US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3784

On September 25 2022 09:20 ChristianS wrote:

I think it’s revealing that you think the asylum system would have such elastic demand if it ran efficiently. If we actually allowed people to apply immediately (as required by law!) and processed their claims in, say, 3 months you’d have a lot fewer people around with this intermediate legal status of “asylum seeker,” AKA “allowed to be here pending results of my case, check back in 3 years.” Sure that’d be a bigger draw for people whose cases are likely to prevail, but not for the people who are counting on years of legal limbo before their case is likely rejected. The implication would be that you think there’s a lot of people who have legitimate asylum claims but aren’t currently seeking it because our system is so brutal and slow they don’t think they’re likely to get the asylum our system *currently promises them,* at least not in a reasonable time frame.

Do you know how fucked up circumstances usually have to be for you to have a legitimate asylum claim? Lotta different stories come out of a lot of different places, but it’s not unusual for it to be something like “a drug cartel threatened to kill my family if my son doesn’t fight in their war against another cartel.” If you think that situation is real and common but you just don’t care or think it’s your problem, fine. But then you’re seriously gonna turn around and ask me to have compassion for the poor El Pasoans who have to deal with an extra 1000 homeless for a while?

It’s kind of rare to see an impassioned case for how valuable the asylum system is, and frankly I’m not qualified to make it. But think about every time Americans have had opinions about what’s happening around the globe. Aw man, some dictator or something is abusing his people, or some ethnic or religious minority is being persecuted! And we’re torn between an interventionist impulse (“Let’s send in guys with guns and shoot the bad guys!”) and an isolationist impulse (“Let’s leave them alone, we always just fuck things up worse when we go in anyways.”). A lot of situations we know we can’t go in (e.g. Hong Kong a few years back) but we spend a lot of time and energy worrying about the injustice of it all.

What if we said “we can’t fix things over there, but anybody who needs to escape can come here”? It won’t solve every problem. Refugees go through hell to get out of danger in the first place, and having to leave their homeland is often deeply painful. And it leaves the “bad guys” in charge with fewer people to resist them. But at the same time, it will be that much harder for tyrants to control their people if they have an escape, and rather than spend so much money and lives on a foreign war, we can spend quite a bit less on temporary lodging and provisions and education for them to integrate into our society. Hell, it probably costs quite a bit less than it would to raise and educate an American child to the point that they can join the work force at an equivalent level.

Like, hey, maybe there’s some value in the “huddled masses” after all if we widen our view beyond the increased burden they’ll place on El Paso’s public bathrooms?

On September 25 2022 08:59 Sermokala wrote:
So what you're trying to say through a bizzare healthcare example is Induced demand. The more roads you build the more traffic comes to fill the capacity.

The solution is the same in both cases, bus rapid transit. Spread the asylum seekers throughout the country through a federally planned system to distribute population to where capacity exists to fill.

The answer is not to make it an even worse existence for those fleeing bad situations. The answer is to consider the human beings as human beings and do what's best for them, and through those actions what's best for the nation.

On September 25 2022 10:10 StasisField wrote:

Then what do you believe? It's really easy to say "tough, they don't get in" and then offer nothing in the way of a rebuttal when people call out how inhumane your stance is.

On September 25 2022 10:32 StasisField wrote:
People are fleeing from all across the continent of South America on the chance they'll get into America and get to work for minimum wage and live in squalor. Counter-argument: the journey to America is a greater risk to their lives than just staying home if they truly aren't fleeing an oppressive, life-threatening situation.

On September 25 2022 10:32 StasisField wrote:
Do you think asylum seekers shouldn't be granted access to the country until their case is ruled on?

On September 25 2022 10:48 StasisField wrote:

This is cruel, unnecessary, and will lead to more people dying. This is what people mean when they call anti-immigration positions inhumane.

And this speaks to your ignorance on South America and asylum seekers in general.

On September 25 2022 11:12 raynpelikoneet wrote:

I guess you can call inhumane on anyone who doesn't get / deserve an asylum. Tbh most of those people seeking one don't, if you or your country wants to get them one, be my guest. I was just saying what is my opinion on the matter.

Which of the South American countries are at war? If none (as it is), why does USA need to give asylum for those people?

It is exacerbated for sure, bu7t the point still stands.

You can't ethically grow human beings, yet, but what you can do is place then in areas where their conception of a standard of living is much lower than the expectation of someone nativly born here. They then get a job as a working poor and begin to pay taxes.

On September 25 2022 10:08 BlackJack wrote:


I didn't say you should have compassion for El Pasoans for having to deal with extra homeless people. I said you should stop supporting ridiculous narratives that border towns are not overwhelmed when they have hundreds of people sleeping and defecating on the streets. Or that people wouldn't get on buses voluntary to go to progressive cities in the northeast because I guess they just love sleeping on the sidewalks of El Paso so much.

If you really want to take the most humane route you could just not have borders at all. Maybe not everyone at the border has a legitimate claim to asylum but they are all escaping something - either persecution, tyranny, or poverty. We already reject/deport plenty of people that are just seeking better lives for their families and we determine they are not entitled to it merely because they had the misfortune of not being born here. Why not just have open borders which would not only allow more people to receive a better life but it would probably also lead to less demand for coyotes dangerously smuggling people in. Is that something you support?

On September 25 2022 11:58 Sermokala wrote:

Venezuela is in a state of western induced collapse. We are directly causing their economy to crash and their people to starve. There is a mass exodus from the nation because a man in Alabama working at a home depot (a store where they sell things like nails plumbing supplies and house building grade wood) is setting price controls on their black market.

This is causing them to flood into the nations around it. This has caused the nations around it to suffer greatly and because the situation is so bad in those nations they're willing to travel through one of the few parts of the world there is no land route through in order to get to a desert in order to then get to texas. Like look at a geographical map and see the kind of insane journey one has to make to travel on foot from Venezuela to the united states.

I'm going to just take a wild guess and say that your opinion on refugees and immigrants is derived from the more recent Islamic refugee crisis that had people from syria migrate to Europe. That you hated that but feel somehow that because they were fleeing a war their refugee label was justified but because people from Venezuela and Central America traveling through to America aren't justified because they aren't fleeing from a declared war or a high level civil conflict.

We are the ones causing the issue that is requiring them to either flee or die. Shit like this just kinda happens when you try to rule the world and slap down anyone that defies you. America doesn't need to invade your country to ruin it. We just make it so that your people starve to death and your economy ceases to exist because we run the worlds market now.

And I am telling you that in the cruelest of maths this is again a good thing for the united states. Immigrants, and especially refugees are extremely valuable economically. You can't ethically grow human beings, yet, but what you can do is place then in areas where their conception of a standard of living is much lower than the expectation of someone nativly born here. They then get a job as a working poor and begin to pay taxes. More valuable then the men is the women, who create more human beings and disproportionately spend money on good things for America like education and healthcare for the human beings that they sprout from the ground I think idk how women work. Now you've got a fresh crop of humans you can train and educate to be super productive in the mold you've grown others in. On top of that you don't need to build fresh infrastructure for them because the existing population isn't reproduceing at the same rate and then can take empty slots that would go unfilled otherwise.

Also not wanting immigrants of any kind is a bit ethnostate and bad. I guarantee Finland needs immigrants in the next few decades to stave off economic collapse and making their children culturally finnish is the only way you save your culture in the next 100 years.

On September 25 2022 13:42 RvB wrote:

Venezuela collapsed all by itself with price controls, nationalisations, mass corruption, and a government destroying their institutions. The West had nothing to do with it.

Edit: and of course the government spending financed by the central bank

On September 25 2022 15:22 EnDeR_ wrote:
Mass migration is a problem that is here to stay and likely to get worse once climate breakdown gets going seriously in the next couple of decades. We are going to have to make a choice of whether we want to help or not.

What we have here though is a large fraction of people that do not want to help but because saying no to asylum seekers with horrible stories makes you look bad, they'd rather break the system so they can't ever get in.

On September 26 2022 04:05 Slydie wrote:


I am not worried about the "climate breakdown" at all. We are both amazing at growing food and transporting it around, and we'll only get better in the future.

Mind you, the US is filled with Europeans because they migrated in millions from around the time the "global warming" started. A colder climate is arguably much worse than a warmer one, we'll see...

On September 26 2022 04:05 Slydie wrote:


I am not worried about the "climate breakdown" at all. We are both amazing at growing food and transporting it around, and we'll only get better in the future.

Mind you, the US is filled with Europeans because they migrated in millions from around the time the "global warming" started. A colder climate is arguably much worse than a warmer one, we'll see...