Something very few people seem to know: Winning the green card lottery does NOT mean one will be admitted to the US. It’s just the first step in a long process. Among other things, an interview is required, and in some places the backlog for interviews is years long.
Here’s one article about it:
In several major cities there is now a crisis, where there was no such problem 6 or 12 months ago.
Chicago, New York, etc…(what Foxnews calls “the sanctuary cities”) are overflowing and unable to handle the number of immigrants who arrive by bus every day.
This can legitimately be called a crisis for each of those cities, and the mayors say so publicly.
The Washington Post has an interesting editorial/quiz today:
Folks who think the immigration situation is an actual (as opposed to political, or manufactured) crisis would do well to take the quiz.
Absolutely there are some cities in crisis as Republican governors are sending thousands of immigrants to cities who don’t have the infrastructure for the sudden influx. But that’s a manufactured crisis, best solved by throwing those Republican governors in prison for human trafficking. What’s distinctly lacking, so far, is evidence that the influx of migrants at the border is causing actual problems, especially problems whose solutions are other than humanitarian support.
If they are now looking at it from an anti-immigrant or immigrant-skeptical perspective, definitely. If I thought that this was a board where half or more of the posters were coming from there, I might have posted the same article you did.
But since I am not posting on such a board: This, the best New York Times article I have read in a long, long time, documents an actual crisis:
There is a fairly good article on this in the Atlantic, unfortunately mostly paywalled:
This isn’t the entirety of the issue, but a lot of immigrants who have family or friends in Florida, California, Texas, or elsewhere in the U.S., are being bused, by the GOP government of Texas, to New York or Chicago, where they know no one and thus must be put up, at government expense, until they hit the 180 point where they are allowed to work in the U.S.
There is some complexity here, and the number being housed at government expense in NYC is more than the number in Greg Abbott-sponsored buses. But it can’t be a coincidence that the cities targeted with buses are the ones with a significant immigrant absorption problem, while Miami and LA take in a big number and seem to be coping well.
NYC is claiming to be overwhelmed by the migrants. Seems like NYC is a poor choice for people seeking employment who don’t necessarily have a PHD.
It would be a poor choice for an immigrant coming on their own.
It would be an excellent choice for a grandstanding nihilist fascistic politician to send immigrants to a place they’ll have no hope of employment with the bonus of perhaps freezing.
That is a great article. It documents, as far as I can tell, a couple of different crises:
-A criminal crisis. The sharp limits on legal immigration have fueled the growth of organized crime, shunting vast amounts of money into cartels, which are characterized by the article as “what the F.B.I. considered one of the largest and most dangerous criminal organizations in the world.” More restrictions on immigration will further empower these criminals.
-A humanitarian crisis. In a rational world, immigrants will enter the country at places like Ellis Island, not places like Chilton’s ranch. By restricting legal immigration, though, we deliberately shunt immigrants away from facilities designed to aid and process them. It’s a bonkers approach.
I don’t deny that there’s a crisis, and I appreciate your offering clear evidence of the crisis. However, the idea that we’ll solve this crisis by further criminalizing immigration is lethally stupid.
I think whoever said this is incorrect, sensible immigration policy these days has to have some limits, if only because international travel is so much easier.
It’s clear, though, that our country would not be overwhelmed if the ~12M illegal immigrants we currently have had been allowed in legally. If we had allowed those people in, they would arrive with more than just the clothes on their back, as they wouldn’t have had to pay criminals to sneak them over the border, they could buy a bus ticket.
Does anyone else here see the familiarity with the war on drugs?
There’s a demand for something which some people believe to be dangerous, so we enact laws against it. But the nature of supply and demand being what it is, the laws only force the suppliers to be sneakier and more ruthless. More laws, more enforcement, more ruthlessness. No amount of enforcement can quash the demand, so pretty soon we’ve enabled the creation of monstrous cartels – the existence of which only fuel the anti-demand folks into yet tighter laws and enforcement.
In the case of migrants, the supply and demand come from the same people – the people who also happen to be the substance in question. But the dynamic is the same. More laws and tighter restrictions only drive more ruthlessness and strengthen the cartels. And the solution – as it is with drugs – is to rethink and relax the laws so supply can meet demand more easily.
Maybe it’s not an exact analogy, but I find the parallels striking.
As someone firmly on the side of “Everything short of open borders is a grievous sin future generations will judge us harshly for”, I thought this article was an act of journalistic malpractice more akin to push polling than any serious rumination on the issue. It was pretty easy to figure out that the right answer to every question was always the one most favorable to migrants. And it seemed like, judging by how quickly the audience went to being right close to 100% as the questions went on, nearly everyone else figured this super obvious pattern out too.
The entire article was engineered to only ever produce two responses: pat yourself on the back for being a good citizen on the migrant issue or look, you idiot, you’ve been deceived into thinking the problem is worse than it is. It shouldn’t be the job of journalists to frame an issue so dishonestly, even if it is in service of ostensibly noble goals.
All them furriners who come over here and won’t learn the language! It’s like all the Irish who flocked to the US during the potato famine, and they still haven’t assimilated!
Whaddaya mean “haven’t assimilated?”. Their skin is just as white as real Americans.
[/extreme sarcasm] in case anyone missed my tone of voice.
How is “certain other sources of news and opinion are engaging in a program of misleading and manipulating the public discourse about an important topic” not news?! News media should expose when businesses and government officials are cheating organizations and individuals of their money, but be silent when the lies and fraud don’t have a concrete price tag? 
We all have our opinions, on immigration and other matters of public policy. But there’s only one reality, and some things are a matter of fact rather than opinion. For instance, we can’t properly debate what to do about climate change when millions believe it doesn’t exist. The role of media used to be, and many would say is supposed to be, to give us a common set of facts that is hopefully as close to the truth as fallible human beings can get.