I mean, a bunch of context-free links is definitely closer to a rebuttal of the idea that there’s no crisis, and indeed it reflects what I’ve been hearing.
I’m uninterested in a Gish Gallop, though, so let’s just look at one of these articles: New York’s bonkers mayor, who blames immigrants for his budget crisis. From your article:
The article mentions, without elaboration:
(emphasis added)
I’ll assume for now that all your articles have similar issues. If you want to focus on something else, I recommend you explain what you’re focusing on, instead of offering bare links.
With that assumption in mind, I have two questions:
Is Adams scapegoating migrants, because it’s an easy way to avoid blame for his own mismanagement?
More liberal immigration laws would allow migrants to work and would remove barriers to obtaining housing and other private services. To the extent that there actually is a problem here, is it one that’s best solved by making it easier on migrants instead of harder?
I was surprised it’s that high. And if that’s for the nation as a whole, there must be areas where it’s a lot higher than that. And I can kind of understand why people who live in those places might think “Whoa! We’re getting an awful lot of immigrants here!”
Yeah, it was a big issue where I live, a few centuries back.
I definitely get why folks might feel that way. What I want to pin down, though, is whether it goes beyond a feeling, and to what extent the solution to any actual crisis lies in more border enforcement, or better avenues for immigrants to integrate with the existing community.
Suppose that there is a Democratic wave election this November. Possible! Trump could go to prison, and his supporters stay home.
Then say that Democrats use this opportunity to enact a policy recognizing that migrants are, overwhelmingly, good people making a better life for their families, and thus just as deserving as those who are already U.S. citizens. I find that hard to believe, but you seem to think it conceivable – so, maybe!
Potential migrants have cell phones and read, or see, the news. Local commentators would be opining that America’s turn to the left, on immigration, is a very limited time offer. So every available excess seat, in the world airliner fleet, would be devoted to bringing immigrants to the United States. I’m going to say – crisis.
As for establishing a process where third world potential migrants are put on a list where we would supposedly get down to their name some years from now, no one smart enough, that we really want them as Americans, is going to believe the policy will be the same when their name is reached. All would be see it as hopeless if their date was after the next presidential. Better to get into the U.S. right away, now that, I presume, progressive policy is making the southern physical border more permeable.
Surely there must be some way to spread out the migration a bit so entry into the U.S. will be millions a year, rather than millions a month, without migrants thinking that the Darien Gap and Sonoran Desert are a better risk. No. You won’t get controlled immigration without actual controls.
Only if the law makes sense. People driving 3x the speed limit past an elementary school is a serious problem, but not if the speed limit is 5mph.
Yes, and the degree is between letting in basically zero people and letting in the hundreds of thousands to millions of people our economy can not only support, but needs to thrive.
Unemployment is at historic lows, with all of these people already here, we could have just let them come here to work, save all of that enforcement cost, all of those legal costs or at least focus those costs on the people who are actually bad actors instead of families trying to make a better life for themselves.
Life is full of problems, the government exists in large part to help solve problems or at least make them better. Some problems are bigger than others, of course.
To me a crisis is one that affects or potentially affects everyone in a significant way. When Covid hit the US and we had to adjust to try to mitigate the deaths, free up hospitals, and keep people from getting seriously ill, that was a crisis. When a coordinated terrorist attack led to thousands of deaths and showed vulnerabilities that needed to be addressed, and led to completely changing the way air travel security functioned. that was a crisis. I don’t see immigration coming anywhere near that, not today at least, and probably not ever.
Well said. If every problem were a crisis we’d forever be in crisis mode. A crisis is an emergency situation where a catastrophic outcome has occurred, or may well occur.
Villains like Abbott and DeSantis shipping human beings to various locations certainly creates enormous headaches, which is obviously the objective of these assholes. Without minimizing the headaches, what exactly is the catastrophe?
Well, in this case, if we are talking about going back to 1920 U.S. immigration policy, except no Chinese exclusion:
I think China would see the soaring rate of emigration as unacceptable, and stop international travel for all their citizen residents, except for a small elite. Locking in over a billion people seems a catastrophic outcome to me.
It’s always hard to say what would also happen if some policy change occurred that is politically impossible. Did everyone start taking some preventive medicine that cured nationalism as a side effect? Was this just in the U.S., or worldwide? If worldwide, then the emigrant flow would be split between a great many arrival destinations. And China would now be too progressive to ban international travel by their citizens. So maybe there would be no catastrophic outcome. But if it is just that the Republican Party collapsed, and progressive Democrats found themselves in temporary control of U.S. policy, yes there would be catastrophic outcomes, not least in countries of emigration.
China is not be the only country that now accepts gradual emigration but would go into crisis mode if it was sudden. Going back to 1920 is so extreme and unlikely that pointing to probable disasters is almost too easy. Perhaps these threads should therefore be about more subtle policy changes. But if one admits that there is wisdom in keeping some nationalistic policies privileging those already privileged, that leaves us in an uncomfortable place.
If there’s a crisis, it’s our inability to process a much larger number of applicants. We will need those citizens in the decades to come. We need them now.
That’s not a good hypothetical for a crisis. “China might lock down outbound travel if the U.S. liberalizes immigration” is not some unavoidable outcome. It’s completely within China’s power to not do so. Dictatorial governments behaving badly is tragic, not akin to a tornado and its aftermath.
It also misses the point of that particular exchange. The question is, why is the current U.S. border situation a crisis?
Is it a crisis of Biden’s doing? No. But if someone tells me it’s a crisis, I’m not going to argue back that your perception is wrong — it’s just a problem.
If you mean to concede it is a crisis, but only because the United States refuses to make its border policies uniquely liberal, I disagree. Substantial liberalization, without increased controls, would switch the nature of the crisis or problem without lessening it.
I am speaking broadly. There probably are some small liberalizations that would be a good idea by themselves — I just have not seen them in this thread.
If “the border” is a crisis, we must first ask what is the nature of the crisis. Is it:
the fact that brown skinned Spanish speaking people are crossing the border.
the fact that human beings crossing the border are being brutalized by racists.
#1 is not a crisis. These people are not harming our nation, they are not a “drain on our resources” they are not “replacing real Americans”.
If #2 is a crisis, it’s a crisis of our own devising. The racists that millions of people want to run our country are deliberately harming people who, if you read #1 above, are not harming anyone currently living here.
There is no evidence that substantial liberalization would result in Crisis #1, or that ending Crisis #2 will create a whole new Crisis. Reasonable people can debate how many economically challenged immigrants can be incorporated into our economy, but not if they’re trying to argue that the answer is zero.
CBO’s latest budget outlook estimates a 0.2 percentage point boost to the annual growth rate of real GDP. There’s a lot of guess work going into that that I’m not in a position to evaluate. They don’t distinguish between how people get here.
That works out to about $7 trillion in GDP over eleven years.
AFAIK, the rapists do not care if those walking from South America to Texas are African, as many now are, or Asian (more and more are Chinese), or European (some are from Romania), or from Latin America.
If you are thinking more about Republicans putting migrants on buses as the brutalizers, American nativists are perfectly capable of opposing European immigrants.
If you are thinking that the median American voter, skeptical of Trump but convinced there is a border crisis, is the brutal racist, well, I can’t oppose you for expressing your honest belief. But if people feel looked down on by mainstream Democrats, well, then they won’t vote for them.
Which border crisis? As I suggested, there isn’t one singular crisis, there’s the racist crisis, and the humanitarian crisis. If they’re convinced that there’s a tidal wave of brown people invading our country, then they’re the racists, and it’s not my job to make them feel better about themselves.
Next time I’m in Sunland Park, NM I should do a Reporting LIVE on the Border Crisis! thread in MPSIMS. Anapra Rd goes right up to the border and it’s a nice view of Mt. Cristo Rey from an angle you don’t get in El Paso. Except it would be really boring. Maybe I could count tumbleweeds or something.
How about next time you are in the Darien Gap or Sonoran Desert? Because if you report from NM, you will be missing those who died.
I think there are some other aspects of the crisis, but we should at least be able to agree that is a crisis. We also should be able to agree that without border controls, there will be another crisis due to tens of millions of migrants entering the U.S. as soon as enough airliners seats can be booked.
The one Joe Biden and a large portion of congressional Democrats agree exists.
There’s a real humanitarian crisis. Then there’s whatever the pro-razor wire, let’s put alligators in the Rio Grande, great displacement, “take back out border”, charge people who set up water stations crowd who want me to vote for anti-women and anti-child politicians is worried about. The people who find out where I’m from and respond that they’ve heard how bad it is for us there don’t strike me as being motivated by dead brown people, let alone ones crossing an entirely different border between two countries I have low confidence they can point to on a map. Or maybe motivated in the wrong way.
The humanitarian crisis is real. The “border crisis” of the Trumpist crowd is not.
Someone previously implied that with 1920-style border controls, we wouldn’t be overwhelmed. So I wanted to mention that there can be 22 million green card lottery applicants a year:
Add to that those who do not meet the current lottery education requirement — maybe not an enormous number, since you have to be able to afford an airplane ticket.
Add to that would-be migrants from countries excluded from the lottery because they already have lots of immigrants coming to the U.S. — that one IS enormous.
Add to that those who would like to come to the U.S. but do not apply for the lottery, since, depending on country of origin, there is a one in 400 chance of success, making it feel hopeless — another enormous number.
This is why I say that excess airliner (and passenger ship) capacity is the actual limiting factor if progressive-on-immigration Democrats got control of the U.S. government. Have a number for that? Not now.
To think more on this potential but, if it happened, real, crisis, read about Israel in the 1950’s, which experienced enormous immigration rates, mostly from third world countries. The immigrants came, were not happy living in tents, often resented the affluent people who had welcomed them, and, by the way, to this day, mostly vote right-wing.
To be clear, I don’t think that a waitlist queue is the right way to do immigration: When someone applies to enter the US, there shouldn’t be any more of a wait than the time it takes to verify that they’re not dangerous (no reputable criminal record, not on any terror watch-lists, no serious diseases) Which should take a couple of days, tops. I just mention that because so many people think the process works that, instead of the reality of there being no process.