For Republicans, one of the nice things about their waning support for Ukraine is that it means they can credibly threaten to vote against it unless Democrats throw in some goodies for them. As usual, the goodies they want involve border security.
Politico reports that one concession President Biden is considering is a tweak to asylum law:
Under current law, if a migrant is subject to expedited removal and put through the credible fear process, that person is required to show a “significant possibility” of credible fear of persecution, torture or fear returning to their country. A tweak to the law’s language could in theory mean fewer migrants hitting the credible fear threshold and, therefore, more being denied the opportunity to apply for asylum.
That's all well and good, but it won't accomplish much. We need to do two things:
- We need a lot more asylum judges. We have an enormous backlog of cases, and asylum seekers end up spending years in the country just waiting for a hearing. This understaffing also means that we have little enforcement even when asylum seekers lose their cases.
- Define the requirements for asylum more stringently. Right now judges are all over the map when it comes to asylum cases, which is the sign of a bad, vaguely written law. The law needs to be cleared up so judges have proper guidance on how to implement national policy.
In addition, we need a change in how we handle ordinary illegal immigration:
- The United States should require employers to adopt E-Verify for all new hires. ICE "raids" can then be aimed solely at employers, who would fund the E-Verify program by paying fines whenever they're out of compliance. If the jobs go away, so will the undocumented workers.
None of this is especially coercive or inhumane, but it would work. I often wonder if that's why nobody seems very interested in it.
None of this is especially coercive or inhumane, but it would work. I often wonder if that's why nobody seems very interested in it.
That's precisely it. Immigration inspires the wingnut imagination, but not anyone else's, so everyone who isn't a wingnut just wishes it would all go away and that someone else will think about it.
For a conservative a solution that has no offset of inflicting misery is no solution at all.
This. It is very hard to work with anyone who is demagoguing to stoke fear and hatred. Would you co-sponsor anything with Ted Cruz or MTG?
This is a question that is easy to answer: The GOP loves illegal immigration. It has helped them win numerous elections. They are not interested in fixing the problem, they are interested in keeping the goose alive that lays the golden electoral eggs. So they propose measures that are appealing to primitive minds and that are known to be ineffective.
Democrats make the mistake of thinking they ought to solve a problem with policy. Obamacare for example made a big step towards insuring everybody. Success! But the Dems never benefited from that success in an election. The GOP understands that it is far more advantageous to keep a problem alive and to demagogue it relentlessly.
Yeah, I think Democratic voters are different; since we think that government is the way we can tackle problems collectively that we couldn’t individually, we expect our elected officials to actually propose and implement solutions.
They love demagoguing immigration. I noticed that one of the asks in the Biden supplemental was $14B for immigration. But Johnson dropped it from his irrational Israeli funding. That shows quite clearly how interested Republicans are in solving this problem.
I think it's more closer to:
GOP big donors love illegal immigration. Gives them a supply of low cost workers who don't complain too much and want to work hard.
GOP base hates immigration of all kids, it takes jobs from Americans and stirs the cultural pot.
So, the GOP political wing loves immigration because it animates the base and the donor class doesn't want it touched.
The comments here need at least a thumbs up function. Meanwhile, thumbs up to you and Kevin.
👍👍👍👍
I agree on the thumbs up feature. How hard can this be?
You can’t be the only one on here with emojis. Hmmmmm, let’s see…
👍👍👍👍👍 Well, lookee there!
That’s lit! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
KD: We may disagree with our approaches to the immigration question but this one post I agree with 100%. Conservatives don’t want to hear it but it will cost a lot of government spending to deal with the matter. McConnell will mostly get his wish list.
If you're going to really bring the hammer down on jobs with E-Verify, then you need to couple it with an amnesty for workers who have been here for at least a year or so (and preferably just any new workers going forward). Otherwise it's kind of inhumane - you'll end up with a lot more people panhandling, going door to door begging for work, or trying to sell odds and ends on the sidewalks.
Plus, who wants to be responsible for decimating America's food supply by getting rid of half the farmworkers?
Not just food production --- the US is dependent on cheap illegal labor in a lot of industries. We would need some guest-worker program so we have enough workers at the lower end to keep our economy from suffering serious problems.
Because, with Republicans these days, the cruelty IS THE POINT. It shows "manliness", sort of like "Sprinter" Hawley or "Cancun" Cruz. It shows "seriousness". It shows "resolve".
These pudges are all hat and less than no cattle.
Everyone (politicians) quietly embraces the way the current system works -- it gives both sides the space to air their grievances about the other side.
See the response I gave to azumbrunn. This isn’t a both-sides thing, Democrats expect action.
What is the Democrat's opinion of controlling immigration, though? Should it be -- as I believe -- open borders, or is it The Wall, or is it nebulous? I put it to you, it is nebulous.
"I often wonder if that's why nobody seems very interested in it."
I agree with the commenters above. I'd also add that any suggestion of a national job eligibility database gives the black helicopter crowd the willies. Yeah, I know. We already essentially have that database in the form of Social Security numbers, and it's easily gamed. E-Verify would just plug some of the holes. But putting the names of native-born white employees into a federal database would really set off the QAnon Qrazies.
SS is not the only database of employment eligibility. If you are an employee, they have all the taxes paid in on your behalf. If you are retired, they know how much SS you get every month, and the same for all gov’t benefit programs. If you are in college and not wealthy, they have the FAFSA records.
The black helicopter fearing, Qanon loving, RWNJ types are not worth considering. Repubs can’t win without them, but they aren’t enough on their own.
Pingback: Getting serious about illegal immigration - Angry Bear
There is no limit on human misery around the world and so there is no way to manage the crush of people. As the able bodied folks depart the shithole countries, the shit will stink more and more. And we will import the lunacy. Case in point - arabs in the US hating on jews. Africans and muslims hating on the gays. All this religious and ethnic hatred will become widespread in the US - and it's pretty bad here already. Your compassion and sympathy for the world's refugees will soon become alarm as they destroy any social cohesion we have left. Someone should teach these newly arrived folks what it means to live in a melting pot. Somehow I don't think they really get it.
David Brooks seems to see the danger.
"We’re living in a brutalizing time: Scenes of mass savagery pervade the media. Americans have become vicious toward one another amid our disagreements. Everywhere I go, people are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/opinion/resilience-bad-news-coping.html
Not all, but most hatred toward Muslims, Jews, blacks, gays, etc in the US come from one area. White supremacist. It's not all these random groups as the driving force of the hatred for each other. Just good old white supremacist.
Yes.
Religious fanatics of all sorts hate the gays. Muslims have been teaming up with republicans to hate on the gays. And now, of course, the arabs are going after Jews.
Hatred of gay people is a subset of patriarchy and misogyny. It's almost always about gay men, and the problem is that they are acting like women to these people, and for a man that is lowering yourself. Meanwhile buttsex is often privately accepted among men in those cultures as long as you are the top, particularly if the bottom is adolescent or younger, or from a lower status class, so not really a man.
I agree that importing large numbers of people with these beliefs which because of religion (particularly a religion with a Word of God/God Inspired Prophet Holy Book) not just culture tend to persist through generations.
As does the oppression of women.
Americans are less violent towards each other now than at practically any time during which Brooks has been alive. (Violence has ticked up a bit after bottoming out in the late 2010s but compared to where it was for the four or five decades prior its massively down.)
As with damn near everything, he is wrong and you should not listen to him.
I think he's probably thinking about the current drama on campuses and in street protests. Or perhaps in mean social media interactions.
"None of this is especially coercive or inhumane, but it would work."
Of course it would work, and that's exactly why Republicans won't do it. They like the situation that we have now! It's a three-fer for them:
1) Lots of people crossing the border illegally means businesses have a large pool of exploitable labor available to them, workers who can be paid very little and treated miserably. Profit!
2) Lots of people crossing the border illegally means they can point to a typical crossing point and say, "See? Chaos! Biden is incompetent!"
3) Most of the people crossing the border illegally have brown skin. They can point to that to appeal to the (large and influential) white supremacist wing of the party.
Republicans will not lift a finger to solve this problem, no matter how easy the solution. The status quo is working very well for them.
"None of this is especially coercive or inhumane, but it would work. I often wonder if that's why nobody seems very interested in it."
Two reasons why your very reasonable suggestions for change won't be implemented.
1. For poor, legal workers, immigrants are direct competitors for their jobs, and they therefore hate and fear immigrants and are more than willing to get angry at them, but they lack the power to change anything about the situation.
2.For rich "job creators", immigration is working exactly the way they want it. They get a scared (because illegal) workforce for cheap which can be discarded at their slightest whim, plus they get a scapegoat towards which they can redirect the anger of poor legal workers for receiving low wages.
It's a perfect setup, if you are a rich Republican. And Money = Political Power.
All these commenters are on target. (Well… except for resident nihilist Justin, who is just an amoral monster still apparently living a sheltered life in his mother’s basement.)
Eventually it’ll become another dog-caught-the-car issue for them, like what happened with abortion. Eventually their base will force them to nominate judges to actually solve the illegal immigration issue… cutting off the supply of cheap labor so many Republican-supporting businesses depend on, as well as causing middle-of-nowhere places to depopulate. (Lots of rural towns are only alive because Latinos have moved in to do the shitty chicken processing or strawberry picking or whatever jobs.) But, alas, not enough voters will realize this in time to stop it before it destroys big parts of the economy, including even more inflation in the cost of basic necessities like food.
Florida already requires E-Verify for any employer with more than 25 (I think) employees. As far as I know it's working well.
This thread is appalling.
Some of us are against this "compromise" solution because it assumes baseline "we should be trying to make it harder for people to come to America and stay."
And screw THAT noise.
I don't want massive resources poured down the E-Verify hole and a huge enforcement and courts mechanism. I want people to be able to come to America under precisely the same terms that four of my eight great-grandparents and a bunch more distant ancestors did: they came to America and that was all that was required of them.
Anyone who has ancestors who came here willingly prior to the slamming of the door shut in the 20s has no moral or ethical grounds to claim "sure, I only exist because of freedom of movement, but people trying to do the same thing now should be kicked in the face."
This is not the 19th century. At that time the US and most of the rest of the Americas were underpopulated by European standards. In the US and Canada the European immigrants seized the land of and annihilated the previous natives; in Latin America many natives were enslaved. Do immigrants now have the right to take the land of current inhabitants?
There is no reason that things have to be run the way they were in the era of colonization and westward expansion.
We still are, in fact. Not that it would matter if we weren't.
Call me when immigrants are murdering people to take their land, and we'll talk. Otherwise, this framing is bad and you should feel bad.
If we did that, America would drown in people as fast as airliners from the Third World could land. And they can land really fast. Mass unemployment, desperate housing shortages, a loss of cultural cohesion... the world is a vastly different place than it was when your great grandparents came over.
"Gotta keep the teeming hordes out or they'll swarm over us and destroy the country!"
The people saying this a century ago were vile liars and racists. The people saying it today are no different.
Loon
Respectfully E Verify, in practice, does not work well: the database has material errors. Forcing strict usage, without meaningful correction of the current data, is not likely to improve the situation.
Agreed, but any requirement to use it would also entail doing such improvements to the database and its operation. Still far cheaper than a fucking wall in the middle of the Rio Grande.
E-Verify is far, far, more effective than building a 1700 mile wall, and having real legal sanctions for employers who knowingly circumvent the process would also be effective. Really can't implement the requirement to use E-Verify nationwide without first deciding who can stay in the US legally, unless we are prepared to loose a significant amount of the workforce. I believe we tried immigration reform legislation, with Marco Rubio leading for the R's, which passed the Senate and went nowhere in the House. Rubio for his efforts got trashed by Il Duce in the 2016 primary for it.
Rubio's proposal was terrible, tho.
I have not reviewed what was passed in the Senate in 2013, but I would guess that it is an improvement in what what have today. All the Democrats, 13 Republicans and 2 independents voted for it.
"E-Verify is far, far, more effective than building a 1700 mile wall, and having real legal sanctions for employers who knowingly circumvent the process would also be effective."
Agreed but, to make E Verify really work you would need
1) near hack proof, national biometric IDs with a requirement to use this ID for all government services
2) accurate databases, consistently updated
3) decisions on current undocumented folks who live in the US (do they get a valid biometric ID?)
4) significant employer fines for failure to follow the E Verify law
5) etc
Neither party support anything, remotely close to what I just decribed
Both sides bath this argument in their own party bathwater
Keep this in mind
The DEMs want us to think about the children coming across the border, either alone or with impoverished parents. The republicans want us to think those families are going to become government handout dependent, job stealing drug dealing thugs who will prey on innocent Americans.
But to an American employer in a state with high immigrant population, those folks represent workers who will do what Americans don't like to do at a price Americans wouldn't accept like working as a roofer in Texas, or in a slaughter house in any state. Employers WANT e-verify but many just don't want to be bothered but they definitely want the cheaper labor.
When Trump says his second term will feature mass deportations and closure of our borders what he's really saying is that those businesses that employ immigrants better be ready for an instant labor shortage because thats what will happen in many states and in many industries
This study by Pew in 2000 shows that up until the year 2000 there was no real PROBLEM!! with unauthorized immigration.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
The PROBLEM!! was mostly an invention of Trump. The actual situation was more unauthorized immigrants from Mexico were leaving than coming in. The real situation that became problematic was people coming to US from Central and South America. These people are fleeing harsh lives caused by the political situation and drug cartels. I suppose in the future climate change may cause mass migrations and I don’t see how programs like e-verify will be of much help with this. I don’t see this as a problem with an easy solution.
I do see a certain irony though. From my point of view, the people coming from Central America are braving hardships and risking their lives to go to a place where they might have a chance for a better life. The current occupants of the place they want to go don’t want them. How are these people different from our pioneers who we romanticize and honor?
Ah Kevin, this would all require an investment of people and changing the laws, which the repulsives do not want to do. They would rather just all whine about it. Of course they would never prosecute the employers as likely most of them are repulsives....
Did you miss the lefty pile on when DeSantis tightened E-verify penalties in Florida?
The right nutters want it all gone but it's pretty clear the progressive left actually does believe in open borders.
This isn’t going to go over well here. The prospect the US and EU becoming majority African. 😂
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/opinion/israel-gaza-mass-migration.html
“One is the first installment of a series from my newsroom colleague Declan Walsh about Africa’s “youthquake,” the surge in population growth that’s going to give the continent the world’s largest work force within the next decade — two out of every five babies born worldwide by the 2040s, at least a third of the globe’s 15- to 24-year-olds by 2050.”
“That means the dilemma of the 21st century isn’t how Earth will feed an ever-growing population, but how the world will deal with a potential mass rebalancing of population via migration, an altered wealth-and-people equilibrium, in a world where technology is making the movement of peoples easier than ever. The hopeful way to view this transformation is as a win-win: “African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing: a youthful population,” is how Walsh puts it, and you can imagine the future as an acceleration in the exchange of resources, with younger African workers going north and sending remittances south to help boost the developing economies they leave behind.”
Have more kids white people!
We’ll surely get the dumbest illiterate young men here. Dumbing down our society even more and subjecting us to their violence and ethnic hatred. Bring it on.
In case you have not noticed, there has been a surge in West African, particularly Nigerian immigration into the USA the last couple decades. From what I can tell and from talking with my coworkers and neighbors who are from West Africa, they are generally well educated and hard working folks working a lot in the medical and IT fields. They tend, however, to be conservative Christians with corresponding attitudes on social issues.
And it doesn't matter too much anyway because robots and AI will be doing most of the work sooner or later!
Pingback: Getting serious about illegal immigration – Angry Bear