didn’t command his disciples to lobby the Roman government for more state aid programs in Judea. The Good Samaritan didn’t sponsor legislation in his local council for more inns and aid workers.

The problem is applying spiritual law to systematic problems. The message wasn’t to import the world to rich “holy lands” for salvation. That’s almost an earth-born salvation theology. I know friends that literally moved to central and South America to apply the Good Samaritan lessons, and people support them as well as others. So while I do know there’s a contradiction if members of the religious right don’t personally give their time and money, I know this isn’t about loving humanity into a rich Ark: Part 2. Most of the theological criticism only takes biblical lessons that favor their argument, and not others.


How do you reconcile the first bold part with Christian politics toward gay marriage?

The second seems to be equally a problem among the faithful.
"People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."
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