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Backlash to the border bussing policies: To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards. New York City- which has received the largest number of migrants shipped from the southern border by Greg Abbott- is the site of protests https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/another-massive-rally-expected-outside-staten-island-school-turned-migrant-shelter/ Obviously not all of these people are democrats, but some of them seem to be. But the real story is down below, in LA.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/la-city-council-texas-governor-migrant-busing/story?id=102840424
Obviously, some of this is just hypocrisy and looking out for number one- it's fine for you to have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers camped under highway overpasses with no say in the matter, but don't you dare dump any on me- but I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work
When in reality Abbott has no incentive to stop when a federal judge tells him to, he has every incentive to appeal to the supreme court and ignore the federal judge- he does after all want to win his 2026 primary- and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop. Both practically- he wants these people to be someone else's problem- and politically- this makes him look tough to a base that doesn't already think of him that way- there's every reason for Greg Abbott to just keep doing this until he's lost much, much bigger than anybody seems to be talking about, or his demands are met.
And of course, 2), the decision to cast this as human trafficking
When, likewise in reality, "free bus tickets to New York/LA/DC" is quite an appealing pitch to migrants living under a bridge in McAllen and Eagle Pass Texas. After all, most of them didn't walk from Venezuela with the intent of settling in McAllen, they wanted to go further into the US. And obviously Abbott's real incentive is to get them out of his jurisdiction as fast as possible, which means offering free bus tickets to the places they actually wanted to go to in the first place. There just isn't a scenario where the migrants stayed in Eagle Pass long term; they could be deported to Honduras or wherever they came from, or they could go somewhere else in the country.
TheAgeofShoddy writes on Twitter,
I happen to overall agree - the dominant contemporary US left position on immigration is very much about avoiding having a serious discussion over how much it costs (currently, it is argued that it is free), and what means are acceptable to prevent immigration (currently, almost none) and keep it within some level.
About the only ones moderately serious about this are libertarians, who propose "no welfare" and "upzone everything" as answers, which at least fits the economic considerations, but fail to consider the political economy in a world where social programs fail to converge group outcomes and demagogues are eager to weaponize ethnic tensions.
The current position helps Democrats to keep their coalition together, but it's an obstacle to necessary reforms - which also fits the overexpansion of universities and student debt, Left-NIMBYism, and the general amount of reputation management conducted by Democrats in and outside of the party.
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Schadenfreude all the way on this one. If you're going to call yourself a sanctuary city, then live up to it. Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling. Funny how all those thousands of future productive citizens who will stimulate the economy by the advantages of immigration turn into resource sinks when they do show up in the big city that is built by immigrants and has plenty of jobs, instead of border towns and the south and western states, isn't it?
Particularly when you have people leaving food and water dumps in the deserts for the illegal immigrants because "no human is illegal!" and breaking laws. If it's fine to break laws to support immigrants, why expect Abbott to abide by legal decisions?
So why is LA putting obstacles in their way? Why doesn't it want to help people who have fled injustice and are in fear for their lives?
Yes, it's a stunt, but by God it's great to see the hypocrisy of the liberals exposed like this.
What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California? (Spoilers: it's a lot, considerably more than Texas)
LA and the state of CA have perfectly adequate reasons to oppose migrant busing without exposing themselves as secretly anti-immigrant hypocrites:
The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning, so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.
So you think TX should be forced to host immigrants that it does not desire, whereas CA should not be forced to do the same even though it desires immigrants?
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This is all very very weak
This would be valid if the response was "Hey, it's great that you're sending us these people! Can we coordinate to handle this better?", and TX refused to send more people with coordination.
This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables" -- otherwise the precedent is that TX can ship people that CA wants to CA.
This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.
Of course it's an exercise in lib-owning. What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling? Saying "You're getting a kick out of my floundering around in cognitive dissonance when you expose my hypocrisy!" is not a defense.
Who's surprised? The fact that liberal governing bodies are opposed to something their stated beliefs demand they support is exactly the point. That's why it's "owning the libs"
No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.
When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.
Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far? Nativists prefer to believe that this exposes their opponents as hypocrites because it vindicates their own sentiments ("our enemies secretly agree with us"), but it doesn't square with reality.
Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.
Absolutely not.
If you inherit your fathers rifle and think it's "icky", then a gun collector would be happy to take it off your hands without worrying about "setting a precedent" that it's okay for anti gun people to gift guns to pro gun people.
Yeah, no. Not when it's politically convenient to have an excuse, and there's no substance behind it.
And the number of people does very little to make something more credible, since it's not like they're independent observations.
This does nothing to provide substance to the claim. There's still no proposed reason why "bussing migrants is bad", so nothing to even argue with.
Absolutely not.
The Wikipedia page is actually pretty decent on this one.
You may find it to be "cruel" to make fun of people for their exposed cognitive dissonance, but it is specifically getting a kick out of proving their perspectives to be reliant on mental contortions. Quoting Wikipedia here, "Online troll Jacob Wohl has stated that the goal in owning the libs is to evoke in people "the type of unhinged emotional response that you would expect out of somebody who is suffering a serious mental episode."". There are plenty of ways to be cruel to people you disagree with which you do not see falling under "own the libs" -- for example, "punch nazis!" is a thing, but "punch libs to own them!" is not, despite it being a great way to show how tough and cruel you are to the people they hate.
In contrast "owning the libs" works well even the "lib" in question is smiling and being a relatively good sport about it. Jordan Peterson vs Cathy Newmanis a good example. It is an asymmetric weapon in that it only works if you can successfully frame your opponent as having no rational response, and isn't even cruel to the extent that your outgroup can demonstrate humility, intellectual integrity, and a sense of humor when they can't respond with a rational thought. Those which can be humiliated with truth should be.
The whole point of "owning the libs" is definitely to own the libs. Yes, they get a kick out of doing it. Yes, there are social incentives to get "high fives" from the ingroup. Yes, people on the right sometimes like to pretend that their arguments are more solid than they actually are, and conveniently fail to notice valid rebuttals (shame on them). Yet the purpose of doing and rewarding this behavior is to actually show the libs to be fools, and to the extent that it is obvious that it is not doing this, the behavior isn't socially rewarded.
And as a result, the only valid response is... a valid object level response. Pointing out that they are high fiving each other and enjoying having made you look like a fool doesn't help your case, unless you first show that you aren't actually the fool you appear to them to be.
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The whole issue here seems to be that states other than TX, such as CA, finds it undesirable that TX give these people bus tickets that have places like CA as the destination. I'm not sure how it's possible to frame this in a way that doesn't fully admit that the decisionmakers in places like CA that are complaining or at least pushing back at this action by the decisionmakers by TX are seeing these immigrants as "undesirables."
"We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent. If migrants want to come here on their own that's fine, but we don't want the TX government deciding next week that since we're not doing anything about immigrants they can save money on vagrancy or prison facilities as well."
Then why call yourself a sanctuary city?
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That precedent was established a long time ago when CA and TX (and other states involved) joined the United States with the expectation of free movement of people between the borders. If TX officials are handing out bus tickets to people, and those people are voluntarily choosing to use those bus tickets to transport themselves to other places within the United States as they have a right to do, then the Union is working as intended.
If TX officials are using coercion, manipulation, or even just the slightest bit of pressure to these migrants to "ship" them off to other states, that's certainly an issue, though it's one between the individual migrants who have been wronged and the government officials who have wronged them. From what I can tell, there's likely some evidence that something like this took place, and justice for these wronged migrants seems worth pursuing. But if the objection is to a different state handing out resources to its inhabitants which then free them up to voluntarily choose to move within the United States to one's own state of residence, then, again, I don't see how to interpret that objection as anything other than the declaration that those people are "undesirables" in some meaningful way.
What evidence? Assertions from people who don’t want to have to deal with them?
It doesn’t seem likely that significant numbers of migrants illegally hop the border to take up residence in places like Eagle Pass and McAllen, and the state governments shipping them off are able to produce signed consent forms on a regular basis.
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Sounds like they should petition the Federal Government to intervene in some way.
But it also sounds like if the migrants sign a simple form in their own language that says "I consent to being shipped to California" that this concern goes away.
And absolutely none of this avoids the fact that the source of the problem is unfettered migration across the Southern Border, which could be fixed if there were action taken at the Federal Level, but that the Democratic Party has decided is not worth addressing. Indeed, they will take photo-ops next to the 'cages' where they keep the kids at the border to make you feel bad about current immigration restrictions.
So in essence, if your policies are creating a problem for another state, why do you get to complain when they make it your problem as well? Especially if you have been previously denying up and down that it was actually a 'problem' and saying it was, in fact, desirable.
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The position of the left-wingers is that countries have no moral right to exclude any immigrant that isn't literally part of the Taliban or ISIL, and that all complaints about practical matters such as housing are actually just a cover for ethnic hatred, and that no measure for immigration enforcement is acceptable.
In what way is it unacceptable to make them bear the full burden of their position that housing and other resources are free and materialize the instant an immigrant shows up?
Why should they not be made to take all unauthorised migrants in the entire country? They volunteered.
Sanctuary cities are free riding, and to correct the incentives this should be fixed.
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"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:
Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).
Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.
We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!
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Is this a standard you apply across the board? You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners - they always claim they're opposed to mass immigration because of the negative socioeconomic impact of mass immigration on their community.
Good luck finding:
women'sbirthgivers' bodies - they will instead insist that they do care about unborn babies and think aborting them is morally equivalent to murder.I very much doubt you're applying your own stated standard across the board. You say we should "generally" believe people who say they believe X because of reason Y, which implies that there are exceptions, and I suspect that all of these exceptions are people with whom you disagree.
Yes. I might think they don't take their avowed belief seriously (but then, who does?), but if, e.g. there are tens of millions of people saying they think abortion is murder I can probably guess that they actually believe a rough approximation of that rather than somehow coordinating tens of millions of people to lie about their motives.
It might not be their only motive, since social desirability bias encourages people to put their most acceptable justification forward, but we can pretty safely say they're mostly sincere about it.
No, but it's quite easy to find people who will admit that they think immigrants (or particular groups of immigrants) are lazy, dirty, criminal, parasitic, etc... or that they don't consider their lives to have equal value. Holocaust deniers won't generally just say "I hate Jews" and most of them probably don't hold that belief in so many words, but they will then go on to make some very sketchy claims about the character of Jews. And I'll be honest, it's not that hard to find people who will say that they think homosexuality is evil.
Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.
So why is my judgement (that many Democrats who claim to support mass immigration, open borders and sanctuary cities are insincere virtue-signallers who only support these policies when they don't affect them personally) unreasonable? Aren't their reactions to Abbott and DeSantis's bussing stunts entirely consistent with them being insincere virtue-signallers?
Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.
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The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.
These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.
In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?
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Giving people free bus tickets sure is cruel.
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I'm aware of that, but New York complaining now about immigrants turning up is just extra-creamy richness of hypocrisy. Are we back to the days of the Know-Nothing Party?
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I argued this after the Martha’s Vineyard stunt, but it really doesn’t have to be hypocrisy.
If they’re already at equilibrium, but Abbott or DeSantis decides to put his thumb on the scales, why shouldn’t they be annoyed? The outgroup is benefiting at their expense; it doesn’t matter how much!
It’s the difference between choosing to paint your house and being compelled to do so by your neighbors.
The term "Sanctuary city" doesn't seem to imply "we accept a proportional share of migrants but get upset if we have to deal with more than that" (1) Instead it seems to imply "we welcome all migrants". If what they really mean is (1) then their proclamations of being a sanctuary city are empty virtue signalling and they deserve to be exposed by stunts like this.
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The sanctuary city lot never said "yeah there's an optimum number of immigrants and our share would be X" or "economic migrants are definitely not covered", it was all pious "why are the horrible rednecks oppressing the mothers and children fleeing for their lives from despotic regimes? why are they not letting them through and helping them settle in their states?"
Now suddenly there's such a thing as a "fair share" of people you can take in?
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Of course they can. They can put him in Federal prison for defying them.
I am really curious as to whether you think that is actually, in the reality we currently inhabit, going to work out for them, if we assume that the Government of Texas doesn't believe that any crime has been committed.
How do you imagine an attempt to physically take him into custody would go, and are you already assuming that the FedGov would be willing to roll armored vehicles and/or Apache Helicopters up to the Governor's mansion?
If it plays out like the vast majority of situations where there's a looming conflict between State and Federal Authority, the whole situation will get put on hold (i.e. the warrant will remain unserved for the duration) and gets fast-tracked to SCOTUS.
I can't imagine anyone 'jumping the gun' to trigger such a possibly violent conflict when one of the major reasons SCOTUS exists is to help ameliorate the need for violent confrontations between states and the Federal Government.
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If he pushes it, it will work out quite well for the Federal Government. He won't push it though, he'll give in if a judge tells him to.
They roll in with overwhelming force, take him, and win. You don't really think the state police are going to try to fight the military (or a nationalized Texas National Guard for that matter), do you?
Remind me again, Nybbler, about those calls for local police not to co-operate with the Feds/ICE when it comes to arresting illegal immigrants?
That sure seems like thinking state authorities can ignore or refuse to help a federal authority? Someone better warn Mayor Lightfoot about the overwhelming force that's going to roll in and take her!
The local police don't need to co-operate with the arrest of Abbott if it comes to that, they just need to get out of the way.
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The Texas national guard(and the other state national guard forces in Texas under Texan command) would refuse federalization orders if Greg Abbott came up with some kind of sovereign citizen tier bullshit(he is, after all, an accomplished constitutional lawyer) as for why they have the right to. That’s almost literally the story of operation lone star.
This would then cause a constitutional crisis that paralyzes everyone.
You’re forgetting the fact that Austin is in Austin. If this happened the national media would stir up George Floyd-level mob of “patriotic citizens” who would storm the governor’s mansion and the state capitol. If the Texas National Guard fired upon these protesters, it would be Fort Sumter all over again.
The Texas government relocating top executive functioning to Lubbock, Corpus Christi, or Tyler for particularly controversial decisions is a matter of routine, and even if it wasn’t Texas police are more willing than average to turn on the firehoses and Austin doesn’t have full control of its own PD anyways- state troopers patrol the streets on an ordinary beat.
It’s true that the entire government can’t be moved, but it doesn’t have to and Greg Abbott relocating to Tyler for a while and some protestors getting beaten by cops is a step on the escalation ladder, not a nuclear launch.
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Is there any precedent, particularly in the past 50 or so years, where any sitting Governor got arrested for Federal Crimes without resistance from the State the Governor presided over?
I'll go ahead and give you the one I can think of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich#Impeachment,_removal_from_office,_trial
And in that case they had no support in their own legislature and had indeed violated the state's laws as well.
Do you think Texas would impeach Abbot over such an arrest?
I think the downside for the Federal Government taking such a step is so vastly disproportionate to the upside that it would be absurd to imagine them attempting it. So the State police aren't going to 'fight' the military, but what do you expect the Federal Government to do if state forces merely 'obstruct' their attempts to arrest the governor, say by erecting roadblocks and refusing to stand aside for the arresting officers.
Who fires the first shot?
"Putting him in Federal Prison" entails giving him some measure of due process and a chance to have a hearing and thus isn't going to be a quick fix to the alleged issue.
Everything with precedent happened a first time. The last time it came close was the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door". Alabama governor George Wallace yielded rather than be arrested.
Destroy the roadblocks and forcibly move the officers aside if it comes to that. But the state forces won't actually attempt to intervene bodily; they'll yield.
No, they just put him in for contempt on the word of the judge who gave the order.
Again this is without precedent, so I don't think anyone can be confident in this outcome.
In the vast majority of times the question of the State's authority to resist Federal intervention has arisen, the whole situation gets put on hold and fast-tracked to the Supreme Court. Since that's one of the main reasons they exist.
So understand that I can envision the scenario where Abbot backs down after a SCOTUS ruling establishing that he's apparently in the wrong, but I have a much, much harder time envisioning (and ascribe low probability to) Federal agents immediately jumping to arrest a sitting Governor on a contempt order where there is any probability that the State government declines to cooperate and there's likely an immediate appeal.
I mean Jesus, there IS precedent of Federal Agents Attempting to serve warrants in Texas wherein the party on the other side declined to cooperate. It was a debacle all around and I doubt that the FedGov has really forgotten that lesson.
Likewise, FedGov has folded in more recent memory when faced with CIVILIAN resistance. FedGov didn't just roll through the barricades and easily arrest those involved. It was way messier overall.
Cliven Bundy is, as of now, still a free man. Strange to see that FedGov can be cowed by a rancher out of Nevada and yet conclude they would simply steamroll the Governor of one of the largest states in the Country without a second thought.
Anyhow, I doubt any of this comes to fruition, I just think "they'll put him in Federal Prison" is not the easy checkmate move you're asserting.
There is plenty of precedent to throw people in jail for contempt on the word of the judge who claimed the contempt. That's how contempt works.
The precedents are now in place; no need to wait. The Insurrection Act exists, and the National Guard can be federalized at the word of the President.
Steamrollering Cliven Bundy doesn't politically benefit anyone; the bureaucracy might do it on its own but it doesn't help the political set. Steamrolling Abbott with a sufficient legal fig leaf is like steamrolling Wallace back in the day -- it shows who is in charge.
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Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
Because Waco was considered an ur-example of a poorly run operation that resulted in more carnage than was really necessary and the exact sort of collateral damage (women, kids) that should be avoided whenever possible.
It lasted 51 days on top of it all, so for a long time they DID repel the government's ability to serve the warrant.
At least, consider how the most recent popular documentary about it was received. I don't think public opinion on the situation was favorable to the state, and would the President really want to have that kind of massacre on their hands?
I dunno, there was no major upside for the Government regarding how that turned out. It is fathomable that they might risk that sort of event again for a sufficiently important goal, but I doubt they'd be eager to do so.
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Probably, very few are. Staten Island voted 57-42 for Trump in 2020, and the demographics that tend to vote Democratic do not seem very well represented in those pics.
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I've not followed this closely, but are the tickets offered on a voluntary basis?
It seems like if they were and food and water were provided, it would sharpen the critique against the target cities with the exact same effect. Arguably that might make the posturing seem less "tough," but I would guess that's not nearly as important when it comes to Republican primaries as is embarrassing Democrats.
Then again, who knows if those details would actually even be reported. I don't know if I can trust ABC to fact check someone saying the migrants were sent without food and water.
The Texas state government claims that migrants boarding busses volunteered to go wherever they were being sent(and my prior is that setting foot in a refugee camp on the border and asking "Quieres una boleta gratis a Nueva York?" would result in very many takers, so this isn't implausible, and the Texas government has produced waivers signed by migrants before) and that food and water are stocked on the busses(I believe this, if only because you don't do anything to move groups of people in south Texas in the summer without laying in water) and migrants are offered a medical exam before boarding(I am more skeptical of this one, at least if the medical exam is more extensive than a national guard soldier checking to make sure no passengers have open wounds or are in labor before departure).
I got a medical exam before 1st grade tee-ball. I don't think anyone was doing bloodwork, but they probably took temperature, bp, and maybe some fellas had to turn their head to the side and cough.
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I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year. The bus was traveling from San Antonio to Dallas. It was a normal Greyhound bus, and I had purchased a ticket. When I got to the bus station, there was some kind of (possibly Christian) charity group distributing boxed lunches. Most passenger wore stickers on their chests listing their names and final destinations.
I talked a bit to the guy sitting next to me (I speak Spanish). I'll call him L. L was from Venezuela, but had been living the past few years in Ecuador. He had a wife and 2 kids remaining in South America. He'd crossed north through Central America and then Mexico through some combination of foot, car, and rail. Finally, he'd arrived at the US border a few days prior. He proceeded to cross-over around Laredo, TX, then surrendered himself to American immigration agents. L was detained for a few days in some kind of immigration facility, then discharged to the streets with an (online) court date for a year in the future. Someone told L he should proceed to some kind of homeless shelter, so that's what he did. He stayed there for a few days, and then someone came and offered him (and other migrants) a free, 1-way bus ticket to the American city of their choosing. L chose Indianapolis, because he had some relatives living there. Some days later, he was escorted into a shuttle with other migrants, transported by shuttle to the Laredo bus station, handed a stack of bus tickets (there's no direct route from Laredo to Indianapolis!), and encouraged to board the bus. His first stop was San Antonio. L told me he'd worked as an auto mechanic before, and that he hoped to find similar work in Indianapolis, but that he was willing to work at any kind of job.
A few points:
Reading this I wish L the best of luck in making a successful life in the USA. Economic migrants (of all stripes) are one of the few groups for whom their version of the American Dream is still a possibility.
I admire L and his actions, because they demonstrate that he's high agency.
I despise our country's response to his actions, because it means we're not.
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That's the equivalent of "I met a poor person who genuinely needed a car, and the US budget is obviously able to handle giving out a car, so we should buy cars for every poor person who needs a car."
Even if the immigrant isn't a criminal and can get a job at a reasonable salary, the problem is the country only has resources for a limited number of immigrants. Because the drain on resources is distributed as a zillion dust specks, if you peer at any specific example it will always seem like that particular example couldn't possibly drain enough resources to matter, no matter where you put the limit. But cumulatively, doing that ends up meaning completely open borders and no limit at all.
Or in other words, the sympathy for the individual immigrant is a concentrated benefit, while the drain on resources is a distributed harm, so it's always going to look like we should add just one more immigrant because we don't balance concentrated benefits and distributed harms very well.
I'm not convinced that people like L are a harm on the country in any way shape or form, at least any more than comparable citizens. I can accept that the country is better off without L, but then I equally want acceptance that the country is better off without all its low end citizens (I am not asking for the citizens to be removed, I just want there to be a societal consensus that the low end citizens are a drain on society, who only get what they have by grace of their superiors), and we all know that's never happening.
The next best alternative to this is to flood the country with people like L. That way the wilfully blind societal consensus gets what it deserves by being run over.
Someone like L who has a trade, family members who will house him and get him work, and wants to assimilate isn't the worst type and good luck to him. The people trying to argue that it's a river, not a pie and that the USA can handle unlimited amounts of immigrants because they will magically grow the economy are the ones who need their feet held over a fire (in Minecraft).
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Without all its low end citizens? Or without a chunk of them? After all, not a lot of people are demanding that all immigrants be kept out.
And even if you restrict it to "a lot of low end citizens", that's sort of cheating, because it's indeed widely believed but it would get you cancelled if you say it in public. (There are also a noticeable contingent of people who "don't believe" it but whose revealed preference shows otherwise.)
We could in theory rank all citizens (or households headed by citizens) in order by net value to the country; anyone below a citizen whose net value is zero you could define as a "low end citizen"; then the country would be better off without them.
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Without a large chunk of them,.not without all of them. Just like cancer, the optimal amount of low end citizens is non-zero.
Fair enough that my language in the post above was needlessly extreme.
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I fail to see how this type of immigrant is a resource drain at almost any scale. He's hungry and eager to work, has a skill, is willing to learn english (which I'll take as signaling the desire to assimilate). The job market is tight. Where's the downside? Yes at some point we don't need more workers but we're several million workers short of that at the moment.
Perhaps in a more perfect world we'd have an elaborate visa system like Canada to only let in the immigrants like this. But in some respects the journey he made was the elaborate filter, and seems to be doing a somewhat decent job. I trust the government to do almost nothing properly, so maybe a difficult journey works just as well in practice as letting the government pick immigrants.
The downside is the (alleged) corrosion of social fabric and other intangibles. On a purely material level, working age immigrants with useful skills are pretty much a free lunch.
Only if they pay enough taxes to cover their use of government services. Which if they have kids they very likely don't.
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He's so willing to work he's undercutting the wages of natives.
Fuck him, send him back where he came from along with the rest of the foreigners.
Unnecessarily antagonistic, write like you want to include others in the conversation, low effort, banned for this behavior before...
Let's call it seven days this time.
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I considered making a comment with a similar angle. As nice as it is for L to work for a better life and all that, it's also bad when a bunch of Ls undercut people's wages. I see the "a bunch of" as the problem, not L himself.
It's also morally questionable that the US incentivized him to take a dangerous journey, too dangerous for his family by his own account, in order to get here.
Beyond that, all the authorities knew was "this guy showed up at the border," and they just released him with a joke of a court date. L seems nice, he knows a trade (or so he claims), he's certainly courageous, and I infer that he's a hard worker. A model immigrant, in other words. Most people who show up at the border probably aren't L.
A question for you, KMC. If the US accepted fewer immigrants, would you mind L becoming a citizen? Pick your ideal number of immigrants accepted each year for the hypothetical, whether 10 or 1000000.
Put another way: Do you absolutely hate all immigrants/foreigners in the US, or are you reacting to the ever-increasing number entering the country? Something else entirely?
Your vitriol seems misplaced. L isn't the problem, it's the people who made the policies that convinced L that migrating here was a good idea.
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This is a good thing. It means that I, as a consumer of labor in the USA, can get the same product at a cheaper price.
Protectionism in trade, which is what your argument amounts to, tends to benefit the few at the expense of the many and are negative sum over all. If skilled mechanics come to the USA from Central and South America mechanics in the USA will be econimically worse off but everyone who needs their car fixed will be economically better off
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This might be stupidly uninformed by me but wouldn’t it be easy for Texas to get voluntary compliance? Just put them in a shitty jail for the crime of being illegal which is against the law until they say give me the bus ticket.
That is if they didn’t already want to leave.
That would be relevant if they wanted to live in McAllen(none of them do).
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I suspect we might see "informed consent" rear its ugly head. As much as I like playing amateur lawyer, I can't make heads or tails out of immigration law. I legitimately have no clue where SCOTUS would come down on this.
I'm reminded a bit of SF's "Homeward Bound" program, where it offered free transportation home to homeless people. I'm not aware if they got the agreement of the hosting city before they did so, but I doubt it. Immigration law, of course, is a different beast.
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