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On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.Show nested quote +After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter.
Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants.
Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans!
…except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible.
The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.)
So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away.
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Northern Ireland23825 Posts
On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away.
Be quite interested in listening to that episode if you could be arsed digging it out.
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On September 20 2022 03:14 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Be quite interested in listening to that episode if you could be arsed digging it out.
I think it’s this one:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/688/transcript
They’ve done a few other episodes on MPP, immigration and refugee camps, if you’re still interested after that one.
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On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away.
Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped.
But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed.
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/RVNZ4sf.png)
The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people.
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Deceitful info peddled to people to traffic them.
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On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people.
To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb?
That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them?
I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?"
The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away.
How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"?
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On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away.
The thing is, the US government is not a charity for foreigners. The fact that it could provide for a million Venezuelans doesn't mean it should do that, instead of say provide for a million poor US citizens.
As a government of the US it should be able to convince the citizens how that policy benefits their country.
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On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"?
What they want is clear.
They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals.
You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear.
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United States41984 Posts
On September 20 2022 14:17 gobbledydook wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"? What they want is clear. They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals. You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear.
It’s not once you realize that economic migrants aren’t crossing the border posing as refugees. This is like the weird bathroom hysteria conservatives have. They imagine a problem and then get upset about how their fantasy makes them feel.
What they want isn’t actually what they say they want because what they say they want makes no sense. What they actually want us to feel safe. What they need is someone to turn off Fox News.
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On September 20 2022 14:17 gobbledydook wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/Fifteen migrants who spoke to TIME in Del Rio and Washington said they were thrilled for the option of free transportation, and were surprised to learn that Abbott’s intentions were less about accommodating them than inconveniencing his political opponents. “It’s great that he helped us,” says Oliver, a 26-year-old migrant, in an interview conducted at his arrival in Washington on July 26. https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.htmlMany, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
"They want to go on the buses," said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. "No one has been forced." The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"? What they want is clear. They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals. You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear.
Luckily then that migrants don't take away jobs from natives. Natives have different skill sets and don't compete for the same jobs. That migration is bad for natives is one of the biggest economic myths there is.
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On September 20 2022 17:46 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 14:17 gobbledydook wrote:On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/[quote] https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.html[quote] The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"? What they want is clear. They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals. You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear. Luckily then that migrants don't take away jobs from natives. Natives have different skill sets and don't compete for the same jobs. That migration is bad for natives is one of the biggest economic myths there is.
You're absolutely correct, but this is a rational argument that, in practice, barely ever registers with ordinary people.
Humans are hardwired to form cliques and reject outsiders; this is a deep and raw emotional need that has existed for as long as civilization has. In ancient history, this was manifested in the massacre of enemy civilians after a victorious conquest. We're lucky today that we don't consider that normal any more.
Another key issue is that the benefits of having immigrants don't generally directly impact the average Joe. He's not the one hiring help for housekeeping his mansion, our berry pickers at his commercial farm. He gets the benefit of cheaper produce at the market, but it isn't immediately obvious that he benefited from letting those migrants I'm. Whereas when the Mexican drug dealers set up shop at the street corner it directly affects him.
So you see how it can feel so negative for the average citizen, who doesn't really have the interest or the capacity to reason about this deeply.
The final problem of course, is that just because you should let migrants in doesn't mean you should let them in without regard for the law. It is supposedly the case that many of those who ultimately become undocumented migrants simply skip their immigration court date and disappear. It's hard to be arguing for non enforcement of laws - if they do not suit the current situation they should be repealed and replaced with something that does.
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That implies a functional government with an interest in solving problems, though.
I don't think anyone here is argueing for illegal migration. But lawfulness works both ways. If you have a right to a hearing, but have to wait 3 years for said hearing, then i would argue that the lawless one in that situation is the state which factually denies you a thing that you legally have a right to.
Having a system capable of quickly and lawfully handling migrants, asylum seeker, and anyone else crossing the border is something that most people here seem to be in favor of. Sadly, the republicans don't want that. They want to make anyone crossing the border suffer as much as possible to deter other people from doing that, no matter if those people are legal or not.
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Norway28558 Posts
On September 20 2022 17:46 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 14:17 gobbledydook wrote:On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 05:26 BlackJack wrote:You can speculate all you want but if you actually want to provide some evidence that people are being coerced or forced onto buses then I'm all ears. So far every news source says the migrants have been grateful and happy for the free rides. https://time.com/6211993/greg-abbott-migrants-buses-texas-dc-new-york/[quote] https://us.cnn.com/2022/08/19/us/texas-migrants-bus-washington-dc-new-york/index.html[quote] The migrants themselves don't seem to be complaining. As is typical these days, it's others getting offended on their behalf over the horrors of having to endure such an arduous journey as a free air-conditioned bus ride which I'm sure makes the trek through Central America to get here in the first place seem like a cake walk. Nobody should be surprised here. Of course these mayors and governors can't just come out and say "stop sending migrants here, we don't want them and we don't have room for them." That's completely against their brand. So they have to try to channel their whining through invented narratives that migrants are being kidnapped/trafficked without any evidence. Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that: If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it. But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either. By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"? What they want is clear. They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals. You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear. Luckily then that migrants don't take away jobs from natives. Natives have different skill sets and don't compete for the same jobs. That migration is bad for natives is one of the biggest economic myths there is.
Eh, I generally agree, but there's an argument to be made that natives who never acquired the skill sets that are more demanding language wise end up being hurt by migrants because migrants from countries with lower cost of living make it possible to pay much less for workers working those jobs.
For example, Norwegian carpenters are a dying breed because Polish and Lithuanian carpenters do the same job (or better) for less money, and while the money they make working half the year in Norway is plenty sufficient to live a very comfortable life in Lithuania or Poland, the money a Norwegian carpenter would make working a whole year in Norway for the same hourly salary is not necessarily enough for a comfortable life in Norway. A lot of seasonal manual farm labor is the same - it's a great summer job for a Lithuanian worker who then gets to spend the money in Lithuania, but for Norwegian youth, they feel it's not worth the effort. Of course, this does manifest through a) carpenter jobs and b) produce being less expensive for Norwegian consumers, but I'm confident there's a small subset of Norwegians who have overall been hurt economically by migrants, because their skill set now pays less than it used to and for them less expensive goods or services offered by migrants isn't enough to offset this.
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This is actually one of the key points why the swiss left is against the EU. Cheap labour from the neighbouring countries is actually hurting local blue collar jobs.
But thats not at all what the right wing is arguing or at least the right wing isn't proposing any actual solution to the problem besides "Migrants bad, EU bad".
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@veir,Switzerland is right in the middle of the EU, do you guys have much immigration? and how do you deal with it?
@Simberto Speaking my language.
"That implies a functional government with an interest in solving problems, though.
The democrats have the house, the senate and the presidency right now, let us all hope they do anything.
No the state is not denying you the hearing, they are waiting for the federal hearing date. It's obviously insanely backed up. The states cannot send people back, or deny them. It's the fed's that have that power.
"The final problem of course, is that just because you should let migrants in doesn't mean you should let them in without regard for the law. It is supposedly the case that many of those who ultimately become undocumented migrants simply skip their immigration court date and disappear. It's hard to be arguing for non enforcement of laws - if they do not suit the current situation they should be repealed and replaced with something that does."
well said, sadly they do become undocumented. Uncounted. They need to be housed. Sanctuary cities seem like a reasonable choice for them. But as discussed before, the better option is more judges+ to get their cases heard.
@Kwark Sorry i didn't keep up but the thread moved on. Appreciate the stats/comments on the numbers there. Didn't know the line was that long, Jesus.
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On September 20 2022 18:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 17:46 RvB wrote:On September 20 2022 14:17 gobbledydook wrote:On September 20 2022 10:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 20 2022 06:01 BlackJack wrote:On September 20 2022 02:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 18:37 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 08:39 ChristianS wrote:On September 19 2022 07:45 BlackJack wrote:On September 19 2022 06:52 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
Seems like we’ve switched from the Desantis stunt to Abbott’s bus thing. So on that:
If LA started a program where they’d give homeless people free bus tickets to San Diego, San Diego would be understandably peeved. The entire premise of the program is that programs to take care of homeless people are expensive, but if you pay a little for bus tickets you can shift that off your own ledger onto someone else’s. It’s a negative sum policy, obviously not universalizable, and I see no reason to praise the politician who came up with it. Nor would it expose some hypocrisy if San Diego’s mayor has made a bunch of public statements about how we should be compassionate and take good care of the homeless. But the homeless people who got the free ticket to San Diego might be happy enough about it.
But also, they’re not just drains on public monies, they’re human beings with lives. How many people are there really that are going to happily climb on a bus to a completely new city with nothing but what they can carry on, and the only thing that was stopping them before was the price of the bus ticket? Without any form of coercion how many takers is LA actually gonna get? Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have any attachments. If they’re not giving you *any* way to survive on the other side of that trip, what’s in it for you? You’re still homeless, but now you don’t know anybody, you don’t know your way around, you don’t know where you can and can’t go without getting harassed by cops. The people who *do* take the free ticket might know somebody in San Diego, or be really eager to leave LA for some reason, but selfishness aside this policy probably won’t really solve LA’s homeless problem, either.
By analogy the Desantis thing is closer to if I kidnapped a homeless person and dumped them on Leonardo DiCaprio’s front lawn with a bunch of cameras watching the whole thing. Leo certainly might feel obligated to take good care of the homeless person dumped on his lawn. Maybe this will wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him. This plan still makes me look like a piece of shit, especially if my whole purpose is to please my fans with antipathy for both homeless people and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah maybe not many would want to get on the bus voluntary. Which is exactly how many have gotten on the bus. 2 million border encounters in the last year, how many as a percent have taken up the offer of free bus rides? maybe 1%? Less than that? I'm not sure why we need the homeless analogy. Is it negative-sum when you zoom out? Yes. But why should LA care about that? If they are successful at shifting them on to San Diego's ledger then good for them. If San Diego's mayor wants to pretend there isn't a homelessness problem in SoCal and dismiss the LA Mayor's concerns as uncompassionate whining then it absolutely makes them a hypocrite if they start whining when the homeless people show up in their town. We disagree on that one. Will it solve the larger problem? Probably not, but at least we see some action of Biden's officials meeting to address the issue and leaders declaring federal emergencies. Which seems to be more than what was happening when the immigration crisis was only affecting the red states. I don’t think finding negative sum ways to shift your problems onto others is praiseworthy. Even less so if you’re barely even addressing your own problem and mostly just making a publicity stunt out of it. And without knowing what specifically the smug liberals said it’s hard to know what you’re saying they’re hypocrites about. In the Martha’s Vineyard case the MV residents might have said a week ago “you should take care of the needy in your community.” Then the governor of Florida went and found a bunch of needy in Texas and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, and their response was to… take care of them? While saying Florida and Texas are being assholes? I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. I don’t think you have to look that hard for evidence rich liberals talking about compassion don’t put their money where their mouth is, but for the present discussion maybe it would be more valuable to ask why exactly you’ve got an ax to grind on immigration. What problems is it causing, exactly? Are immigrants using public resources without paying taxes because they’re undocumented? Are they “taking our jobs”? We’re getting these vague references to “overwhelmed border communities” but overwhelmed by… what? Trump would probably say “crime” or “drugs” but those claims are frequently poorly substantiated. Not to say those communities don’t have crime or drug problems, but when the proposition is “let’s have Border Patrol brutalize asylum seekers more and maybe my kids won’t have drug problems” it’s both shameless and unlikely to achieve the desired effect. But maybe there are a bunch of asylum seekers who have good cases, but they wind up languishing in border towns for years before getting approved. And maybe it would be better if we dedicated some resources to processing their cases, approving them, and setting them up with assistance in different towns across the country instead of languishing in border towns waiting for their cases to be heard. Something tells me that’s not the outcome you’re hoping for, but if not then what? They are overwhelmed with people. Washington DC declared a state of emergency over the migrants that were bussed in to them. The Governor of Massachusetts called in the National Guard to help with the 50 migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard. Meanwhile in El Paso 1,166 migrants were released onto the streets by the U.S. border control in the last 8 days.After spending several days on the streets of Downtown El Paso, some migrants are finding it difficult to take care of basic human necessities like using the bathroom and taking showers.
With local shelters at capacity, many migrants are now forced to live on the street enduring heavy rains, high temperatures and little access to public restrooms.
Some El Paso residents tell ABC-7 the smell of human waste is overwhelming in the area. https://kvia.com/top-stories/2022/09/13/migrants-released-on-the-streets-of-downtown-el-paso-struggle-to-find-bathrooms-and-showers/If only people cared about the hundreds of migrants that are sleeping and shitting on the streets as much as they care about the 50 sent to Martha's vineyard that are receiving warm meals, hot showers and shelter. Readers that didn’t click through your first link might not realize that “1,166 migrants in 8 days” number is a recent and unusual event, not the normal rate at which Border Patrol puts migrants in El Paso. For reference, the last time they just left a bunch of migrants in El Paso was apparently Christmas Day, 2018. This is happening, incidentally, because the recent influx of migrants are refugees from Venezuela, who are in more dire straits than most immigrants. Okay, sounds like we should mobilize some resources to take care of these people! Food, shelter! Set up tents, if need be, until we can find them something more permanent! Humanitarian crises are no time to be stingy, and the Venezuelans seem to be real, genuine refugees in desperate condition, so Introvert assures me conservative support for helping them will be broad. Kwark says border states already get a lot of federal money to deal with situations like these, but if you’re saying that money isn’t enough and we need even more funding to tend to the present crisis, you’ll get no pushback from me! Mobilize emergency funds, Congress should allocate more if we need it. The richest country in the world surely has the resources to provide for 1000 or 10,000 or even 1,000,000 Venezuelans! …except we all know that’s not how this works, is it? All the right-wing policy solutions seem to involve blocking, abusing, and deporting migrants as much as possible. They’re legally entitled to apply for asylum, yet Trump’s signature policy was to deport them before their case even had a chance to be heard, slow-walk their applications as much as possible, and find any legal loophole he could to delay or deny as many as possible. The result? Refugee camps on our southern border that, iirc, human rights groups said had the worst conditions of any refugee camps in the world. I’m sorry to hear migrants have had trouble finding adequate bathroom facilities in El Paso, but not as sorry as I was to hear about dysentery and tapeworm epidemics in refugee camps because thousands of migrants had no option but to go into the woods nearby. Volunteer doctors tried to treat the tapeworms, but there was little point because people would just get a new one as soon as you got rid of the old one. That’s not even to get into the kidnapping industry preying on migrants, often just as they got out of the van after being deported. (There was a This American Life episode on these camps a few years ago; I can try to chase it down if you’re curious.) So if you’re here telling me there’s a humanitarian crisis, and we should marshall resources to help these people, fine! So far all the right’s arguments have been “there’s too many immigrants, and we need to make them go away somehow,” which (running theme here!) is both completely craven and hasn’t even successfully pushed the problem away. Right, there are a ton more migrants coming across the border than a few years ago. I'm pushing back against multiple narratives presented in this thread. Acrofales suggestion that border towns should be able to absorb a seemingly infinite number of migrants because they have the "infrastructure" to do that, but one of the wealthiest places in the country can't absorb 50. If they fail the only reason must be they lack a sufficient level of compassion or they've squandered all their money on renting buses. Again - this is a deep blue city run by Democrats which we want to conveniently ignore. The other narrative that migrants that cross the border just have such a strong attachment to the first border town that they land in that the only way they would get on a bus to leave it is if they are misled or kidnapped. But more importantly your mere questioning of "What are these border towns overwhelmed by?" seems to indicate that the awareness raised by this political stunt was sorely needed. The graph for border apprehension and encounters is basically a vertical line. If this were a graph for anything else, say COVID or gun violence, people in this thread would be losing their shit. There would be no pretending that border states are equipped to handle this and their only failing is their lack of compassion and their desire to harm people. To be clear, you're looking at the example of Martha's Vineyard, a tiny obscure island community with absolutely no reason to expect refugees or have infrastructure to process them. Then you're saying they weren't able to absorb 50 refugees, even though as far as I understand they did take care of those 50 refugees, which would seem to imply they can. Then you're trying to extrapolate from that example how many refugees a typical border town ought to be able to absorb? That reasoning is so lazy I'm honestly not sure how seriously I should be taking it. Same for the lazy "raising awareness" excuse for making a photo op out of abusing migrants. Same for your hockey stick chart. You're mocking me asking "what are they overwhelmed by specifically" but you didn't even answer it! I read the articles you linked and can infer you meant something like "humanitarian aid facilities" or "beds in shelters" or "bathrooms in downtown El Paso" but the only actual answer you gave is "people" which is the exact opposite of specific. Maybe I'll try again: what resources specifically would they need to handle the crisis? What problems specifically are being caused by too many people, and how can we address them? I'm all in favor of raising awareness of the refugees' plight and finding more resources, public or private, to help them find new lives. I think we're going to see plenty of refugee crises over the course of this century, and we'd be well-served to develop better systems for caring for them as soon as possible. But something tells me it's not the refugees' plight you'd like to raise awareness of (If I'm wrong about that, by all means, correct me!). I'm guessing your concern is more "what about the poor citizens of El Paso that don't want to have to deal with all these migrants?" The usual right-wing answers to that "problem" are to try to prevent them from entering in whatever way possible (Build a wall? Hire more border patrol? Maybe just brutalize them so they won't want to come in the first place?) and then deport as many of the rest as you can. There will still be Venezuelan refugees, of course (unless they're killed wherever you send them), but then you won't have to deal with them. Honestly, I think 90% of right-wing politics these days can boil down to some version of "maybe we can make our problem go away by giving a worse problem to someone else." And generally, the result (not trying to sound like a broken record!): you fuck things up for somebody else, and it doesn't even work to make your own problem go away. How about this: forget about Desantis and Abbott's stunts. You like that they got us talking about immigration; now we're talking about immigration. Congratulations! Now that we're here: what exactly do you want to see happen? What change are you wanting enacted as a result of all this "awareness raising"? What they want is clear. They just don't want so many migrants coming through the border. They don't want economic migrants posing as refugees, entering the US and taking jobs away from the locals. You might disagree with what they want but what they want is quite clear. Luckily then that migrants don't take away jobs from natives. Natives have different skill sets and don't compete for the same jobs. That migration is bad for natives is one of the biggest economic myths there is. Eh, I generally agree, but there's an argument to be made that natives who never acquired the skill sets that are more demanding language wise end up being hurt by migrants because migrants from countries with lower cost of living make it possible to pay much less for workers working those jobs. For example, Norwegian carpenters are a dying breed because Polish and Lithuanian carpenters do the same job (or better) for less money, and while the money they make working half the year in Norway is plenty sufficient to live a very comfortable life in Lithuania or Poland, the money a Norwegian carpenter would make working a whole year in Norway for the same hourly salary is not necessarily enough for a comfortable life in Norway. A lot of seasonal manual farm labor is the same - it's a great summer job for a Lithuanian worker who then gets to spend the money in Lithuania, but for Norwegian youth, they feel it's not worth the effort. Of course, this does manifest through a) carpenter jobs and b) produce being less expensive for Norwegian consumers, but I'm confident there's a small subset of Norwegians who have overall been hurt economically by migrants, because their skill set now pays less than it used to and for them less expensive goods or services offered by migrants isn't enough to offset this.
Maybe Norwegians shouldn’t be carpenters then (at least while this dynamic exists)? This is classic comparative advantage. I get that the carpenters themselves would be unhappy with the situation, but it’s better for literally everyone else involved (Polish/Lithuanians, Norwegian society, Polish/Lithuanian society) so it should be on them to either educate themselves in a more needed/lucrative profession (which Norway should have an advantage in assisting/supporting them in compared to Poland or Lithuania), or move to areas of Norway with less migrant competition.
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On September 20 2022 20:54 Taelshin wrote:
@veir,Switzerland is right in the middle of the EU, do you guys have much immigration? and how do you deal with it?
How Switzerland deals with immigration would be a bit of a big topic, but some stats:
Total people living in switzerland (not citizens): ~8'800'000 (100%)
Foreigners living in Switzerland: ~2'200'000 (25%)
+~370'000 foreigners travelling from neighbouring countries to work in switzerland daily.
Refugees (processed and officially recognized as refugees): ~75'000
"Illegal" immigrants (mainly declined refugees/immigrants, we call them "sans papiers"): ~90'000
But its to be noted that its notoriously hard to become a swiss citizen due to some strange rules, a decent amount of these 2'200'000 "foreigners" are swiss in all but passport (or  .
@Ryzel: Why is it good for a country that people that live there can't work their, still in demand, jobs just because they don't require some higher level (local) language skill? We are not talking jobs that need no education, we are talking carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians and so on.
Mainly, how the fuck is it good for a society if more "working poors" are created due to foreigners dumping prices until the local businesses are no longer viable?
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United States41984 Posts
On September 20 2022 21:38 Velr wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 20:54 Taelshin wrote:
@veir,Switzerland is right in the middle of the EU, do you guys have much immigration? and how do you deal with it?
How Switzerland deals with immigration would be a bit of a big topic, but some stats: Total people living in switzerland (not citizens): ~8'800'000 (100%) Foreigners living in Switzerland: ~2'200'000 (25%) +~370'000 foreigners travelling from neighbouring countries to work in switzerland daily. Refugees (processed and officially recognized as refugees): ~75'000 "Illegal" immigrants (mainly declined refugees/immigrants, we call them "sans papiers"): ~90'000 But its to be noted that its notoriously hard to become a swiss citizen due to some strange rules, a decent amount of these 2'200'000 "foreigners" are swiss in all but passport (or . @Ryzel: Why is it good for a country that people that live there can't work their, still in demand, jobs just because they don't require some higher level (local) language skill? We are not talking jobs that need no education, we are talking carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians and so on. Mainly, how the fuck is it good for a society if more "working poors" are created due to foreigners dumping prices until the local businesses are no longer viable?
Ryzel is saying that trade makes everyone richer. Essentially a citizen workforce functions like a guild that limits the supply of labour to guild members. It’s anticompetitive. Some people want to buy labour. Some people want to sell labour. Both are relatively elastic, as the price of labour goes down the demand for it goes up (people who would not buy at one price point may buy at another lower one). As the price of labour goes up the supply of it goes up (more people become carpenters if they make bank). Artificially creating scarcity by limiting labour supply to a small group of providers helps the guild members but not society as a whole.
Obviously that’s the frictionless vacuum approach to trade and it’s way more complicated in reality but if Swiss people don’t want to do trades at the prices that Eastern Europeans do them then that means they want to do something else more than the trades and that something else is probably a more optimal use of their labour. They do that something else, sell their labour, hire Eastern European carpenters, and come out ahead on the difference between what they get paid to do the new thing vs what they pay for the old thing.
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EPT
