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On September 21 2022 08:06 gobbledydook wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2022 23:17 ChristianS wrote: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.
We had a poster a while back who was all about "countries should always fuck over foreigners if it even slightly advantages their citizens." That was basically xDaunt's whole worldview. He framed the whole thing as basically a big game of Civilization, with a bunch of different cultures engaged in one giant battle to the death. To him, acting in self-defense is always fundamentally moral, and since every culture is always in a struggle for survival against every other culture, any action taken to advantage your own culture and disadvantage others is morally justified. He liked to say foreign relations is fundamentally "amoral." ("Genocide is the primary arc of human history" as another of his.) It goes without saying he was a big fan of Trump and "America First."
I have... a lot of issues with that worldview. Maybe most obvious is that I don't actually think "self-defense is always moral," especially if the "self" being defended is some kind of group association rather than an actual person. If the principle decides to disband the chess club, I don't think the members of the chess club are justified in murdering him. In general, people insisting on using the word amoral tend to want to do a lot of extremely immoral stuff, and their rationalizations for why we shouldn't consider it as such are usually pretty flimsy.
But even if you set aside the moral objection, this basically amounts to, in Prisoner's Dilemma terms, an "Always Forsake" strategy (same initials as America First!). And the thing about an Always Forsake strategy is that you're going to walk away from every interaction feeling like you got the absolute maximum for yourself that you could out of it. But all that forsaking you're putting out into the world tends to come back on you, one way or another. In game theory that's usually because everybody notices you always forsake and starts doing the same to you, while still trusting each other, and they come out better off than you.
But in real world terms, just look at the last century of American foreign policy decisions. Post-WW2 it's basically one story after another of us deciding we can fuck somebody over to further our own goals. Then that shit we did causes a huge fucking problem over there, which just gets worse until it blows back on us somehow, precipitating the next crisis that we'll decide to "solve" in a half-assed way that fucks somebody else over even harder. Rinse, repeat. I mean, frankly, look at every one of these central and South American countries we're complaining about getting refugees from. Then go look at the problems they've got back home that are forcing all these people to flee their homes, and look back in their history a bit to when things went bad. It's not always a US intervention that fucked things up, but you'd be surprised how often you find Contras or School of the Americas or some other US scheme to blow shit up in a way we thought might favor us somehow.
So even if we accept (and I definitely don't) that our government should act with only citizens' interests in mind: maybe a safer assumption to start from is if we cause problems abroad it's probably going to come back on us somehow? It certainly seems like the track record is pretty clear that it always fucks us over down the line, sooner or later.
On September 21 2022 08:38 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 07:03 ChristianS wrote: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:
[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"? 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.
But those hundreds of thousands aren't just El Paso, no? If MV's 15000ish residents can house 50 refugees in a day, that would imply Texas's ~30 million can house ~100,000 in a day, and the US's ~330 million can house >1 million in a day? This is stupid, extrapolating from Martha's Vineyard was a bad idea in the first place and it doesn't even favor your point, so let's just drop it, huh?
So the change you'd like to see is... harsher perception and rhetoric? If Biden starts giving variants of Trump's "very fine people" speech every day, while removing all the pointlessly cruel Trump-era policies since apparently they weren't even doing anything, will that make you happy?
Come on, you've been beating the drum for several pages about how important an issue is, how great it is that Desantis is bringing attention to it, how desperately we need to raise awareness about... well, someone's plight anyway. You don't have any change to advocate for besides "sound less welcoming"?
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On September 21 2022 11:23 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 11:02 gobbledydook wrote:
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. But border crossings make up a small % of the immigrant problem. For example none of the people that were involved in the political stunt snuck in. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/10/683662691/where-does-illegal-immigration-mostly-occur-heres-what-the-data-tell-usSo I mean you could build the worlds most expensive wall, man it and maintain it, stop 99.9% of the people who sneak across and still not make a significant dent in the numbers because most are overstays and those who sneak in rarely do it over the desert, they do it in the backs of semi's, and so on.
And again I don't know if anyone is hearing me but this all started because Ronald Reagan wanted to get more Cuban pro life Catholics into America.
If you look at a map you'll see cuba is an island which means you'll need to drastically expand the coast guard to guard the option of using a boat to migrate to America.
Speaking of an island apparently they found a couple of lawyers on Martha's Vineyard and they're going to launch a class action suit against the state of Florida or desantis himself. You know, for the kidnapping of children and subsequent trafficking of human beings.
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On September 22 2022 00:09 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On September 21 2022 11:23 JimmiC wrote:On September 21 2022 11:02 gobbledydook wrote:
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. But border crossings make up a small % of the immigrant problem. For example none of the people that were involved in the political stunt snuck in. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/10/683662691/where-does-illegal-immigration-mostly-occur-heres-what-the-data-tell-usSo I mean you could build the worlds most expensive wall, man it and maintain it, stop 99.9% of the people who sneak across and still not make a significant dent in the numbers because most are overstays and those who sneak in rarely do it over the desert, they do it in the backs of semi's, and so on. And again I don't know if anyone is hearing me but this all started because Ronald Reagan wanted to get more Cuban pro life Catholics into America. If you look at a map you'll see cuba is an island which means you'll need to drastically expand the coast guard to guard the option of using a boat to migrate to America. Speaking of an island apparently they found a couple of lawyers on Martha's Vineyard and they're going to launch a class action suit against the state of Florida or desantis himself. You know, for the kidnapping of children and subsequent trafficking of human beings. I think it is that people ignore the facts that counter the narrative they prefer. I kind of get it while they are within their bubble and the people spreading the narrative are not informing of the truth. But it is strange when they leave that bubble that they still ignore all the facts they do not like. Even if that and other lawsuits fail, what is going to be the end cost to the tax payers of Florida? It is going to be WAY WAY WAY more than just doing right by these people, probably doing right by 10-1000x the people. This is was a moronic stunt with absolutely no purpose. No one can explain what they were trying to get from it, it is not more support they are the ones blocking that, it is nothing. It was purely a wildly expensive political stunt that ignorant people find awesome because its trolling people they have been told are the enemy. I'm embarrassed for anyone who thinks this was a good move, other than the Machiavellian types who see that playing to the ignorant gets DeSantis big dollars and brings him more notoriety and power. Why would anyone want this guy as a leader? His moves do nothing but make people mad at each other, cost lots of money and accomplish absolutely nothing.
You are seeing this through the lens of 'wanting a functioning government that takes care of important things'. At some point, we have to accept that this is not the goal for a lot of people.
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On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote:
But those hundreds of thousands aren't just El Paso, no? If MV's 15000ish residents can house 50 refugees in a day, that would imply Texas's ~30 million can house ~100,000 in a day, and the US's ~330 million can house >1 million in a day? This is stupid, extrapolating from Martha's Vineyard was a bad idea in the first place and it doesn't even favor your point, so let's just drop it, huh?
So the change you'd like to see is... harsher perception and rhetoric? If Biden starts giving variants of Trump's "very fine people" speech every day, while removing all the pointlessly cruel Trump-era policies since apparently they weren't even doing anything, will that make you happy?
Come on, you've been beating the drum for several pages about how important an issue is, how great it is that Desantis is bringing attention to it, how desperately we need to raise awareness about... well, someone's plight anyway. You don't have any change to advocate for besides "sound less welcoming"?
I have a slight issue with your math as probably could be corroborated by DeepEmBlues who as far as I know is a math professor or academic.
Since
15000/50 ~ 300
30,000,000/100,000 ~ 300
300,000,000/1,000,000 ~ 300
You wouldn't expect the US to be able to house 1 million immigrants per day, correct, that's the idea?
However, you start from a misleading premise to label "50" as MV's daily immigrant intake. They got 50 immigrants on one day. Not every day. Without intentionally being controversial I would honestly presume every other day this year they got 0 per day. That means 50 is not an average daily number. 50 is a gross yearly number. 50 is annual migrant intake.
The average daily would be more like 50 people per 250 days, or about 1/5th of a person per day, 0.2 people per day.
In which case with border crossings at over 2.1m (or around 2.5m alternatively?) year-to-date (which is noticeably higher than what you correctly point out as ~1m being the scaled-up number for 50 migrants per 15000 residents) it seems MV is pulling far less than their weight, if you were to gauge simply by population. Whereas if you weighted their responsibility by wealth per capita, they are probably pulling hundreds of times below their weight - in other words they've done less than 1% of what they should, and they only did that for 48 hours anyway.
If they can't even handle that, I think that's prima facie evidence the government has failed with respect to immigration.
To the rest of your point about interventionism I would hope you try to be less cynical and not conflate the revolving door of neoconservatives, the military industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and corporate oligarchs' disastrous self-serving unilateral foreign policy interventions, with American democracy. That is case after case of wars, assassinations, other fuck-ups, that the American people didn't want, didn't vote for, and rightly don't support the terrible results of. Which I get the reasons to deride, but if you live in a world where the world's leading democracy can't intervene, there's just no one else to take up the sword for what's right for the little guy. That means for the people of Taiwan, Afghanistan, Iran, Hong Kong (already lost), Ukraine... Like there are actual threats in the world that you can't simply Gandhi away. The fact that people do evil doesn't mean that nobody should bother to be strong enough to do good.
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The discussion wasn't about constant influx of immigrants in the first place. Saying a place can take so many immigrants in a day doesn't say they're taking in that many every day. It was a discussion on what these places are able to handle if needed, not what they're being expected to take in on a constant basis. That math is also immediately followed up by pointing out that trying to extrapolate anything about immigration from the Martha's Vineyard trafficking is an awful idea.
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On September 22 2022 02:04 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote:
But those hundreds of thousands aren't just El Paso, no? If MV's 15000ish residents can house 50 refugees in a day, that would imply Texas's ~30 million can house ~100,000 in a day, and the US's ~330 million can house >1 million in a day? This is stupid, extrapolating from Martha's Vineyard was a bad idea in the first place and it doesn't even favor your point, so let's just drop it, huh?
So the change you'd like to see is... harsher perception and rhetoric? If Biden starts giving variants of Trump's "very fine people" speech every day, while removing all the pointlessly cruel Trump-era policies since apparently they weren't even doing anything, will that make you happy?
Come on, you've been beating the drum for several pages about how important an issue is, how great it is that Desantis is bringing attention to it, how desperately we need to raise awareness about... well, someone's plight anyway. You don't have any change to advocate for besides "sound less welcoming"? I have a slight issue with your math as probably could be corroborated by DeepEmBlues who as far as I know is a math professor or academic. Since 15000/50 ~ 300 30,000,000/100,000 ~ 300 300,000,000/1,000,000 ~ 300 You wouldn't expect the US to be able to house 1 million immigrants per day, correct, that's the idea? However, you start from a misleading premise to label "50" as MV's daily immigrant intake. They got 50 immigrants on one day. Not every day. Without intentionally being controversial I would honestly presume every other day this year they got 0 per day. That means 50 is not an average daily number. 50 is a gross yearly number. 50 is annual migrant intake. The average daily would be more like 50 people per 250 days, or about 1/5th of a person per day, 0.2 people per day. In which case with border crossings at over 2.1m (or around 2.5m alternatively?) year-to-date (which is noticeably higher than what you correctly point out as ~1m being the scaled-up number for 50 migrants per 15000 residents) it seems MV is pulling far less than their weight, if you were to gauge simply by population. Whereas if you weighted their responsibility by wealth per capita, they are probably pulling hundreds of times below their weight - in other words they've done less than 1% of what they should, and they only did that for 48 hours anyway. If they can't even handle that, I think that's prima facie evidence the government has failed with respect to immigration. To the rest of your point about interventionism I would hope you try to be less cynical and not conflate the revolving door of neoconservatives, the military industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and corporate oligarchs' disastrous self-serving unilateral foreign policy interventions, with American democracy. That is case after case of wars, assassinations, other fuck-ups, that the American people didn't want, didn't vote for, and rightly don't support the terrible results of. Which I get the reasons to deride, but if you live in a world where the world's leading democracy can't intervene, there's just no one else to take up the sword for what's right for the little guy. That means for the people of Taiwan, Afghanistan, Iran, Hong Kong (already lost), Ukraine... Like there are actual threats in the world that you can't simply Gandhi away. The fact that people do evil doesn't mean that nobody should bother to be strong enough to do good.
The point of the math is that the comparison is stupid. MV needing to take care of 50 people unexpectedly in a single day is obviously not a similar occurrence to the United States needing to take care of 1 million people in a single day, despite the population ratios being the same. We can redo the math with square footage or population*average income or whatever other statistic you want, and we’ll get different numbers, but none of the numbers are actually going to be meaningful predictors of what happens on the border because Martha’s Vineyard is not a mini-United States. It’s bad math no matter how you do it.
Blackjack (and now you) want to use the comparison to show how plainly a problem immigration is, and it doesn’t even do that! You’re saying we got 2.1 million people this year. If we do the bad math that’s equivalent to MV needing to take care of ~110 people in the last ~9 months, which based on recent events and common sense, doesn’t seem like it would actually be a very big lift for them! If *I* was flashing that comparison around to say immigration isn’t a problem you could (rightly!) point out that the comparison is inapt and this is a bad way to reason about the problem. Instead you guys are trying to highlight the comparison even though it doesn’t even favor your point!
On interventionism: yeah, foreign policy is complicated and there are a lot of tough calls. I’m not advocating isolationism, though, I’m pointing out that a huge number of our interventions in the last century could not reasonably be seen as “taking up the sword for the little guy.” Frequently our motivations are much more selfish, and we cause a lot of damage thinking we’ll still come out ahead. Then that damage we caused eventually fucks us over down the line. Point being, maybe we should be slower to fuck others over for our own gain? If not for magnanimous reasons, at least because we know it usually doesn’t even help us in the long run?
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United States41983 Posts
On September 21 2022 11:02 gobbledydook wrote:
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.
You understand that airports and the sea are also borders, right?
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United States41983 Posts
On September 22 2022 02:04 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote:
But those hundreds of thousands aren't just El Paso, no? If MV's 15000ish residents can house 50 refugees in a day, that would imply Texas's ~30 million can house ~100,000 in a day, and the US's ~330 million can house >1 million in a day? This is stupid, extrapolating from Martha's Vineyard was a bad idea in the first place and it doesn't even favor your point, so let's just drop it, huh?
So the change you'd like to see is... harsher perception and rhetoric? If Biden starts giving variants of Trump's "very fine people" speech every day, while removing all the pointlessly cruel Trump-era policies since apparently they weren't even doing anything, will that make you happy?
Come on, you've been beating the drum for several pages about how important an issue is, how great it is that Desantis is bringing attention to it, how desperately we need to raise awareness about... well, someone's plight anyway. You don't have any change to advocate for besides "sound less welcoming"? I have a slight issue with your math as probably could be corroborated by DeepEmBlues who as far as I know is a math professor or academic. Since 15000/50 ~ 300 30,000,000/100,000 ~ 300 300,000,000/1,000,000 ~ 300 You wouldn't expect the US to be able to house 1 million immigrants per day, correct, that's the idea? However, you start from a misleading premise to label "50" as MV's daily immigrant intake. They got 50 immigrants on one day. Not every day. Without intentionally being controversial I would honestly presume every other day this year they got 0 per day. That means 50 is not an average daily number. 50 is a gross yearly number. 50 is annual migrant intake. The average daily would be more like 50 people per 250 days, or about 1/5th of a person per day, 0.2 people per day. In which case with border crossings at over 2.1m (or around 2.5m alternatively?) year-to-date (which is noticeably higher than what you correctly point out as ~1m being the scaled-up number for 50 migrants per 15000 residents) it seems MV is pulling far less than their weight, if you were to gauge simply by population. Whereas if you weighted their responsibility by wealth per capita, they are probably pulling hundreds of times below their weight - in other words they've done less than 1% of what they should, and they only did that for 48 hours anyway. If they can't even handle that, I think that's prima facie evidence the government has failed with respect to immigration. To the rest of your point about interventionism I would hope you try to be less cynical and not conflate the revolving door of neoconservatives, the military industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and corporate oligarchs' disastrous self-serving unilateral foreign policy interventions, with American democracy. That is case after case of wars, assassinations, other fuck-ups, that the American people didn't want, didn't vote for, and rightly don't support the terrible results of. Which I get the reasons to deride, but if you live in a world where the world's leading democracy can't intervene, there's just no one else to take up the sword for what's right for the little guy. That means for the people of Taiwan, Afghanistan, Iran, Hong Kong (already lost), Ukraine... Like there are actual threats in the world that you can't simply Gandhi away. The fact that people do evil doesn't mean that nobody should bother to be strong enough to do good.
You did your math in the opposite order here. 50 per year is easy, that’s 1 hotel room as long as you have the ability to process 1 per week. 50 all at once is a much bigger problem, even if you can still process 1 per week. You need 50 hotel rooms for week 1, 49 week 2 etc. You can’t take a sudden arrival of 50 people and say that really it’s just 1 on average.
The math you were critiquing checks out. If 15,000 can handle a sudden unexpected influx of 50 then 300,000,000 should be able to handle 1,000,000 showing up overnight.
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On September 22 2022 02:41 ChristianS wrote:
The point of the math is that the comparison is stupid. MV needing to take care of 50 people unexpectedly in a single day is obviously not a similar occurrence to the United States needing to take care of 1 million people in a single day, despite the population ratios being the same. We can redo the math with square footage or population*average income or whatever other statistic you want, and we’ll get different numbers, but none of the numbers are actually going to be meaningful predictors of what happens on the border because Martha’s Vineyard is not a mini-United States. It’s bad math no matter how you do it.
I think the purpose of the "stunt" is it should cause you to question the premises you're operating from. Why is it unexpected that they should be able to handle 50 in a day when on average they should expect, with our naive math, over 100 in a year? You're highlighting the complacency of the people who call themselves a sanctuary city and then after day after day of 0 immigrants coming, for some reason expect none ever will and have no plan to deal with them or liaise with the rest of the government volunteering their wealth, land, and time to serve the outlanders.
On September 22 2022 02:41 ChristianS wrote:
Blackjack (and now you) want to use the comparison to show how plainly a problem immigration is, and it doesn’t even do that! You’re saying we got 2.1 million people this year. If we do the bad math that’s equivalent to MV needing to take care of ~110 people in the last ~9 months, which based on recent events and common sense, doesn’t seem like it would actually be a very big lift for them! If *I* was flashing that comparison around to say immigration isn’t a problem you could (rightly!) point out that the comparison is inapt and this is a bad way to reason about the problem. Instead you guys are trying to highlight the comparison even though it doesn’t even favor your point!
I don't see the bad math. Like we both now say, with this math, on average they'd have to handle 110 over a year. They got 50 and threw in the towel. Something is not fundamentally wrong not with the math but with a system that doesn't distribute the demands that illegal and irregular immigration makes to the people who can afford it, vote for it, and designate themselves a sanctuary. I feel like the math here either shows it's a problem or it's not. In fact, I'm willing to agree for the sake of argument that it shouldn't be a big deal. It doesn't sound like a lot of people.
That's why the failure is so revealing - start asking more than the level 1 questions, is probably all that those who like this stunt want you to do - how many immigrants has this sanctuary jurisdiction taken before, more than they should have by population? or less? Why didn't they have any resources to handle these immigrants now - because they've never handle any before, or they used up all their resources handling so many already? Or as Kwark says, one bus of people is an unmanageable influx. Why should states even have to communicate their relocation of immigrants when we have a federal Department of Homeland Security that runs this? In other words, why should states have an obligation to do anything with immigrants in the interior, when they are hamstrung from enforcing federal law even when it has disastrous consequences to their own states/commonwealths and communities? Whose responsibility is this? If no one's taking responsibility, why should we expect anything less than a shambles? Then who can we blame for dropping the ball? What is Mayorkas doing? Harris? Biden? Congress? Most of the last like 10 or so presidents?
On September 22 2022 03:10 KwarK wrote:
You did your math in the opposite order here. 50 per year is easy, that’s 1 hotel room as long as you have the ability to process 1 per week. 50 all at once is a much bigger problem, even if you can still process 1 per week. You need 50 hotel rooms for week 1, 49 week 2 etc. You can’t take a sudden arrival of 50 people and say that really it’s just 1 on average.
The math you were critiquing checks out. If 15,000 can handle a sudden unexpected influx of 50 then 300,000,000 should be able to handle 1,000,000 showing up overnight.
In this case "process" = remove from Martha's Vineyard and dump elsewhere individually rather than en masse? What is processing?
50 people is like one bus of people? You should not expect the government to ever relocate people in an even less efficient manner than a bus such that they would come one at a time in a taxi or uber or Obama's limo, or in any other way that would constitute 2% of a bus per day. Think of a bus as the "quantum" of immigrants, the smallest packet that the government would deal with. If you are so woefully unprepared as to be incapable of handling one bus of people per year (understanding that as a bus, it will come at one time all at once one day), you have no business calling yourself a sanctuary jurisdiction and frankly no business supporting an administration for de facto forcing that on others who never willingly assumed that label.
And 50 hotel rooms? Single rooms each, okay let's splurge, after all, they deserve it, it's a human right. Less than one entire hotel right? Assuming all these people are traveling as individuals and not in families for some reason. I heard this wasn't the busy season, everyone kept saying - must have been a lot of vacancies, no? Like how is one class field trip worth of people this unmanageable by a sanctuary city except with the national guard.
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United States41983 Posts
On September 22 2022 04:14 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 02:41 ChristianS wrote:
The point of the math is that the comparison is stupid. MV needing to take care of 50 people unexpectedly in a single day is obviously not a similar occurrence to the United States needing to take care of 1 million people in a single day, despite the population ratios being the same. We can redo the math with square footage or population*average income or whatever other statistic you want, and we’ll get different numbers, but none of the numbers are actually going to be meaningful predictors of what happens on the border because Martha’s Vineyard is not a mini-United States. It’s bad math no matter how you do it. I think the purpose of the "stunt" is it should cause you to question the premises you're operating from. Why is it unexpected that they should be able to handle 50 in a day when on average they should expect, with our naive math, over 100 in a year? You're highlighting the complacency of the people who call themselves a sanctuary city and then after day after day of 0 immigrants coming, for some reason expect none ever will and have no plan to deal with them or liaise with the rest of the government volunteering their wealth, land, and time to serve the outlanders. Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 02:41 ChristianS wrote:
Blackjack (and now you) want to use the comparison to show how plainly a problem immigration is, and it doesn’t even do that! You’re saying we got 2.1 million people this year. If we do the bad math that’s equivalent to MV needing to take care of ~110 people in the last ~9 months, which based on recent events and common sense, doesn’t seem like it would actually be a very big lift for them! If *I* was flashing that comparison around to say immigration isn’t a problem you could (rightly!) point out that the comparison is inapt and this is a bad way to reason about the problem. Instead you guys are trying to highlight the comparison even though it doesn’t even favor your point! I don't see the bad math. Like we both now say, with this math, on average they'd have to handle 110 over a year. They got 50 and threw in the towel. Something is not fundamentally wrong not with the math but with a system that doesn't distribute the demands that illegal and irregular immigration makes to the people who can afford it, vote for it, and designate themselves a sanctuary. I feel like the math here either shows it's a problem or it's not. In fact, I'm willing to agree for the sake of argument that it shouldn't be a big deal. It doesn't sound like a lot of people. That's why the failure is so revealing - start asking more than the level 1 questions, is probably all that those who like this stunt want you to do - how many immigrants has this sanctuary jurisdiction taken before, more than they should have by population? or less? Why didn't they have any resources to handle these immigrants now - because they've never handle any before, or they used up all their resources handling so many already? Or as Kwark says, one bus of people is an unmanageable influx. Why should states even have to communicate their relocation of immigrants when we have a federal Department of Homeland Security that runs this? In other words, why should states have an obligation to do anything with immigrants in the interior, when they are hamstrung from enforcing federal law even when it has disastrous consequences to their own states/commonwealths and communities? Whose responsibility is this? If no one's taking responsibility, why should we expect anything less than a shambles? Then who can we blame for dropping the ball? What is Mayorkas doing? Harris? Biden? Congress? Most of the last like 10 or so presidents? Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 03:10 KwarK wrote:
You did your math in the opposite order here. 50 per year is easy, that’s 1 hotel room as long as you have the ability to process 1 per week. 50 all at once is a much bigger problem, even if you can still process 1 per week. You need 50 hotel rooms for week 1, 49 week 2 etc. You can’t take a sudden arrival of 50 people and say that really it’s just 1 on average.
The math you were critiquing checks out. If 15,000 can handle a sudden unexpected influx of 50 then 300,000,000 should be able to handle 1,000,000 showing up overnight. In this case "process" = remove from Martha's Vineyard and dump elsewhere individually rather than en masse? What is processing? 50 people is like one bus of people? You should not expect the government to ever relocate people in an even less efficient manner than a bus such that they would come one at a time in a taxi or uber or Obama's limo, or in any other way that would constitute 2% of a bus per day. Think of a bus as the "quantum" of immigrants, the smallest packet that the government would deal with. If you are so woefully unprepared as to be incapable of handling one bus of people per year (understanding that as a bus, it will come at one time all at once one day), you have no business calling yourself a sanctuary jurisdiction and frankly no business supporting an administration for de facto forcing that on others who never willingly assumed that label. And 50 hotel rooms? Single rooms each, okay let's splurge, after all, they deserve it, it's a human right. Less than one entire hotel right? Assuming all these people are traveling as individuals and not in families for some reason. I heard this wasn't the busy season, everyone kept saying - must have been a lot of vacancies, no? Like how is one class field trip worth of people this unmanageable by a sanctuary city except with the national guard.
So we're agreed that we're talking 50 all at once and that the fair comparison would be a million all at once across the nation? Not 50 all at once but that only happens once per year so it's really 1 per week.
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On September 22 2022 01:45 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 01:10 EnDeR_ wrote:On September 22 2022 00:09 JimmiC wrote:On September 22 2022 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On September 21 2022 11:23 JimmiC wrote:On September 21 2022 11:02 gobbledydook wrote:
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. But border crossings make up a small % of the immigrant problem. For example none of the people that were involved in the political stunt snuck in. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/10/683662691/where-does-illegal-immigration-mostly-occur-heres-what-the-data-tell-usSo I mean you could build the worlds most expensive wall, man it and maintain it, stop 99.9% of the people who sneak across and still not make a significant dent in the numbers because most are overstays and those who sneak in rarely do it over the desert, they do it in the backs of semi's, and so on. And again I don't know if anyone is hearing me but this all started because Ronald Reagan wanted to get more Cuban pro life Catholics into America. If you look at a map you'll see cuba is an island which means you'll need to drastically expand the coast guard to guard the option of using a boat to migrate to America. Speaking of an island apparently they found a couple of lawyers on Martha's Vineyard and they're going to launch a class action suit against the state of Florida or desantis himself. You know, for the kidnapping of children and subsequent trafficking of human beings. I think it is that people ignore the facts that counter the narrative they prefer. I kind of get it while they are within their bubble and the people spreading the narrative are not informing of the truth. But it is strange when they leave that bubble that they still ignore all the facts they do not like. Even if that and other lawsuits fail, what is going to be the end cost to the tax payers of Florida? It is going to be WAY WAY WAY more than just doing right by these people, probably doing right by 10-1000x the people. This is was a moronic stunt with absolutely no purpose. No one can explain what they were trying to get from it, it is not more support they are the ones blocking that, it is nothing. It was purely a wildly expensive political stunt that ignorant people find awesome because its trolling people they have been told are the enemy. I'm embarrassed for anyone who thinks this was a good move, other than the Machiavellian types who see that playing to the ignorant gets DeSantis big dollars and brings him more notoriety and power. Why would anyone want this guy as a leader? His moves do nothing but make people mad at each other, cost lots of money and accomplish absolutely nothing. You are seeing this through the lens of 'wanting a functioning government that takes care of important things'. At some point, we have to accept that this is not the goal for a lot of people. I mean true, but you would think if you didn't want a functioning one you would at least want one that didn't waste money.
Again, not true. See the wall or the healthcare system. These are outcomes that people actually want. A plurality of people aren't that bothered about efficiency but are far more interested in minimising their own contribution to society, I.e. tax burden. They're not actually interested in making things better.
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I think it’s funny that people want to use the entire country’s population of 300+ million to extrapolate how many people we should be able to take care of and then they are the same people criticizing the buses that are dispersing the migrants to other parts of the country to be taken care of.
ChristianS you want to conclude that the MV migrants were taken care of and then extrapolate how many we can care for based on the population of MV. This neglects the truth that the migrants were there for 2 days before the state governor activated the national guard and relocated them to mainland Massachusetts. The fact you want to use the population of MV and not the population of the state of Massachusetts for your extrapolation strikes me as odd considering you use the state population of all of Texas to determine how many migrants the border towns can handle.
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On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 08:06 gobbledydook wrote:On September 20 2022 23:17 ChristianS wrote: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/[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. 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. + Show Spoiler +We had a poster a while back who was all about "countries should always fuck over foreigners if it even slightly advantages their citizens." That was basically xDaunt's whole worldview. He framed the whole thing as basically a big game of Civilization, with a bunch of different cultures engaged in one giant battle to the death. To him, acting in self-defense is always fundamentally moral, and since every culture is always in a struggle for survival against every other culture, any action taken to advantage your own culture and disadvantage others is morally justified. He liked to say foreign relations is fundamentally "amoral." ("Genocide is the primary arc of human history" as another of his.) It goes without saying he was a big fan of Trump and "America First."
I have... a lot of issues with that worldview. Maybe most obvious is that I don't actually think "self-defense is always moral," especially if the "self" being defended is some kind of group association rather than an actual person. If the principle decides to disband the chess club, I don't think the members of the chess club are justified in murdering him. In general, people insisting on using the word amoral tend to want to do a lot of extremely immoral stuff, and their rationalizations for why we shouldn't consider it as such are usually pretty flimsy.
But even if you set aside the moral objection, this basically amounts to, in Prisoner's Dilemma terms, an "Always Forsake" strategy (same initials as America First!). And the thing about an Always Forsake strategy is that you're going to walk away from every interaction feeling like you got the absolute maximum for yourself that you could out of it. But all that forsaking you're putting out into the world tends to come back on you, one way or another. In game theory that's usually because everybody notices you always forsake and starts doing the same to you, while still trusting each other, and they come out better off than you.
But in real world terms, just look at the last century of American foreign policy decisions. Post-WW2 it's basically one story after another of us deciding we can fuck somebody over to further our own goals. Then that shit we did causes a huge fucking problem over there, which just gets worse until it blows back on us somehow, precipitating the next crisis that we'll decide to "solve" in a half-assed way that fucks somebody else over even harder. Rinse, repeat. I mean, frankly, look at every one of these central and South American countries we're complaining about getting refugees from. Then go look at the problems they've got back home that are forcing all these people to flee their homes, and look back in their history a bit to when things went bad. It's not always a US intervention that fucked things up, but you'd be surprised how often you find Contras or School of the Americas or some other US scheme to blow shit up in a way we thought might favor us somehow.
So even if we accept (and I definitely don't) that our government should act with only citizens' interests in mind: maybe a safer assumption to start from is if we cause problems abroad it's probably going to come back on us somehow? It certainly seems like the track record is pretty clear that it always fucks us over down the line, sooner or later. Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 08:38 BlackJack wrote:On September 21 2022 07:03 ChristianS wrote: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:
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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. But those hundreds of thousands aren't just El Paso, no? If MV's 15000ish residents can house 50 refugees in a day, that would imply Texas's ~30 million can house ~100,000 in a day, and the US's ~330 million can house >1 million in a day? This is stupid, extrapolating from Martha's Vineyard was a bad idea in the first place and it doesn't even favor your point, so let's just drop it, huh? So the change you'd like to see is... harsher perception and rhetoric? If Biden starts giving variants of Trump's "very fine people" speech every day, while removing all the pointlessly cruel Trump-era policies since apparently they weren't even doing anything, will that make you happy? Come on, you've been beating the drum for several pages about how important an issue is, how great it is that Desantis is bringing attention to it, how desperately we need to raise awareness about... well, someone's plight anyway. You don't have any change to advocate for besides "sound less welcoming"?
I don't necessarily buy the premise that Trump-era policies "weren't even doing anything" but I'm open to hearing evidence of that. I'm not an expert on immigration policy so I don't pretend to have the solution to these problems. That doesn't mean I don't get to believe that the problem wasn't getting enough attention and that this political stunt won't work towards getting a solution. Everyone that has worked in a corporate hierarchy knows that this is an effective way to get a change. If you complain to the person above you often nothing happens. If you can make it a personal annoyance to the person above you then something happens. Biden now has to deal with mayors/governors from blue states telling him to do something about this.
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