Caravan? What caravan? Now that the election is over, there appears to be no caravan.
We beat them back at Bowling Green.
It oughta be added to those estimates of total campaign spending I’ve seen.
Yes, if “sphere” or “domain” means anywhere that the caravan has currently reached, that could apply. However, since they are no where near our border, it can in no way be characterized as an invasion of the US at this point.
I’ll also point out that the caravan is still like 1700 miles from Tijuana and are down to 4,000 people. In a post earlier in this thread they were 2100 miles away on October, 31, and there less than a third of their number when they were being compared to the size of the force (14,000) in Pickett’s charge.
I guess I haven’t cared enough to investigate, but other than handing Trump a very poignant talking point with white national racists on the eve of a midterm, what did the migrant caravan hope to accomplish with this PR stunt? If Obama was currently president I think his hands would have been tied as well, and for good reason. This is a group of people gathered together to defy US law.
God help me, I just can’t let this go. I know it is trivial and irrelevant, but…
Barbarous/barbarian comes from Greek and is an onomatopoeia for what non-Greek speakers sounded like to Greeks( “bar-bar” ). Barbarossa comes from Latin - barba = beard and rossa = red. It was the Italian nickname for the HRE Frederick I, because he just happens to have had a red beard( also an Ottoman admiral, kinda through the semantic backdoor ).
There is essentially no relationship between those words. It’s that niggardly thing again and shit like that just drives me nuts.
What is the caravan’s destination? The east coast? El Paso? Tijuana?
No they are not. This is what the Republican get out the vote effort would like for you to believe.
This is a group of people gathered together with the intent of of following a legal avenue to ask for help. It is completely legal for them to request asylum at a port of entry.
Furthermore, very few of them will even make it to the border to make that request, and only a fraction of that fraction will be granted asylum.
The end result of this caravan will probably be less than one hundred people legally allowed to remain in the US. That is the truth about the caravan.
Tijuana most likely. They are still 1,700 miles from Tijuana FYI.
Ok. Has this tactic ever worked in the past? I mean, a group enroute preemptively petitioning for asylum. Other than giving fuel to the xenophobic fire what effect did they think a caravan would be more likely to accomplish?
I’m not sure I understand your question, but I’ll try to answer it anyway.
It ‘works’ for the teeny, tiny fraction that are granted asylum. It doesn’t ‘work’ for the vast majority of the caravaners who are sent back to where they started, oftentimes to their deaths.
Does that answer your question?
Is there the slightest chance that Trump supporters feel just a little bit stupid for the fact that last week they were up in arms about this, but this week nobody cares and that there happened to be an election in between that shift?
I mean works as in the tactic of gathering up to petition publicly. Would they collectively have had a better chance if they each had gotten to the border and petitioned on their own.
If we had a normal administration, I would agree.
I’m not sure I follow you.
Stop me when I go wrong: I’d figure that Trump supporters believe that we should be up in arms — literally, even — when the caravan actually arrives. And I’d also figure that Trump supporters, in the weeks before an election, would want to spotlight the issue: they’d want candidates to take a stand, the better to (a) cheer on candidates who tell them what they want to hear about how to deal with the caravan once it gets here; and, likewise, to (b) rail against candidates they believe will make the wrong choices when people show up at the border.
But if there’s nothing to be done about any given caravan until it arrives, then why wouldn’t they give it a rest for a while? Near as I can tell, it’d be entirely consistent to say “hey, I still care as much as I ever did; when they arrive, I’ll still push for exactly as hard a line as I did last week. But while it made sense to draw attention to that issue before the vote, and will make sense to make the right choice when the caravan gets here, there’s no choice before us now. I mean, there was, then; and there will be, again; but what’s to be done about it now?”
They have a much better chance of reaching the border traveling in a group. Even so, only a fraction make it to the border. Crossing the entire length of Mexico is fraught with peril, but being among a group of like minded people ameliorates that somewhat.
I bolded the parts where you went wrong by being entirely right; there is nothing that needs to be done now. I would argue that there is nothing that needs to be done ever. But, if we agree that there is nothing to be done for a while then why was was it so important last week to send troops to sit around and do nothing for a few months? Seems more consistent with the hypothesis that the entire thing was being done right before the election as a big nonsensical show rather than any practical reason to have tens of thousands of troops sitting in the wrong place for a caravan that a few dozen people may or may not ultimately show up in a few months.
Nobody actually cared about this issue a week ago. Nobody will care about it a week from now.
But they will care about it when the caravan arrives, right? And so, even if they’re wrong, it’ll make sense for them to be up in arms about it then; and, even if they’re wrong, I’d figure it makes sense for them to be up in arms about it when deciding who to elect to office, if those elected officials will be making decisions about how to react when one caravan or another arrives.
No. They won’t.
By the time the caravan gets to Tijuana it will be a few hundred malnourished people begging for help. It will be a couple days that are slightly busier than normal at the US port of entry near Tijuana. It will barely register.