Immigration, illegal and otherwise, is not one of my hot buttons. However, I do believe that countries have an obligation to control their borders, and I also recognize that immigration is a hot button for lots of people. That said, here are the latest figures for encounters along the border with Mexico:
Even those of us who don't feel strongly about immigration can surely understand that a spike of this magnitude requires a response of some kind, something that the Biden administration doesn't seem much interested in providing. I find this a bit of a mystery. Is Biden simply assuming that the spike will be old news by the time midterms roll around next year? Does he not care much about the border? Or does he simply not have any idea what to do about the current ayslum-driven spike?
UPDATE: The original version of the chart showed the wrong dates. Sorry about that. It's correct now.
Trump didn't deal with the problem, just set up an "agreement" where we'd end up with a ton of people on our doorstep. Biden tried taking baby steps to start to address the problem, and was shot down by the courts.
The best thing would be to see that their home countries have enough doses of the vaccine. Then see what can be done to help those places be safe for their citizens--i.e. go after the money in the drug trade--even if it ruins tax havens for others.
Some of that issue is address by the current bills working their way through Congress. Don't fall into the Green Lantern theory of the presidency.
Yup on this. This started last year when lockdowns started. Follow the growth line for March 2020. I would crow on mass deportations happening and also accuse Republicans of helping spur it via the corporate elite. This is how you turn swing voters against them.
Absolutely. Also: anything Biden (publicly) does re: the border is a lose/lose situation.
Biden doe not wish to risk (further) clashes with the progressive wing.
I don't think Biden cares or knows what to do. It's a hard problem. But I really hope Democratic outreach to hispanics is more than immigration.
A lot of us have been have here for a long time or even had citizenship since the US took over where we lived. Immigration has no special salience and while I am all for treating people humanely, illegal immigrants are still breaking the law.
Biden knows what should be done in the absence of the political climate. Unfortunately that would be a huge expensive "Marshall Plan" for the golden triangle with a ton of controls and whatnot to ensure that it didn't just go into the pockets of oligarchs and drug lords. There's no mood to do that in the US right now.
Not sure what other people see--but the chart only goes to 2017...so???
Exactly. I noticed the same thing. I also wonder how stable or neutral the "encounter" measure is. Is it sensitive to increased enforcement such that Trump's border obsessions could have driven up the number of encounters without the actual number of entries changing much?
Some really sloppy data here lately. Goes to 2017 but the title says it goes to 2021.
And now the labels are right but the title is still wrong.
Archive dot org early.
Archive dot org often.
Good catch. Needs clarification before everyone rends their garments and runs keening through the streets naked.
too late 😉
I think those with strong feelings in immigration have already picked their corners. I'm don't think there are many independents on the fence, waiting to see how harsh to brown people Biden is before picking a side.
I'm also unclear on what motivation the Biden admin has to make this any easier for Texas.
That's the political question. On the reality question, this sucks for a ton of folks, they should absolutely be helped, and Biden is a bit of a disappointment to me on immigration. But then I'm usually disappointed on this topic, so I'm used to it.
One person can only do so much.
It speaks to the general bottleneck of our government, where the representation is a fraction of what it should be.
Not seeing the entire Rio Grande Valley go bright red?
There needs to be a refugee relocation agency, if not a cabinet level department because this is really a worldwide issue, which is only going to get continually worse for the rest of the century.
Exactly, the artisanal quality of the problem of refugees will soon become industrialized as aquifers shrink while beaches strike new lines on maps.
Kevin ought to compare this to the number of routine border crossings.
San Ysidro is 90,000 PER DAY.
Two hundred thou for the entire southern border sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but we do have a border which is designed to be crossed.
I often ask my Republican Congressman why we shouldn’t want to let these honest and hard working people contribute to our economy.
Labeling the migrants collaborators and translators for the never ending American war on drugs who are fleeing persecution for helping the Americans should persuade most Americans to allow these people to become farm workers and slaughterhouse employees.
Most are not that. Most are from central/south America. Pumped in by corporate America and Christian's.
It is pretty crazy. And it’s only going to get worse. This is what we voted to tolerate. Just let them all in. It’ll be fine.
I have long been an immigration advocate. I cannot for the life of me figure out why my fellow liberals do not grasp that in the political long run, illegal immigrants count against legal immigrant quotas and limits….and probably at close to a 1-to-3 ratio. This connection isn’t automatic, but the more illegals, the more Republican wins, the less legal immigration connection is sure as sunshine in the desert.
The path to both maximum immigration AND fair, safe and orderly immigration is to deport, without much of a fuss, almost anyone caught here illegally while tightening up the asylum system to get us back to the few thousand cases a year that was the norm before the explosion of cases in the mid aughts. Trade that politically for expanded immigration quotas and faster, simpler and fairer immigration processing.
Republicans only win it you let them. Or you can channel the peoples/populists from the 1890's/1900 and make Republicans squirm. Either you get it or you don't
Deportation is blowing up records under Biden, and indeed will wear out the ability of religious and business associations in this game. Come back in a year. The rate is already slowing.
I THINK Biden is boxed in on this issue and a bit scared to speak about immigration given the Trump experience.
First, the economic incentives to migrate are tremendous: a poor working immigrant to the US generally can sustain themselves and repatriate some money home. Second, polling does not support vast new migration (versus much better polling for say the Dreamers). Third, Trump really polarized this issue (well he moved folks further to their respective corners). Finally, the political structure is another barrier: even if one imagined removal of the filibuster, I doubt support (meaning 50 votes in the Senate) for the type/level of immigration reform the progressives desire.
What defines a "border encounter?" I guess I could look.
Penetration.
Naughty
"Is Biden simply assuming that the spike will be old news by the time mid-terms roll around next year? Does he not care much about the border? Or does he simply not have any idea what to do about the current ayslum-driven spike?"
Now I must ask you a question: What do you want him to do?
1). Send in the military and mow down the asylum seekers with machine guns? Well, okay maybe not THAT option but I seem to recall Dems being upset with Trump and or GOP governors using the Army or National Guardsman to give the appearance that they "doing something" at the border even though they're no more than toy soldier action figures propped up in a game of play.
2). Continue Trumps' wall? Well I doubt if that's being considered either and besides, walls aren't preventing people from coming right up to them or figuring out ways around them, even during the Trump Administration as the numbers show.
3). Completely shut down and seal the southern border? That's an option but it would be pretty drastic and desperate and economically disasterous, especially for the communities on the border. For as much as they complain about migrants, they would not be able to handle a complete suspension of border traffic even to gain control of the situation.
4). Basically increase staff to handle this sudden surge, provide humanitarian assistance and process asylum claims. That's basically all they can do, especially with the courts now dictating immigration policy it seems because Congress is too divided to do so itself.
Now I get that option 4 basically sucks for those living on the border itself but what can be done that's both humane and efficient that's not already being done, just with more people? This is a problem for ranchers and those on living in the Southwest that's spans this century, hell even going back into the 80s and its going to be a problem because the U.S. is a place people are going to want to come to, even while living in squalid, unbearable conditions. Either Congress has to make a policy to deal with this (and fat chance of happening now, especially after Trump) or the administration has to deal with the law as it is and act accordingly, which is what they're doing. Everything else, even this topic, is just posturing.
There was one other option I forgot to mention Biden could pursue and that's to go to the border, jump up and down while banging a drum attached to a 30-foot flahsing electronic sign that says "PLEASE DO NOT COME TO THE U.S.!" The exact same message Vice -President Harris gave several months ago I do believe. Obviously this hasn't deterred too many people has it? You can't say they've put out the welcome mat but it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that so long as the U.S. rich and everyone in the region is poor or suffering from earthquakes, political repression or climate change, the migrants will keep coming. Especially when there's 10 million jobs to fill, or so someone on this website told me.
1) Republicans will accuse Democrats of supporting open borders regardless of what Biden does. For that reason, I doubt that there is much of a political benefit to dealing with the border. It makes sense for Biden to focus public attention on his "build back better" agenda (which he needs to get through Congress), and on COVID (where he has to try to convince more people to get vaccinated) rather than talk about immigration.
2) Biden's plan for dealing with the boarder is to encourage people to apply for asylum in their own countries (rather than coming to the border to apply), and to improve conditions in countries south of the border in order to reduce the incentive to come to the United States. I haven't seen anything to indicate that Biden is abandoning this approach, but it will take time.
"Biden's plan for dealing with the boarder is to encourage people to apply for asylum in their own countries"
Nope, he isn't trying to do this for the simple fact that it is impossible for people to do so. What a lot of people still don't understand is that in order to request asylum the person has to already be on US soil. That is a requirement for asylum claims. That is why it's maddening when people refer to them as illegal immigrants. They are not illegal immigrants trying to sneak in, they are actually following the the law to the letter, which is why they immediately surrender at the border as opposed to trying to stay under the radar like was usually the case in prior decades for those who mere wanted to stay undocumented. When people suggest they should apply for asylum in their own countries what they are suggesting is that they apply for refugee status, which is a different process and one for which almost none of the people from Mexico and Central America would qualify. Nearly all the people requesting asylum right now do so because the threats and persecution on their lives come from the drug cartels and other criminal organizations that run rampart in those countries, and which more often than not control the local authorities too. Unfortunately that is not something covered by the refugee process, which is limited to help people escape persecution on the basis of race, nationality, political views, religion, or membership to a particular group.
If population growth hasn't led to a decline in the economy, how does higher immigration make our country worse off, economically?
I can point to Japan and show you that population decline *has* to be offset by technology to replace labor.
I can point to higher death rates contribute to lower GDP.
But I can't show how increased population leads to lower GDP -- can you?
"how does higher immigration make our country worse off, economically?"
It doesn't lower GDP or even GDP per capita. But it hurts workers who are specifically competing with immigrant groups.
For example, undocumented, low-education immigrants coming illegally over the southern border work hard for low pay, and they compete with low-skill American workers. For these Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly. In some areas of the country, entire classes of jobs (construction laborers for example) are substantially undocumented immigrants.
Let's say that *anyone* who wants a work visa could get one. They pay a fee to work here and pay taxes but don't get safety net benefits. Are you still against people who would otherwise be undocumented immigrants?
And in those areas of the country, is there higher unemployment or lower? Is the economy bigger or smaller? Even if you're competing in low-skilled or unskilled jobs, what difference does it make if you're earning $15/hr working a construction site or $15/hr washing dishes?
Population growth unavoidably leads to competition for scarce resources such as land and, especially in the Southwestern states, water. This results in crazily high real estate prices, rapidly depleting aquifers, etc.
There comes a time when even the most enthusiastic growth advocate has to say "right, the country has enough people now". In my view, the right time to say that was about fifty years ago.
Land is not scarce. Real estate pricing isn't generally indicative of land scarcity; it's of the relative value of the economy of agglomeration and the willingness of people to pay as a result of perceived value exceeding that of the cost.
In other areas, prices reflect values of restrictive zoning policies that limit housing density even as population growth increases.
When people talk about land scarcity in cities, I point to all of the surface parking lots and the miles of 6- and 8-lane streets. Los Angeles is full of these. How weird, for a city with high real estate prices, to have so much wasted space, don't you think? Is it because land is scarce or because of other factors like policy and a willingness to buy into the economies of agglomeration?
Fresh water is limited but mostly wasted. We could recycle water to be potable but we don't. Some off-grid housing make use of technology to make waste (black and gray) water potable. We will eventually end up building massive desalination plants and aqueducts to deliver water inland to a certain extent.
Why not just limit the population, thereby limiting the demand for water and 8 lane freeways?
Shall we ponder the fact that commander in chief Joe Biden “killed 10 civilians, including seven children”?
I’m sure he’s sorry, but what the heck? 10s of thousands will Protest the murder of a useless criminal like George Floyd but no one gives a crap about this Presidentially sanctioned mass murder… of children.
You people are disgusting.
Yes. Drone strikes often kill civilians. That is relevant to this thread on the border "crisis" how? Didnt TFG solve this problem by just not reporting civ casualties?
Well, if Biden is willing to kill kids and you all don't care, why do you care about the so called border crisis which is just mildly inconvenient for people?
Clearly people in the us care more about the border because, first, it is a much larger problem ( just one bridge looks to be having 20,000 under it soon). And , second, whether it is moral or not , because the border crisis affects Americans directly while innocent afghans dying does not .
And should add. This was not just someone innocent who got struck by the drone attack . He was someone who worked with intl agencies we sponsor. I.e. he was one of " our guys ".
I expect the administration was desperately trying to find some way to possibly link him to a terrorist group, even in a strained way to try to say he might have looked like a terrorist. But was unable to do so.
And the real problem here was getting ourselves into a position where we are trying to defend an airport in the middle of an urban area without controlling that urban area . That is the real screw up as made it almost impossible to avoid possibly killing civilians in trying to protect the airport.
There is a big moral difference between any military action , including drone strikes , that target a legitimate military target but cause civilian deaths in addition as a inevitable consequence.
Vs. Here where the target itself was totally innocent and the administration finally admitted that today ( late on a Friday to bury the news of course ) after there were too many news reports to avoid the issue. And where the reported circumstances were such that it is hard to defend this as a good faith mistake.
What we may never know is the actual decision making process and whether launching a drone strike on thin evidence was politically motivated.
I served in the infantry in 'Nam and yes technically speaking we killed civilians - they were called Viet Cong, or VC for short
It was ugly.
There is NO amount of smart bombs that can correct this situation and we, as a nation, have become too used to wars being "nice" with ONLY the combatants dying. The problem is that WWII changed that but not here, not on U.S. soil.
The LAST war fought on our soil was the War of 1812. (Yes, I am aware the Japanese occupied a couple of the Aleutian island during WWII) - but even that was back in a time when wars were "polite".
I have no feelings one way or the other for this incident. If it's the only one? Good for us......I guess.
You fought in Vietnam? Tough war largely because no support at home. Did not realize you are older than I am.
Not sure if wars were more polite back in the 1800s. In some ways yes but in other ways no. Back then rape and pillage still happened often enough which is no longer normal. But you did not see the mass civilian deaths you now see which is more inevitable
It’s not nearly the only one.
Why are you so afraid that you ask your government to kill people half way around the world? That’s nuts. And then when they screw it up so badly that they kill thousands of innocent people - children even- you chalk it up to a good faith mistake. Do you not see the moral quagmire you’ve accepted?
How can we take the ideals of liberal democracy seriously when we allow our government to do this because of cowardice?
If your point is that we shouldn't have invaded and occupied Iraq and that we should have left Afghanistan when bin Laden and al Qaeda were evicted, I agree. But that's true regardless of civilian deaths from drone strikes.
@joelyes that is part of the point. But I expand it to illustrate that the Democrats are deeply complicit. The murder of innocents on the way out put an exclamation point on the barbaric bipartisan consensus for war.
And so this cry over treatment of immigrants, while admirable, is undermined by this barbarism. So when people defend war and talk of good faith, they are, I think, misguided. I’d trade a closed border for an end to these wars any day.
Trump allowed the Pentagon to change the ROEs in Afghanistan so they didn't have to do so much to mitigate civilian causalities going after ISIS or Taliban or whatever. MAGA!
But of course now it's Biden who's history's greatest monster now.
All my friends and family know I despise the war criminals. Bush, clinton, bush, Obama, trump, and Biden are all guilty. If you want to hide behind the idea that one was worse than the others, be my guest. They are all murderers in my book. And your defense of them shows that you don’t much care. Why do you want Biden to be a war criminal like trump?
Because no civilians were killed in drone strikes under Trump? Who knew?
Yes - the war criminals inhabit both parties.
Thanks, Glemm.
Glad to see you care about drones again. Only took four years.
Nope. When trump assassinated the Iranian generals I was quite vocal. Same when Obama attacked ISIS, Libya, and funded rebels in Syria. The US military is a terrorist organization and has been for 30 + years.
It’s curious how you defend them. Always.
BTW, if you look up oldest CBP data, you can go all the way back to 1999.
SW border encounters:
02.2000 211,328
03.2000 220,063
Yes, it's been worse before--but people forget. The situation is a bit different now, as others here have noted, not to mention asylum seekers are now demonized.
We're still dealing with the immigration system that was decimated by Trump--how to make it hard on immigrants? make sure no one is around to process their applications.... And as other write ups have mentioned:
1. resources are in the process of being deployed to alleviated some of the problems at the camp(s).
2. immigration judges/officials are stretched thin as they try to process Afghan applications
3. as one article said, "Biden is re-instituting Trump's remain in Mexico policy", though failed to mentioned they are under a court order to do so.
yes, being a bit lazy, so no links...
Who knows? He doesn't seem to have time to nominate an FCC chair either.
My general position is that more illegal immigration should be made legal immigration. If immigrants are going to come here, it's better for everyone if they do it legally. The solution is not to keep them out but to make it easier/possible for them to come in legally.
But as to the chart, my first reaction is to ask: why are encounters are up so much? I don't think you can address it without understanding that.
@RT
Caught the tail end of the fighting in 'Nam, Once THAT was over I stayed in for my 20 figuring I could get the remaining 17 years without getting shot at so from THAT standpoint it was a good decision (?). I moved around within the Army in various jobs, not always in the infantry.
I used the term polite wars because in the past because even though there is carnage in all wars NOTHING compares to WWII for civilian death and destruction. We have NEVER seen that type of thing on our soil. We're used to seeing paintings of the WH burning in the way of 1812 but the rest of DC remained relatively unscathed. In Dresden Germany the fire bombing was so bad the updraft from the flame.heat rising it sucked people up into it. That type of destruction and loss of life changes a society in general.
We see the camera's pointing at a building in down ton Baghdad until the laser guided munition destroys it. THAT's what we think war is nowadays.
I still retch at the recollection of my first kill in 'Nam- I wouldn't be human if I didn't.
Interesting you mention dresden. I generally think of that as the most unjustifiable action of the allies in ww2. More than Hiroshima and Nagasaki as it is very arguable that doing that saved even more Japanese lives than it cost, because they were just so damn stubborn and refused to surrender. More than the fire bombing of Tokyo ( which killed more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as there was some military related targets.
With dresden, it seems to have been targeted even though there was very little military reason. And it seems maybe BECAUSE it had no military purpose - to make the point this was an all out war against the German people and cause terror.
Just hard to reconcile that we would do things like dresden while still treating German pows humanely and simply executing goebbels after the war instead of torture .
But given the instruments of war available, not sure if anything today is worse than the Mongols. It is technology that has changed to make things worse , not human nature.
RT-
Don't forget Dresden was in response to the bombing of London by Luftwaffe planes that got lost IIRC.
That does NOT make it any better or worse
There are some estimates that put total death toll from WWII at 125 million most of them civilian.
It changed the course of history.
Revenge. That’s cold.
Goering was executed. Goebbels committed suicide. When I do this I call it a thinkographical error 😉
Wondering if there is an evangelical connection to the surge. Evans' have been making big inroads in Central American churches. The opposite is happening in the US. Is it a way to restock the congregations?
Someone has to finance the surge. Poor folks don't have bus fair.
I saw that some people from Haiti have gone through Chile. How does that happen?
Read that they are crossing the Darien Gap... Not a friendly place.
But why?
If they can get there they can get to anyplace along the Mexican coast.
Many of the Haitians now entering have been in Latin American for a long time, often years. Biden has resumed the program of flying some of these back to Haiti. Whatever their claim to asylum may be, it doesn't come from the recent events in Haiti.
In years past border crossers were smugglers and single people looking for work. In my day, most from Northern Mexico. More recently, because of corruption and the effects of climate change in central America, families of refugees are appearing and surrendering in hopes of getting asylum. The change on the statistics is obvious. Instead of one guy on his way to Calexico who may or may not be caught, you've got five people who surrender, and will get counted, held pending a hearing. Stats get higher.
Easy fix, just crash the economy. No jobs far fewer crossings.
Debt ceiling maybe?
Even McConnell will be onboard.
Immigration is hard
Democrats want to treat them humanely and provide health care to them because wherever they came from they probably don't have the level of care we have. This is especially true when it comes to children.
Republicans view these same children as a means by which the parents can come here to get easy access to citizenship and our social safety net.
Neither outlook is correct, but I don't honestly know what the answer is.
But immigrants serve a valuable economic purpose
They take jobs Americans don't WANT to do
AT wages the American workers wouldn't consider working for
Treating people humanely, especially children, including healthcare is 'incorrect'?
Shall their home countries treat them humanely too? What is their responsibility?
They would be irrelevant to whether our government should be humane even if our nation were not partly responsible for the political situation in their home countries, which it actually is.
When Nazis out themselves, there’s no need to question it.
The total number of encounters is the total number of apprehensions and is misleading at the outset. While we are on track to exceed the previous record for "encounters" set back in 2000, the actual apprehension rate is almost double what it was back then, so only half as many people are actually getting in to the country without inspection. If you go way back to the 1980s, around 1986 or so you will find similar numbers, and largely from Guatemala and El Salvador then too. But, once again the apprehension rates were very low then. In 2017 DHS made an attempt to estimate the total number of people successfully entering without inspection (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/17_0914_estimates-of-border-security.pdf) and what they found was:
"With respect to border enforcement outcomes, available data also indicate the lowest number of illegal entries at least since 2000, and likely since the early 1970s. First, the U.S. Border Patrol made 408,000 southwest border apprehensions in 2016, the fourth-lowest number since 1972, and a 75 percent drop from 1.6 million apprehensions in 2000. The drop in apprehensions likely understates the drop in illegal entries given the apparent increase in the apprehension rate. Second, USBP’s observation-based estimate of known got aways fell 83 percent between 2006 and 2016, from 615,000 to 106,000, in spite of improved detection capacity. Third, the IDA Corporation estimates that successful illegal entries fell 91 percent between 2000 and 2016 (from 1.8 million to 170,000), though DHS is still working to validate and refine IDA’s methodology."
But the raw numbers are only part of the story. The types of people showing up at the border, and mostly surrendering to CBP, are mostly asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle as opposed to 95% + being young Mexican males seeking work back in 2000. And the asylum seekers have an absolute right to enter the country and pursue an asylum claim. They are, in the words of DHS, "nonimpactable" by normal border enforcement since they will gain entry into the US eventually no matter what. The crisis at the border is a humanitarian crisis of asylum processing.
So, what is Biden doing? Not enough from my perspective (over 30 years working in humanitarian protection), but he is doing something. Maddeningly slow, but doing something. The most recent move by Biden was to propose a rule a few weeks ago that would turn over the responsibility for initial decisions on asylum at the border to asylum officers instead of putting them into the immigration courts. The courts are backed up by 2 to 4 years, while asylum backlogs are still well below a million cases (about 400,000 last time I looked). The proposed rule would also expand asylum officers' jurisdiction to include decisions on withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture protections. Since they would be deciding issues usually left up to immigration judges the rule proposes increasing their grade level to GS 13, from the current top level of GS 12. They are serious about this since the same day they published the proposed rule there was a job opening announcement for 141 asylum officers at the GS 13 level. They are expecting to expand the asylum officer ranks by a 1,000 or more officers in the end (more than doubling what they have now). Some serious moves on the part of Biden. But did it make any news stories? Nope, and I really looked.
If Biden's plan works out, within a year or two the processing time for asylum requests will shrink from years to months. The last time the asylum corps went through something like this was in the 1990s when applications fell from something like 150,000 in 1994 to more like 45,000 by 2005.
How good will the asylum officers be in adjudicating asylum claims at the border? Well consider this; requirements for an IJ position are 7 years of litigation experience, and under Trump the requirement that the experience be in immigration law was dropped, so several hundred IJs are deciding complex asylum claims with no prior experience and about 2 weeks of formal training, covering all immigration law. Asylum officers are mostly recruited from the ranks fo people working in immigration related fields already and get 9 weeks of formal training on asylum only.
There is still a lot that needs to be done - like getting rid of the overhaul of the asylum regulation that Stephen Miller rammed through in the closing days of the Trump administration, but I h ave to admit I am impressed by his first steps.
Send them to Alabama.
For the first time in Alabama’s known history, the state had more deaths than births in 2020 — a grim milestone that underscores the pandemic’s calamitous toll.
“Even those of us who don't feel strongly about immigration can surely understand that a spike of this magnitude requires a response of some kind”
Lol no we do not