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Following up from the discussion a few weeks ago, Democrats are trying to bring back the border bill from January: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/schumer-says-us-senate-will-try-again-pass-border-bill-2024-05-19/
I said that the bill is obviously something that Democrats want unilaterally, and is no way a compromise or concession that could be offered in exchange for aid or anything else. It seems like this is proven true by the fact that the Democrats still want this as a standalone package.
As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration. Any alternative explanations here? If it wasn't a trap, is there a reason why Republicans would turn this down?
This is your brain on relentless negative partisanship. "The enemy is agreeing with me!?! It must be a trap!!!"
Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties? Many issues aren't black and white, where one party supports 0 and the other party supports infinity. If both sides support some finite number, with one side's number simply being less than the other side's, then there's no contradiction if the status quo's number is far higher than what both would prefer, that both sides would agree to bring it down. For a more pessimistic take, it's possible that the side supporting a higher amount realizes that the status quo is too high and is thus costing them politically. In other words, they might prefer the status quo if they could have it for free, but they judge that the ongoing cost isn't worthwhile. That's what was going on back in February with the compromise deal. It's how the Democrats got to supporting much more stringent immigration restrictions without supporting any sort of amnesty, which had been a feature of basically every immigration compromise prior.
The resurrected bill could be another attempt by Democrats to defray the costs, or it could simply be grandstanding if they know Republicans will shoot it down again. Then they can say they tried to crack down on the border multiple times but Republicans (Trump) wouldn't let them.
The fact that the Democrat president singlehandedly increased the number to the current level seems to imply that their goal isn't to decrease it.
Depending on how you look at it, it was either a trap or a compromise that gave a lot to the Democrats while giving a little bit to the Republicans.s
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There are plenty of democrats who aren't in favor of open borders and the issue is a huge political liability for democrats.
Increasing migration is not the same as open borders.
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No democrats are in favor of open borders.
I should have been more clear. No Democratic elected official is in favor of open borders.
None? Not even one?
Not even one little fella
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None? Not even one?
"Open borders" also would mean you would be as happy to take in ones who vote Republican and also Xi and Putin fans, as much as you happy to take Democratic-voting Minorities(tm).
To first order there aren't any immigrant groups who would vote Republican. The US is well to the right of the part of the world which wants to get here.
I'm not sure about "are", but Cubans "were" an immigrant group that voted Republican.
And then the second generation voted Democratic. But they were the last socialist refugees to oppose socialism; Venezuelan refugees just think the revolution was betrayed.
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I dunno that that's true. Brown immigrants vote D for transparently self-serving reasons, or occasionally machine politics, and not due to ideological affinity.
There's also plenty of eastern Europeans who would like to move here who would be willing to vote R. Current law just doesn't allow working class immigration except for illegal border crossers.
Some group of conservatives should establish an NGO that flies Eastern Europeans to Mexico, then helps them cross the border and claim asylum. If they could get Russians or Armenians, the immigrants would even have a pretty good asylum case.
I believe you'd find that sword has but a single edge.
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I'm someone that generally sees the two parties as pretty close to each other in actual policy positions. Even if they loudly scream about how different they are.
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
Lots of people here like to complain about the Democrats being in favor of open borders, but as someone who is actually in favor of open borders I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.
If you think we have open borders right now .. I think we disagree on too much of base reality and we won't get very far talking with each other.
All of that to say, I would not be surprised if the bill looks semi strict on immigration but basically lacks any real teeth.
The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.
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There are two thoughts on how to win a FPTP:
Win the median voter and everyone to such voters left or right, OR
GOTV by appealing to your base.
If trying to appeal to the median voter kills GOTV amongst your base, then you lose the election. The really successful politician can do both.
I think one strategy is to pursue mainstream policy while also convincing your base that your opponent would totally end democracy.
Another strategy is to pursue extreme policy while also convincing the moderate voters that your opponent would totally end democracy.
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In some ways what we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have open borders for criminals and for low-skilled workers who are willing to work for low wages off the books, but we have tightly restricted immigration for highly skilled workers.
The US would be well served by adopting the Australian method: A relatively easy points based system to get in if you're a skilled worker plus a guarantee you'll be detained offshore and never be allowed into the US ever again if you arrive illegally.
This doesn't suffice to limit the liabilities of diversity. It's very hard to overstate how much self-inflicted damage the United States has accepted in the name of refusing to discriminate between migrant populations on the basis of their cultural backgrounds. People are obviously aware of major incidents like 9/11, but dealing with petty intrusions like not being able to check a backpack at a race because an Islamic extremist bombed the Boston Marathon are just everywhere. We also get the low-level annoyances of antisemitic losers on college campuses and women in beekeeper outfits. There is no plausible case that the benefits of Muslim immigration have outstripped the costs.
Huh? Tsarnaev senior was admitted to the country as an asylee. Wiki says he was on welfare, and worked as a "backyard mechanic."
Tamerlan is a college dropout who tried to compete in boxing and was otherwise a piece of shit with no steady employment listed on his wiki page.
Dzhokar was still in college at the time of the bombing but had a 1.09 GPA.
I don't see how any of these people come to the country on a points based system.
On the other hand, I've worked with many talented and pleasant Iranian immigrants who are definitely assets for this country.
I'd add that getting and holding a professional job for a couple years is itself a strong assimilatory force; I can't think of any H1B who aided or carried out a terrorist attack. Which isn't to say H1Bs don't bring their own issues (preferential hiring of their in-group being a major one), but the biggest offenders there aren't people from Muslim-majority countries.
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I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
$15/hr for a cashier was already on the way just due to general price inflation. Preexisting cashier wages were already a premium over other unskilled labor because you need someone who can count, make change, be nice to customers, and not look fucked up, and even without the labor crunch we would've seen it.
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The focus on immigration types is itself unnecessary. Let the market decide. The key is that migrants and their children should have no recourse to US citizenship (by naturalization or birthright), ever. Perhaps for the richest we can allow them to buy in for $5m per (immediate) family, paid in cash to the treasury dept. Everyone else can go home to retire or when the job is done. They can pay to school their children in public schools, and can’t bring over family unless they can financially demonstrate they can support them.
All we need is the Kuwaiti/Emirati system. These are countries where 80% of the population are immigrants, and yet the natives are still in charge because naturalization doesn’t exist.
At the moment, the US attracts people who see their country of origin going nowhere and are willing to emigrate to secure a better future for themselves and their kids. Due to an oversupply of such people, the US can -- in principle -- filter for the best and the brightest of them.
What you are offering is instead is an oil rig job -- hard work, hostile environment, with the only motivation being able to spend the shittons of money you made after you come back to civilization.
Now I am sure that you would find takers for that deal, global income disparities being what they are, plenty of people would jump at the chances to pick up dog turds for minimum wages which will allow their extended families to live comfortable lives. I mean, it is not like the Arab oil dynasties have problems finding wage slaves either. Put in the hours, go back home, live a better life.
But the top of the cream will likely look elsewhere. Why would anyone take a professorship in a country which has made it plain that they would kick them out as soon as they retire when they could go to Canada instead? Likewise, there is certainly the trope of immigrants who are working hard so they can fulfill their dream of some day owning a Kwik-E-Mart.
The lower class of US citizens will not much like the outcome of your proposal either. Suddenly they have to compete against people who are completely beholden to their employers for continued residency and may come from cultures in which unions are not a thing, while also willing to work for much lower wages because they do not have to feed a family in the US from them. If you think Facebook's preference for H-1Bs over citizens was bad, wait until Amazon gets to staff all their warehouses with people who have much worse visa conditions than H-1B.
I also have some moral objections to your proposal. Leaving aside the question if indentured servitude a la UAE is really the path the US should follow, I also believe that people should generally be the citizen of the country they have lived in for generations. Your proposal would create a permanent caste of people who are non-citizens. Given the TFR, it seems entirely possible that at some point a significant fraction of the population will be excluded from democratic participation. At some point you in effect have an aristocracy. This feels deeply un-american to me.
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If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence). But it is fair for a settler country to decide that permanent settlement is finished. That involves no contradiction or hypocrisy. Manifest destiny is over. The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.
This seems wildly arbitrary. Why can't Duluth be the size of Chicago, Wilmington the size of Manhattan, Portland (Maine) at least as large as Boston? Not to mention the density of many major American cities such as Boston, DC, St. Louis, etc. is a fraction of what it could be. Immigrants aren't coming to America to buy a plot of land and do subsistence farming anymore, they'd be coming for manufacturing and service jobs.
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Not except for the natives; the ancestors of the modern tribes (the Clovis people) killed and/or drove out an earlier wave of settlement.
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That doesn't account for the electoral voting system, as well as how polarization affects races down the ticket that might depend on simple majority rule.
That might be true, in the fact that Democrats created the current situation. But they created the current situation by opening things up far more than they were before.
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From my Fox and Trumpist sources, it has clauses which allow bureaucrats to give American citizenship to swaths of people and restrict the President from using his existing and Constitutionally granted powers to do anything about border crossings until certain thresholds are met. Whatever else is in the bill, those two are poison pills for the voting base of the GOP, so their Congresspeople dare not vote for it.
As I said last time we discussed this, “give American citizenship” is irrelevant when all their children become citizens anyway from the literal moment of birth. At most it slightly brings the problem forward by like half a generation.
When "bringing the problem forward" means "Democratic supermajority now" instead of "Democratic Supermajority later", it's a damn big difference. (because maybe the horse will learn to sing)
Exactly. When one party can simply import third world socialists (including religiously socialist Muslims) and make them voters, the other party has to either become a competing socialist party or stand on principle and expire.
Or flip the table and resort to non-democratic methods.
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I read that (great!) thread on the bill. Any other decent long form articles or think pieces on the bill? Some ignorant thots in the mean time. These might be too cynical, or not sufficiently cynical.
If you're a Democrat and see this is as a Genuine National Concern, but it's not a problem you can admit is a problem, then what's the best way to deal with it? If the party has consensus, then maybe you can talk to your more centrist party members to commit to a Blame Manchin strategy. You let the Republicans pass the legislation and then pass blame for addressing the problem-not-problem on your political enemies and useful quislings. This doesn't seem to be necessary and that should worry for the GOP.* This could also be Plan B for 2025.
If you're a Democrat and see this is as a Genuine National Concern, and may lose the Whitehouse to a man you can not be seen as cooperating with for the next 4 years, then now's the time. Get the legislation out there now while you have the chance. That's leverage for your enemy. Although the leverage may be worthwhile if the bill is electorally beneficial or neutral for your party in this election. At worst, it takes some wind out of the opposing party platform.
If you're a Democrat, and this problem-not-problem is more so an electoral concern, but you're constrained by your party's established platform that needs time to change, then what do you do? You put up legislation that doesn't really address the not-problem or help your opponents, but is enough to pass blame off to the other party if it passes or not. Hey, we just passed bipartisan immigration reform or Hey, we tried to address the not-problem.
Thing is, Whitehouse or not, it appears Democrats are willing to start calling this a not-a-problem thing a problem that needs fixing. Reasonably, responsibly, and certainly not due to hatred. CNN isn't running stories on how this bill is a massive betrayal, are they? Does the GOP get away with dumping a lost opportunity?
If you're a Republican senator you might see it as a Genuine National Concern, but the ongoing problem is not really an electoral problem for you. Not so long as you're trying, or so long as your state's governor keeps shipping immigrants to other parts of the country. It might even be a problem that provides more electoral advantages the worse the problem gets. If allowing the opposing party to fix the not-problem doesn't help you electorally, then what's in it for you? Even if it was acceptable legislation you think might work, your party might have consensus to not deal with the problem until your party has a stronger position.
It may no longer be not be politically feasible to reform immigration through Congress. It seems that way. Congress found the one weird trick years ago. Keep the big stuff on the docket for campaigning, keep your seat, and let POTUS take the heat. If he messes up you can yell at him, and even if it works it'll only stay workin' until your team is back up on the plate. This also fits nicely into a case where you, senator, don't consider this a Genuine National Concern, and is instead just another episode of political football.
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A cynical political reading would be the democrats want to be seen as “doing something” on immigration. Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.
To do this, they need to portray immigration as a problem that needs to be solved. This is difficult, because they have been blasting their base with the message that all concerns about illegal immigration are illegitimate racism for like thirty or forty years now, have actively worked to massively undermine border security for something like two decades now, spent four years attacking Trump's every attempt to secure the border, and directly caused the current crisis. I don't doubt the media's willingness to step up to champion the lie that this is all Red Tribe's Fault, actually, but I am skeptical that it will work all that well.
I saw Chris Murphy speaking on the matter yesterday and he seemed very comfortable framing the issue as needing solving, but from a different angle than where you're coming at - he's selling the idea that the real problem is that the system is so jammed up that these people can't even get a fair hearing on their asylum claims. Let's get something done, get some more judges and lawyers to make sure people get admitted legally, that kind of thing. Basically, illegal immigration is a problem and the solution is to make all of these people legal immigrants. This is easy enough to sell to his constituents, particularly when he can point to those dastardly Republicans that just want to keep these innocent asylum seekers illegal for purely political reasons.
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30 years ago Bill Clinton was talking about how Americans were right to be concerned about illegal immigration, in his State of the Union address. 20 years ago Obama said people can't be allowed to pour over the border undocumented and unchecked. 18 months ago Biden talked about having to crack down on illegal immigration in a speech. Now you may question whether he means that, but he certainly didn't have any problems framing it as negative. And nor did his predecessors.
Now when Trump ralks about that do they frame that as racism? Of course, its a great attack vector. But "its racist when our enemies do it, but not when we do it" is a perfectly standard (albeit potentially immoral) political strategy. Which is targetted at what you might call squishy left leaning moderates.
It does alienate left-left people who will say things like Biden is just as bad as Trump etc. But thats not who is being aimed at.
In other words you are wrong that Democrats as a whole have been blasting concerns about illegal immigration being racist for 30 or 40 years. Only when their opponents have those concerns. Thats how they can pivot if required, on what they themselves say (or even do!) if polling indicates they should do so. When you (not you, you!) do it, its racist nonsense, when we do it, it's humanely targeted enforcement. When you say you are skeptical it will work...well it has been working. Not on everyone of course, but it doesn't need to. Just for those who are squeamish anout kids in cages, but also fear the stories of immigrant felons.
Will it work ENOUGH to win an election is the real question I suppose.
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