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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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“This is an effective way of getting a change”
I think you were asked this already, but what is the change DeSantis seeks? Does he need help or ...?
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The main request I think is to reinstate Trump's Remain in Mexico policy.
That policy meant that refugee applicants could only enter once their application was approved. The goal being that this would filter out bad people who claim to be refugees, enter the US, and commit crimes before their case is heard.
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And what are the statistics on that? I'm curious whether that's a substantial issue, or if it's being wrung through the "any crime is unacceptable" set of hoops.
In general though, it's appreciated to have someone actually say what they want to see, instead of gesticulating towards the general direction of anti-immigrant policy and leaving people to fill in the gaps for you. How many pages has it been?
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On September 22 2022 07:25 BlackJack wrote:
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.
I don't know how I can be any clearer that I don't want to extrapolate anything. Go ask literally anybody that handles for statistics for a living, "Hey, I've got this tiny population of literal and figurative outliers. I was thinking of calculating some quantity based on that population and then extrapolating it to a much larger population that isn't really similar to them in any way. Does that seem reasonable?" I'm running out of adjectives to describe it. Irresponsible? Embarrassing? Cringe? It simply does not deserve to be taken seriously. Meanwhile oBlade seems to not understand that providing for 50 migrants that showed up unexpectedly, all on the same day, is a much bigger ask than providing for 100 migrants showing up periodically over a year. I don't like posting in a condescending tone but I'm not actually sure how to talk about this more without treating this like a math tutoring thread.
Of course they were sent to the mainland! The whole fucking point of this story is that there was no good reason to put the refugees on the tiny Jaws beach island! They don't need to work on their tans, they need short-term food and shelter! They people to help them figure out where they're going to live long-term, what their legal status is and whether they need to apply to change it, whether they have any skills they can use to support themselves. Every single one of those things is harder to get on the tiny Jaws beach island, which is why it was such an obviously vindictive move to send them there! It should be immediately obvious that the people with the sort of means to own property on Martha's Vineyard could very easily provide food and shelter to 50 people (or 110, oBlade) without any meaningful sacrifice in their standard of living. But it's equally obvious the first step in helping these people would be to help them find a place to stay, and there's zero reason.
You imply, without outright stating, that you think it would be more reasonable to use the population of the entire state of Massachusetts as a denominator. The implication of that calculation would be "The entire state of Massachusetts only has the means to provide food and shelter for 50 people." Uh, hey, maybe you've been too busy to answer a lot of the questions I've asked, but can I get a quick yes or no on whether you think that would be a reasonable assumption? Are you actually asking me to take that premise seriously?
On September 22 2022 08:14 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote: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:
[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. 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. 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:
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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"? 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.
The evidence is that the Trump-era policies were still in place for basically all of Biden's administration so far and the "border crisis" has, to hear Republicans tell it, been going on that entire time. All it took, by your own characterization, is a perception that Biden might be more welcoming. Incidentally, who painted him with that brush if not Republicans? If perception is such an important factor, isn't their very own rhetoric to blame?
This is mostly a useless aside, but if you worked in a corporate hierarchy, and you went out of your way to create a big embarrassing public crisis for your company in an effort to make some other department look bad, you would just get fired. For all the many, many things wrong with corporate hierarchies, even pretty dysfunctional companies would correctly diagnose that you're a sociopathic careerist that will happily sabotage the company to hurt your enemies and advance your own position. Which, of course, is exactly what's happening with Desantis, but as dysfunctional as corporate hierarchies are, our democracy is apparently worse.
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On September 22 2022 10:49 NewSunshine wrote:
And what are the statistics on that? I'm curious whether that's a substantial issue, or if it's being wrung through the "any crime is unacceptable" set of hoops.
In general though, it's appreciated to have someone actually say what they want to see, instead of gesticulating towards the general direction of anti-immigrant policy and leaving people to fill in the gaps for you. How many pages has it been?
I don't know.
Predictably, Fox News doesn't give specific numbers but talks generally about how drug dealers and gang members slip into the US and how many deaths that has caused, etc.
It has actually been harder than expected to find concrete data about the effect of the policy.
Sources that are against this policy also predictably don't mention the effectiveness of the program and focus on the harm done to the refugees.
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On September 22 2022 11:34 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 07:25 BlackJack wrote:
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. I don't know how I can be any clearer that I don't want to extrapolate anything. Go ask literally anybody that handles for statistics for a living, "Hey, I've got this tiny population of literal and figurative outliers. I was thinking of calculating some quantity based on that population and then extrapolating it to a much larger population that isn't really similar to them in any way. Does that seem reasonable?" I'm running out of adjectives to describe it. Irresponsible? Embarrassing? Cringe? It simply does not deserve to be taken seriously. Meanwhile oBlade seems to not understand that providing for 50 migrants that showed up unexpectedly, all on the same day, is a much bigger ask than providing for 100 migrants showing up periodically over a year. I don't like posting in a condescending tone but I'm not actually sure how to talk about this more without treating this like a math tutoring thread. Of course they were sent to the mainland! The whole fucking point of this story is that there was no good reason to put the refugees on the tiny Jaws beach island! They don't need to work on their tans, they need short-term food and shelter! They people to help them figure out where they're going to live long-term, what their legal status is and whether they need to apply to change it, whether they have any skills they can use to support themselves. Every single one of those things is harder to get on the tiny Jaws beach island, which is why it was such an obviously vindictive move to send them there! It should be immediately obvious that the people with the sort of means to own property on Martha's Vineyard could very easily provide food and shelter to 50 people (or 110, oBlade) without any meaningful sacrifice in their standard of living. But it's equally obvious the first step in helping these people would be to help them find a place to stay, and there's zero reason. You imply, without outright stating, that you think it would be more reasonable to use the population of the entire state of Massachusetts as a denominator. The implication of that calculation would be "The entire state of Massachusetts only has the means to provide food and shelter for 50 people." Uh, hey, maybe you've been too busy to answer a lot of the questions I've asked, but can I get a quick yes or no on whether you think that would be a reasonable assumption? Are you actually asking me to take that premise seriously? Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 08:14 BlackJack wrote:On September 21 2022 14:08 ChristianS wrote: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:
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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. 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. 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: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. The evidence is that the Trump-era policies were still in place for basically all of Biden's administration so far and the "border crisis" has, to hear Republicans tell it, been going on that entire time. All it took, by your own characterization, is a perception that Biden might be more welcoming. Incidentally, who painted him with that brush if not Republicans? If perception is such an important factor, isn't their very own rhetoric to blame? This is mostly a useless aside, but if you worked in a corporate hierarchy, and you went out of your way to create a big embarrassing public crisis for your company in an effort to make some other department look bad, you would just get fired. For all the many, many things wrong with corporate hierarchies, even pretty dysfunctional companies would correctly diagnose that you're a sociopathic careerist that will happily sabotage the company to hurt your enemies and advance your own position. Which, of course, is exactly what's happening with Desantis, but as dysfunctional as corporate hierarchies are, our democracy is apparently worse.
If you want to be clearer you should stop saying it's dumb to extrapolate while simultaneously offering your back of the napkin math that if MV can absorb 50 migrants than El Paso should be able to absorb 2,000 migrants. Or if MV can absorb 50 migrants then Texas can absorb 100,000. Why are you even doing this math if you think it's a dumb argument?? I haven't been doing any math to make such comparisons. I haven't even googled the population of Martha's Vineyard to even begin the math to make these comparisons. You seem to be the only one crunching these numbers and then immediately following it up with saying how dumb it is to crunch these numbers. Just for the record, I don't think it's more reasonable to use Massachusetts as the denominator. Just like I don't think it's reasonable to use the entire population of Texas as the denominator in the other post you made. But if you want to compare border towns vs MV and the migrants they've received you're absolutely being disingenuous if you want to use the entire state population as the denominator for one but not the other.
My point was simply that any community would be overwhelmed when a large group of migrants unexpectedly show up. It's true when 50 migrants show up unexpectedly in Martha's vineyard and it's true when 15,000 migrants show up unexpectedly in Del Rio, Texas.
Also I wouldn't say that the Republicans are too blame for painting Biden as being more lenient on the border while still having the same Trump policies. I think Biden is happy to paint himself that way to get the Hispanic vote. Again I'm not an expert on the subject but if their policies are the same and Biden isn't actually more lenient then where is the rage from the Dems that they had for Trump?
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On September 22 2022 11:43 gobbledydook wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 10:49 NewSunshine wrote:
And what are the statistics on that? I'm curious whether that's a substantial issue, or if it's being wrung through the "any crime is unacceptable" set of hoops.
In general though, it's appreciated to have someone actually say what they want to see, instead of gesticulating towards the general direction of anti-immigrant policy and leaving people to fill in the gaps for you. How many pages has it been? I don't know. Predictably, Fox News doesn't give specific numbers but talks generally about how drug dealers and gang members slip into the US and how many deaths that has caused, etc. It has actually been harder than expected to find concrete data about the effect of the policy. Sources that are against this policy also predictably don't mention the effectiveness of the program and focus on the harm done to the refugees.
If the best source you have at the moment comes from Fox News, I'm honestly inclined to believe the exact opposite of what they're saying. They have a well-worn track record of making up immigration crises that don't exist and proclaiming it the greatest threat the US has ever faced. I'm open if another source can corroborate that claim.
In general, if I remember right, immigrants to the US, regardless of their origin, tend to commit crime at rates that are noticeably lower compared to the US citizenry at large. So if what you're interested in is reducing crime statistics in the US, taking in more immigrants actually helps in your goal. However, to be fair, I don't have a source on that either at the moment.
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Sounds like you agree the comparison math is stupid. Great! Couldn’t be happier. Now I think you must have a different understanding of the word “overwhelmed” than me in this context but that sounds extremely boring to argue about.
I’ve been extremely unhappy with Biden on immigration. He’s been better than expected on some stuff and maaaybe the courts are partly to blame on immigration but like, I think MPP should have been ruled illegal day 1. Instead it continued well into the next administration. I think using Covid as an excuse to shut down asylum seekers that otherwise would have been entitled to make their case in court was bullshit that a court should have seen through immediately. Instead it continued well into the next administration.
Really, though, the “we’re just enforcing the rule of law!” argument lost most of its power as soon as metering became an intentional strategy to reduce *legal* immigration. That started under Obama (I don’t know for sure if it was an intentional strategy back then or just a lack of resources, but Obama was plenty eager to look hardline on immigration).
At that point you’ve got both US and international law entitling these people to apply for asylum in a timely fashion. Maybe they get rejected! But they’re entitled to apply. But hundreds or thousands are lining up at each port of entry and as a policy we only process 50 applications a day. So people just start coming across, getting apprehended, and *then* applying, and we can’t legally deport them because they do actually have a legal right to apply; we’ve just been refusing to give them that right at the port of entry. Then conservatives are outraged that all these people get to just come across, get apprehended, and stay anyway until their court date, but we’re the ones breaking the law here.
I’d much rather have a robust system for processing asylum cases in a timely fashion. But that would increase legal immigration, and contrary to Introvert’s insistence, conservatives are not actually interested in that, even for legitimate asylum cases. I don’t actually think most liberals are, either. Everybody knows this system is broken but there’s a lot more political will behind keeping it broken or breaking it further than there is in actually getting it functioning, so we’re stuck here forever.
So, uh, sorry El Paso had a bunch more homeless people last week. I hope they found shelters and such for those people to stay in. I’d love for the system to work better so things like that didn’t happen, but I don’t think anyone is actually interested in voting accordingly.
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On September 22 2022 19:15 BlackJack wrote:
Again I'm not an expert on the subject but if their policies are the same and Biden isn't actually more lenient then where is the rage from the Dems that they had for Trump?
Is Biden's administration separating children from their parents at the border and then losing track of where the children are?
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On September 23 2022 02:22 Djabanete wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 19:15 BlackJack wrote:
Again I'm not an expert on the subject but if their policies are the same and Biden isn't actually more lenient then where is the rage from the Dems that they had for Trump? Is Biden's administration separating children from their parents at the border and then losing track of where the children are?
He expelled almost as many Haitians in his first year as the last 3 administrations did in the previous 20 years combined. It was so bad the special envoy Biden appointed quit in protest because of the inhumanity of the mass expulsions of Haitians.
US foreign policy towards Haiti has been atrocious and continues to be under Biden as well so it's not as if the US has no responsibility for the conditions leading to their emigration.
EDIT: Foote aptly noted in his resignation:
Last week, the U.S. and other embassies in Port-au-Prince issued another public statement of support for the unelected, de facto Prime Minister Dr. Ariel Henry as interim leader of Haiti, and have continued to tout his “political agreement” over another broader, earlier accord shepherded by civil society. The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive. This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results.
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On September 23 2022 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2022 02:22 Djabanete wrote:On September 22 2022 19:15 BlackJack wrote:
Again I'm not an expert on the subject but if their policies are the same and Biden isn't actually more lenient then where is the rage from the Dems that they had for Trump? Is Biden's administration separating children from their parents at the border and then losing track of where the children are? He expelled almost as many Haitians in his first year as the last 3 administrations did in the previous 20 years combined. It was so bad the special envoy Biden appointed quit in protest because of the inhumanity of the mass expulsions of Haitians. US foreign policy towards Haiti has been atrocious and continues to be under Biden as well so it's not as if the US has no responsibility for the conditions leading to their emigration. EDIT: Foote aptly noted in his resignation: Show nested quote +Last week, the U.S. and other embassies in Port-au-Prince issued another public statement of support for the unelected, de facto Prime Minister Dr. Ariel Henry as interim leader of Haiti, and have continued to tout his “political agreement” over another broader, earlier accord shepherded by civil society. The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive. This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results.
If parents aren’t being separated from their parents, it’s hard to see expulsion as nearly as bad. Separation from parents is peak evil.
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On September 23 2022 06:10 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2022 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 23 2022 02:22 Djabanete wrote:On September 22 2022 19:15 BlackJack wrote:
Again I'm not an expert on the subject but if their policies are the same and Biden isn't actually more lenient then where is the rage from the Dems that they had for Trump? Is Biden's administration separating children from their parents at the border and then losing track of where the children are? He expelled almost as many Haitians in his first year as the last 3 administrations did in the previous 20 years combined. It was so bad the special envoy Biden appointed quit in protest because of the inhumanity of the mass expulsions of Haitians. US foreign policy towards Haiti has been atrocious and continues to be under Biden as well so it's not as if the US has no responsibility for the conditions leading to their emigration. EDIT: Foote aptly noted in his resignation: Last week, the U.S. and other embassies in Port-au-Prince issued another public statement of support for the unelected, de facto Prime Minister Dr. Ariel Henry as interim leader of Haiti, and have continued to tout his “political agreement” over another broader, earlier accord shepherded by civil society. The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive. This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results. If parents aren’t being separated from their parents, it’s hard to see expulsion as nearly as bad. Separation from parents is peak evil.
Functionally they are, but the Biden administration has (in many eyes) managed to divert the blame to the parents/caretakers seeking refuge for their families rather than his administration's policy.
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I agree with the authors of the piece you linked that the practices described therein are needlessly awful, and I appreciate you sharing the link, but I can also see differences between what’s described there and Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. Your link describes two things:
A) US policy encourages parents to send children to seek asylum solo. If you need asylum, leaving your parents behind to get it is needlessly traumatic even though one could cast the choice as voluntary.
B) Customs and Border Patrol will separate children from nonparent family members. The example given was a 14-yo being separated from his 29-yo sister and not being given a way to find her or contact her.
Both of these are different from, say, forcibly separating a 3-yo from her parents at the border and then losing track of her. (My 3-yo doesn’t even know my full name or her own full name. It’s heartbreaking to think about.)
I agree that voters should be upset about current policy, but I’m not surprised that voters were more upset about Zero Tolerance, since it was even worse.
If your goal was to make me upset about existing CBP practices, then you’ve managed. I agree with the authors’ statement that family evaluations need to made and that family units need to be respected even in the case of nonparent relatives traveling with children. Also, if a child is to be granted asylum, their parents should come too.
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I want to see if anyone is against complete immigration overhaul. I can't remember anyone saying that they're happy with the immigration situation in America for decades now but I see very little about anyone proposing or fighting for real policy for how to solve issues.
I think its one of the biggest examples of the failure of representative republics to adapt to the modern age. Neither side can even imagine actually solving issues when so much politics is entrenched around an issue. Back before the information age politicians could compromise from their white buildings behind doors but now so much of their fundraising and lobbying remains around the issue that perpetuating the issue is more profitable and beneficial to them than actually solving the issue.
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On September 24 2022 05:19 Djabanete wrote:
I agree with the authors of the piece you linked that the practices described therein are needlessly awful, and I appreciate you sharing the link, but I can also see differences between what’s described there and Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. Your link describes two things:
A) US policy encourages parents to send children to seek asylum solo. If you need asylum, leaving your parents behind to get it is needlessly traumatic even though one could cast the choice as voluntary.
B) Customs and Border Patrol will separate children from nonparent family members. The example given was a 14-yo being separated from his 29-yo sister and not being given a way to find her or contact her.
Both of these are different from, say, forcibly separating a 3-yo from her parents at the border and then losing track of her. (My 3-yo doesn’t even know my full name or her own full name. It’s heartbreaking to think about.)
I agree that voters should be upset about current policy, but I’m not surprised that voters were more upset about Zero Tolerance, since it was even worse.
If your goal was to make me upset about existing CBP practices, then you’ve managed. I agree with the authors’ statement that family evaluations need to made and that family units need to be respected even in the case of nonparent relatives traveling with children. Also, if a child is to be granted asylum, their parents should come too.
I was first raising that Biden's administration has been notably worse than Trump, Obama, and Bush (all unacceptably bad) when it comes to Haitians fleeing to the US. As well as how his administration has been actively making the situation worse at the boarder and in Haiti itself. I then noted it was so cruel and inhumane that even the special envoy he appointed resigned in protest. But not before pointing out how US hubris carried on actively by Biden's administration is making it worse again.
My goal was to remind people that there's a chasm that the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge couldn't span between "less bad than Trump" and "remotely acceptable, let alone ethical".
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On September 22 2022 23:23 ChristianS wrote:
Sounds like you agree the comparison math is stupid. Great! Couldn’t be happier. Now I think you must have a different understanding of the word “overwhelmed” than me in this context but that sounds extremely boring to argue about.
I’ve been extremely unhappy with Biden on immigration. He’s been better than expected on some stuff and maaaybe the courts are partly to blame on immigration but like, I think MPP should have been ruled illegal day 1. Instead it continued well into the next administration. I think using Covid as an excuse to shut down asylum seekers that otherwise would have been entitled to make their case in court was bullshit that a court should have seen through immediately. Instead it continued well into the next administration.
Really, though, the “we’re just enforcing the rule of law!” argument lost most of its power as soon as metering became an intentional strategy to reduce *legal* immigration. That started under Obama (I don’t know for sure if it was an intentional strategy back then or just a lack of resources, but Obama was plenty eager to look hardline on immigration).
At that point you’ve got both US and international law entitling these people to apply for asylum in a timely fashion. Maybe they get rejected! But they’re entitled to apply. But hundreds or thousands are lining up at each port of entry and as a policy we only process 50 applications a day. So people just start coming across, getting apprehended, and *then* applying, and we can’t legally deport them because they do actually have a legal right to apply; we’ve just been refusing to give them that right at the port of entry. Then conservatives are outraged that all these people get to just come across, get apprehended, and stay anyway until their court date, but we’re the ones breaking the law here.
I’d much rather have a robust system for processing asylum cases in a timely fashion. But that would increase legal immigration, and contrary to Introvert’s insistence, conservatives are not actually interested in that, even for legitimate asylum cases. I don’t actually think most liberals are, either. Everybody knows this system is broken but there’s a lot more political will behind keeping it broken or breaking it further than there is in actually getting it functioning, so we’re stuck here forever.
So, uh, sorry El Paso had a bunch more homeless people last week. I hope they found shelters and such for those people to stay in. I’d love for the system to work better so things like that didn’t happen, but I don’t think anyone is actually interested in voting accordingly.
I just fundamentally disagree with your philosophy that we can solve this problem if we just provided more resources and funding and allowed more people to expeditiously apply for asylum and get into the country. It's akin to saying that if we just massively incentivized even more people to show up at the border seeking asylum we could solve the problem of having too many people at the border seeking asylum. This is the California theory of governance. Just throw more and more money into making it easier to be homeless and then act surprised when homelessness goes up. Then you get to argue that the problem is even greater and now you need even more money to address it.
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Biden lays down the gauntlet and says that two more dem senators and he will codify roe vs wade. After an attempt to make the election about if human being deserve to be treated as human beings biden decides to make it about if women deserve to die because they are women.
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On September 24 2022 07:54 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2022 23:23 ChristianS wrote:
Sounds like you agree the comparison math is stupid. Great! Couldn’t be happier. Now I think you must have a different understanding of the word “overwhelmed” than me in this context but that sounds extremely boring to argue about.
I’ve been extremely unhappy with Biden on immigration. He’s been better than expected on some stuff and maaaybe the courts are partly to blame on immigration but like, I think MPP should have been ruled illegal day 1. Instead it continued well into the next administration. I think using Covid as an excuse to shut down asylum seekers that otherwise would have been entitled to make their case in court was bullshit that a court should have seen through immediately. Instead it continued well into the next administration.
Really, though, the “we’re just enforcing the rule of law!” argument lost most of its power as soon as metering became an intentional strategy to reduce *legal* immigration. That started under Obama (I don’t know for sure if it was an intentional strategy back then or just a lack of resources, but Obama was plenty eager to look hardline on immigration).
At that point you’ve got both US and international law entitling these people to apply for asylum in a timely fashion. Maybe they get rejected! But they’re entitled to apply. But hundreds or thousands are lining up at each port of entry and as a policy we only process 50 applications a day. So people just start coming across, getting apprehended, and *then* applying, and we can’t legally deport them because they do actually have a legal right to apply; we’ve just been refusing to give them that right at the port of entry. Then conservatives are outraged that all these people get to just come across, get apprehended, and stay anyway until their court date, but we’re the ones breaking the law here.
I’d much rather have a robust system for processing asylum cases in a timely fashion. But that would increase legal immigration, and contrary to Introvert’s insistence, conservatives are not actually interested in that, even for legitimate asylum cases. I don’t actually think most liberals are, either. Everybody knows this system is broken but there’s a lot more political will behind keeping it broken or breaking it further than there is in actually getting it functioning, so we’re stuck here forever.
So, uh, sorry El Paso had a bunch more homeless people last week. I hope they found shelters and such for those people to stay in. I’d love for the system to work better so things like that didn’t happen, but I don’t think anyone is actually interested in voting accordingly. I just fundamentally disagree with your philosophy that we can solve this problem if we just provided more resources and funding and allowed more people to expeditiously apply for asylum and get into the country. It's akin to saying that if we just massively incentivized even more people to show up at the border seeking asylum we could solve the problem of having too many people at the border seeking asylum. This is the California theory of governance. Just throw more and more money into making it easier to be homeless and then act surprised when homelessness goes up. Then you get to argue that the problem is even greater and now you need even more money to address it.
What if I told you that you could make more money and secure your long time finances by treating human beings like they had value?
Would you disagree fundamentally with investing in America and prioritizing economic growth?
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United States41983 Posts
On September 24 2022 08:27 Sermokala wrote:
Biden lays down the gauntlet and says that two more dem senators and he will codify roe vs wade. After an attempt to make the election about if human being deserve to be treated as human beings biden decides to make it about if women deserve to die because they are women.
It's not clear whether you're saying you think this is a bad thing.
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On September 24 2022 08:27 Sermokala wrote:
Biden lays down the gauntlet and says that two more dem senators and he will codify roe vs wade. After an attempt to make the election about if human being deserve to be treated as human beings biden decides to make it about if women deserve to die because they are women.
Frankly Id rather he kept a number out of it because the last time they were promising things for X number of Senators we got Krysten Sinema'd and Joe Manchin'd.
Just aim as vague and high as possible or be realistic and say how many you REALLY need to defeat the conservative Democrat faction because its not precisely clear that its JUST Manchin and Sinema who are crappy.
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EPT
