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On September 20 2022 14:16 gobbledydook 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. 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.
I think people who say this kind of thing are extraordinarily confident it’s never gonna be them that’s a refugee. And, uh, I’m not sure I think that confidence is as well-founded as they assume.
But that possibility aside, can you at least agree your solution here is exactly the kind of negative sum thinking I’m talking about? “We don’t care about the refugees, just use whatever resources you have to to push them someplace else.” You seem to think it’s your country’s obligation to seek a negative sum outcome as long as it benefits citizens, but can you at least acknowledge that’s what’s happening?
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On September 20 2022 22:27 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 21:38 Velr wrote: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.
I see that he probably has a hardcore free trade approach and thanks for the explanation, but holy invisible hand of the market Batman!
How does a cheap labourer from "far away" help Swiss society if the labourer then spends most of the money he made in Switzerland outside of it? Some guy got some work done cheaper but thats like the one and only person that benefitted in swiss society?
Assuming we are not talking about some field were the "homegrown" work force is actually too small (like teachers or nurses).
I'm not against "openish" borders but imho local regulations should grip hard and foreign workers should not be allowed to dump prices. I think its kinda neat that Switzerland still hase a decent blue collar workforce and is actually producing stuff outside of "services".
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On September 20 2022 17:59 gobbledydook 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. ![[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. 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.
Fair enough, I assumed it was your point of view. You're right that the benefits being dispersed but the losses concentrated are a problem and an important reason why it's politically not popular.
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.
My post was a little too short but there are more dynamic effects to immigration that I didn't mention such as immigrants starting more new businesses, and increasing demand. Natives have one skill in particular that almost no immigrant will have and that's that they speak the language fluently. I remember a study about the effect of immigrants on Danish natives and what happened is that the immigrants required more management positions and those were filled by the people on the workfloor. I'll try to see if I can still find it.
The example you give seems to be more of an effect of free trade than immigration. Like Ryzal mentioned this is kind of the point of free trade. Everyone does what they're least bad at and then in aggregate Poland, Lithuania and Norway benefit. Of course there are some who lose out but I that in isolation is not a good argument against free trade (or immigration). Every policy will have negative effects on some groups. For example a higher income tax rate for high earners will be hurt by it but I'm sure you'll agree that that doesn't make it bad policy. It is however a good argument to see what we can do to help those who are negatively affected.
On September 20 2022 18:52 Velr wrote:
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".
That's why they're against it but that doesn't mean it's true. The problem is that you're only looking at more immigrants as more competition for Swiss labourers but don't look at any of the dynamic effects such as an increase in demand of those same immigrants. Following the logic that more people = more competition and lower wages we'd expect population growth in general to have a negative impact on wages but we don't see this at all. The labour market especially is much more complex than the simple econ 101 supply and demand model.
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Norway28558 Posts
To be clear I wasn't really arguing against the free trade of workers or worker migration - just stating that I think some, fairly small groups of people are negatively affected by it, and I think their qualms should be taken seriously. We've (Norway) also experienced certain negative side effects as a country in terms of becoming less self-reliant, which showcased its negative side during covid. Travel restrictions basically made a lot of produce rot instead of being harvested because we actually didn't have enough people willing (and skilled, even though this is referred to as unskilled labor, there's still skill involved) to work with harvesting crops for the low wages the farmers need to pay to be able to sell it for a price Norwegians are willing to pay. Not arguing for protectionism or whatever - just that in certain instances, negative consequences happen to some people.
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United States41984 Posts
On September 21 2022 01:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
To be clear I wasn't really arguing against the free trade of workers or worker migration - just stating that I think some, fairly small groups of people are negatively affected by it, and I think their qualms should be taken seriously. We've (Norway) also experienced certain negative side effects as a country in terms of becoming less self-reliant, which showcased its negative side during covid. Travel restrictions basically made a lot of produce rot instead of being harvested because we actually didn't have enough people willing (and skilled, even though this is referred to as unskilled labor, there's still skill involved) to work with harvesting crops for the low wages the farmers need to pay to be able to sell it for a price Norwegians are willing to pay. Not arguing for protectionism or whatever - just that in certain instances, negative consequences happen to some people.
Letting that produce rot was the economically rational decision though. All sorts of things have value but are worth less than the effort involved in getting them. All that water in rivers is being wastefully allowed to flow into the sea when it could be harvested and sold. Rotting crops are no different, nobody wanted them, or at least not at the price they’d have to pay for harvest. Better to let it rot than waste further effort on a sunk cost.
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A super-short update on the FBI's investigation into Trump...
Trump: I want a special master overseeing the FBI's investigation into the documents that I stole and claim to have declassified.
Judge: Okay.
Special Master: Prove that you declassified those documents.
Trump: I no longer want a special master overseeing things.
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On September 21 2022 01:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
To be clear I wasn't really arguing against the free trade of workers or worker migration - just stating that I think some, fairly small groups of people are negatively affected by it, and I think their qualms should be taken seriously. We've (Norway) also experienced certain negative side effects as a country in terms of becoming less self-reliant, which showcased its negative side during covid. Travel restrictions basically made a lot of produce rot instead of being harvested because we actually didn't have enough people willing (and skilled, even though this is referred to as unskilled labor, there's still skill involved) to work with harvesting crops for the low wages the farmers need to pay to be able to sell it for a price Norwegians are willing to pay. Not arguing for protectionism or whatever - just that in certain instances, negative consequences happen to some people.
The point point localized costs of migration (and free trade at larger) is good and worth mentioning even when those on aggregate make us better off. There is whole chapter dedicated to this phenomenon in the US in Banerjee's and Duflo's Good Economics for Hard Times, which I cannot recommend enough. Waving aside the concerns of those who do end up losing out as a result of migration (or off-sourcing or or similar) is a bad idea.
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On September 20 2022 23:17 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 14:16 gobbledydook 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. 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. I think people who say this kind of thing are extraordinarily confident it’s never gonna be them that’s a refugee. And, uh, I’m not sure I think that confidence is as well-founded as they assume. But that possibility aside, can you at least agree your solution here is exactly the kind of negative sum thinking I’m talking about? “We don’t care about the refugees, just use whatever resources you have to to push them someplace else.” You seem to think it’s your country’s obligation to seek a negative sum outcome as long as it benefits citizens, but can you at least acknowledge that’s what’s happening?
The people who say this also always seem to gloss over the fact that... the US government is choosing not to provide for its own citizens either.
Can't help foreigners because "got to spend that money to help our own people", can't help your own population because that's socialism fuck off.
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Well, yeah, billionaires are the protagonists of the Republicans story. In that light, we do a pretty good job of curtailing assistance to immigrants in order to give that money to the only people who matter.
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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"?
I'm suggesting that El Paso is not more capable to handle 2,000 migrants in one day than MV is capable of handling 50 migrants total just because "they are a border town so they should be set up to handle that type of stuff." The contradiction here is the one where migrants are being abused by being sent somewhere that is taking extremely well care of them.
I'm not sure how I didn't answer your question about what problems specifically El Paso is overwhelmed with. I gave you a news story that hundreds of people were sleeping and shitting on the streets. Are you saying this isn't specific or that it isn't a problem?
The Democrats don't want people to come to the border any more than the Republicans. They just want to appear less hard line than the Republicans. It's not a coincidence that border encounters exploded after Biden took office. There is the perception now that if you show up at the border Biden will let you in.
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They want to build a wall and ship them back to where they came so they can make the trip again.
Instead of adding to the public purse and improving the economy they want to spend more money for no gain on things they know doesn't work.
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On September 21 2022 06:02 BlackJack 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"? I'm suggesting that El Paso is not more capable to handle 2,000 migrants in one day than MV is capable of handling 50 migrants total just because "they are a border town so they should be set up to handle that type of stuff." The contradiction here is the one where migrants are being abused by being sent somewhere that is taking extremely well care of them. I'm not sure how I didn't answer your question about what problems specifically El Paso is overwhelmed with. I gave you a news story that hundreds of people were sleeping and shitting on the streets. Are you saying this isn't specific or that it isn't a problem? The Democrats don't want people to come to the border any more than the Republicans. They just want to appear less hard line than the Republicans. It's not a coincidence that border encounters exploded after Biden took office. There is the perception now that if you show up at the border Biden will let you in.
Back of a napkin math comparing population size, El Paso should absolutely be able to handle 2000 people if MV can handle 50. Of course MV is a tiny island community of rich people, where El Paso is a much larger, not especially rich border town right in the middle of a whole lot of populated territory so, as I said, I’m not sure the comparison deserves to be taken very seriously.
Your actual answer was “people,” and then you linked to a story about an apparently pretty unusual occurrence (first since 2018!) in one border town. But forget about that, I care way more about the other stuff I asked (whose plight is it about which you’d like awareness raised? The migrants? The Texans who don’t like the migrants around? And what change exactly are you hoping to see?). You didn’t really answer that stuff at all - I’ll assume you were too busy to explain in a post, but I’m definitely still interested in the answers.
The fact that border encounters increase merely on the perception of a friendlier administration would seem to indicate Trump-like immigration policies (almost all of which were still in effect most of this time) aren’t actually especially effective deterrents. Didn’t SCOTUS only recently let Biden discontinue MPP? And yet this “border crisis” has been happening (or at least, Republicans have been yelling about it) basically since January 2021. In other words, and I’m getting tired of saying it: the heartless negative-sum policies geared toward pushing the problem someplace aren’t just immoral, they also simply don’t work!
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On September 20 2022 23:17 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 14:16 gobbledydook 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. 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. I think people who say this kind of thing are extraordinarily confident it’s never gonna be them that’s a refugee. And, uh, I’m not sure I think that confidence is as well-founded as they assume. But that possibility aside, can you at least agree your solution here is exactly the kind of negative sum thinking I’m talking about? “We don’t care about the refugees, just use whatever resources you have to to push them someplace else.” You seem to think it’s your country’s obligation to seek a negative sum outcome as long as it benefits citizens, but can you at least acknowledge that’s what’s happening?
Yes. Otherwise why do we even need the concept of a country?
The world would be better off overall if borders didn't exist, but it would be a net loss for the US. The average prosperity of the world is a lot lower than the prosperity of the US.
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On September 21 2022 07:03 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 06:02 BlackJack 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"? I'm suggesting that El Paso is not more capable to handle 2,000 migrants in one day than MV is capable of handling 50 migrants total just because "they are a border town so they should be set up to handle that type of stuff." The contradiction here is the one where migrants are being abused by being sent somewhere that is taking extremely well care of them. I'm not sure how I didn't answer your question about what problems specifically El Paso is overwhelmed with. I gave you a news story that hundreds of people were sleeping and shitting on the streets. Are you saying this isn't specific or that it isn't a problem? The Democrats don't want people to come to the border any more than the Republicans. They just want to appear less hard line than the Republicans. It's not a coincidence that border encounters exploded after Biden took office. There is the perception now that if you show up at the border Biden will let you in. Back of a napkin math comparing population size, El Paso should absolutely be able to handle 2000 people if MV can handle 50. Of course MV is a tiny island community of rich people, where El Paso is a much larger, not especially rich border town right in the middle of a whole lot of populated territory so, as I said, I’m not sure the comparison deserves to be taken very seriously. Your actual answer was “people,” and then you linked to a story about an apparently pretty unusual occurrence (first since 2018!) in one border town. But forget about that, I care way more about the other stuff I asked (whose plight is it about which you’d like awareness raised? The migrants? The Texans who don’t like the migrants around? And what change exactly are you hoping to see?). You didn’t really answer that stuff at all - I’ll assume you were too busy to explain in a post, but I’m definitely still interested in the answers. The fact that border encounters increase merely on the perception of a friendlier administration would seem to indicate Trump-like immigration policies (almost all of which were still in effect most of this time) aren’t actually especially effective deterrents. Didn’t SCOTUS only recently let Biden discontinue MPP? And yet this “border crisis” has been happening (or at least, Republicans have been yelling about it) basically since January 2021. In other words, and I’m getting tired of saying it: the heartless negative-sum policies geared toward pushing the problem someplace aren’t just immoral, they also simply don’t work!
That was 2,000 in just one day. The real total of migrants that have shown up at the border is well into the hundreds of thousands which surely changes that back of the napkin math.
But yes that's my point is that perception and rhetoric are just as important as actual policy. If you create the perception that you're going to be far more lenient and welcoming than your predecessor it's obviously going to encourage more people to come to the border even if you keep the same policies.
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There's at least one proven way to virtually stop all border crossings.
Do it the North Korea style where you shoot on sight.
Of course that's also horrible, but it shows that if you try hard enough it's possible.
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United States24578 Posts
You also need to staff the entire border with armed soldiers. Simply changing your rules of engagement won't stop all border crossings in a place like the US/Mexico border.
Also, occasionally people do enter/exist NK without permission, so it's not completely foolproof.
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EPT
