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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Biden has signed an Executive Order "that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500." Given that the current number of asylum requests far exceeds this figure, the border is effectively shut down now.

On one level, this vindicated conservative commentators and legislators who argued that Congress didn't need to pass any bills to shut down the border. Biden apparently agrees!

On the other level, does this take away some steam from Republicans seeking re-election? That's probably what the Democrats are hoping. "See? We care about border security too! Ignore our behavior for the last 40 months." But is it actually going to be effective? And will they just turn on the spigot once the election is over?

Going back to the bill, was there anything on the bill that would have been allowed Biden to accomplish this executive order better? Does the DHS and Border Patrol need more funds to enact this Executive Order? Or is this something well within their existing abilities?

It also appears that this Executive Order contains some gaping holes. It does not apply to the obvious categories (US Citizens, lawful immigrants who make appointments ahead of time) as well as:

  • Unaccompanied children (UCs);
  • Noncitizens who are determined to be victims of severe forms of trafficking;
  • Noncitizens who a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer permits to enter, based on the totality of the circumstances, including consideration of significant law enforcement, officer and public safety, urgent humanitarian, and public health interests that warrant permitting the noncitizen to enter; and
  • Noncitizens who a CBP officer permits to enter due to operational considerations that warrant permitting the noncitizen to enter.

Does this render this toothless and just good PR? Or are Border Patrol Agents likely to be very restrictive in their interpretation of the order?

Biden has signed an Executive Order

I want every executive order to be read out in full, live on TV with nothing but a printout. No in-ear mics, no teleporompters. Further I want the order to be explained in detail by the president. If you don't finish the whole thing you don't get to have it.

2,500 * 365.25 * 0.6 = 547,875

"The first half million or so we officially notice and record per year are free. After that we'll have to performatively restrict the flow."

Do you kow how many of those “encounters” turn into “releases”?

Last time I checked the math, something like 40% were immediately sent back. Combined with that 913,000, that would put us roughly on par with the pre-2020 numbers.

A Congressman on the radio framed it as a million per year. I'll add in your 60% correction.

I generally think most people’s minds are now set (ie Biden is for open borders). The latest change maybe reaches a handful of voters. But the retort is very easily made (ie you could’ve done this at any time but left our border open for years and only changed it within months of the election; shame on you for the harm caused + we don’t trust you).

The other danger for Biden is will he stand up to his left flank (to date he hasn’t).

I predict this will get overwhelmed in the news cycle by Biden shitting his pants at a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of D-day.

Hm. In my feed, both topics are losing out to breathless Hunter trial coverage. At least the pants-shitting would be relevant.

Well crap. I thought you were joking.

Yeah, normally I would disagree but that video is straight up bizarre and Macron sticking around to visit with veterans just underscores the whole thing. I think opinions on Biden are pretty well fixed at this point.

Does this render this toothless and just good PR? Or are Border Patrol Agents likely to be very restrictive in their interpretation of the order?

Hard to say. Border patrol agents have mostly followed orders thus far, but they’re also at least as loyal to Greg Abbott as to the Biden admin. So the question becomes- does Greg Abbott want the border shut down before Trump gets into office, will the admin issue any guidance to the border patrol knowing it’ll get leaked in the way that casts the Biden admin in the worst possible light, and I think both of those considerations boil down to expectations of media spin.

On the other level, does this take away some steam from Republicans seeking re-election?

Anyone who is following along knows that Biden caused a lot of these problems and tried to mislead people about his ability to affect the outcome until it was clear it'd cost him.

Anyone who isn't probably still knows about the increase in migrants and, if they're inclined in an anti-asylum direction, Trump will always be more credible.

I continue to believe that very close to zero people coming to the Southern border are even close to meeting any ordinary standard of asylum. The entire crisis isn't just self-inflicted, it was created deliberately by people that just don't want there to be any immigration standards at all and found a stupid loophole where they could just encourage migrants to concoct ridiculous stories that meet an arbitrarily low standard of "asylum". Now that this is locked in as the formal policy, migrant-friendly courts will treat these "asylum seekers" as having rights to asylum per international treaties and changing that course is quite difficult.

So, yeah, I am not inclined to think that the people that cooked up this whole ridiculous scheme that has added an enormous number of people to the United States have suddenly had an epiphany any more than I'm inclined to believe that the Senate bill was a good-faith effort to control immigration. The Republicans in the House passed H.R. 2 in 2023, it's a good and reasonable bill that actually controls the border, and it was rejected by Democrats because they're opposed to controlling the border. It's pretty hard to treat the executive branch as differing from that when they literally went to the Supreme Court because they were so mad at Texas for trying to control the border.

They typically can meet the as-written standards of Asylum law, the problem is that those standards were written with a very different intent. The goal of asylum law was largely to protect specific individuals who had specific threats against their lives, like dissidents from Authoritarian regimes. The nature of dissidents is such that there will never be that many of them. At most, the authors thought that Asylum might be granted to small national minorities seeking protection from genocide. There weren't that many Jews in Germany in 1932, and the whole period of Nazi-ism only lasted twelve years.

Asylum law was never intended to apply loosely to the entire population of a country, and certainly not for any length of time. A world where Salvadorans can claim, collectively for decades, credible fear of harm from gangs makes a mockery of Asylum as a concept. The idea needs to be abolished, or reworked from the ground up.

I say this despite being pro-immigration as a broad concept.

The goal of asylum law was largely to protect specific individuals who had specific threats against their lives, like dissidents from Authoritarian regimes.

This is incorrect. The 1951 Refugee Convention (which national asylum laws implement) was designed around two paradigm scenarios:

  1. Regularising the status of people who had fled the fighting in WW2 and couldn't go home because their home country had ceased to exist or the political situation meant they were no longer welcome there. This affected millions of people, but people at the time assumed that it was a one-off.
  2. "Never again" the scenario where Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany couldn't because no country would take them.

In the Cold War era asylum was mostly used by political dissidents, but the system was originally designed around the needs of large groups of people fleeing war and/or democide. It is true that it specifically wasn't designed for people fleeing the kind of general chaos you see in places like pre-Bukele El Salvador.

In any case, the problem is that the system set up by the 1951 Convention has failed, and the sane anti-immigrant right (i.e. Meloni or Marine le Pen, not Trump or Marion Marechal) needs to (and probably will) start talking about what the replacement for it should look like. From my perspective it would be even better if the liberal centre outflanked them by having this conversation first. This is another item on my "effortpost needed when work calms down" list inspired by the UK election campaign.

Jews trying to fell Nazi Germany

"flee", surely.

Oops - edited.

[giant nitpick below]

They typically can meet the as-written standards of Asylum law, the problem is that those standards were written with a very different intent.

Part of the awkwardness is that they don't, but probably should, at least under progressive assumptions. The federal definition of 'refugee', which asylum requests operate, is :

(A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or

(B) in such special circumstances as the President after appropriate consultation (as defined in section 1157(e) of this title) may specify, any person who is within the country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, within the country in which such person is habitually residing, and who is persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So fleeing El Salvador because random gangs try to murder people every day because they're not wearing the right tattoos is outside of the definition of asylum. Which is kinda bad as a policy! Even for the central case of "Nazis trying to kill you", it doesn't cover everything (and not just the obvious political exception); modern-day asylum-seekers are jumping through a mess of hard-to-define feelings in front of a judge that has nearly no ability to seriously verify any claims.

As a result, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, which among other things created a new category of Temporary Protected Status, largely focused around the then-present Salvadoran Civil War. These are specifically not refugee status, either under federal or international law, but allowed nonimmigrant aliens to lawfully reside in the United States and maintain work authorizations. But while TPS aliens could theoretically be required to return to their home country after some time, Ramos and difficulty deporting former-TPS holders from the few countries where TPS has ended show the limits of that policy, as does the increasing breadth that Democratic governments are willing to extend TPS for.

But you're only eligible for TPS if you were in the United States before the date that your home country was given TPS. So that's a mess, too.

So fleeing El Salvador because random gangs try to murder people every day because they're not wearing the right tattoos is outside of the definition of asylum.

This was changed by the Biden administration several years ago.

I appreciate the straightforward explanation here of how policy and intent creep occurs.

Taken at face value, the logical (though extreme) conclusion of the open boarders set is to import all of the less fortunate of the world no questions ask. As "pure" as the intent may be, this is, on its face, a non-viable option to any informed audience. So that argument isn't made ... but it sure as hell gets reflected in the policy-enforcement system.

I believe this is one of the core unsolvable problems in American politics; there are, at least, three "versions" of any given policy - the intent stated by candidates publicly, the letter of the law as literally recorded in U.S. code, and then the execution thereof by the executive branch. When Americans vote for a candidate, they often are voting for just one of those concepts, or are switching between them in their heads. The appreciation of the process is non-existent and so constant dissatisfaction is constant.

That's not a peculiarity of American politics. Any political system is going to have gaps between intended policy, codified law, and execution. What is peculiar about American politics of late is legislative sclerosis. The consequence is that Congress plays a greatly reduced role in making and supervising policy, legislation rarely gets revised, and policy is often a matter of executive and judicial calvinball. The executive has a lot of formal and informal discretion, and often your only recourse if you don't like executive policy is to find a friendly judge and get an injunction.

The core problem of restricting immigration is having a government willing to do the things necessary to actually restrict immigration.

Republicans are never willing to punish employers, despite these being the obvious targets for enforcement as they have names/addresses/Tax-ID where punishment can be executed.

Democrats aren't willing to end up with anything that looks like "Camps full of racial minorities."

We've generally been willing to abolish the Constitutions for Hispanic-looking folks near the border, but there's a line that can't be crossed there either.

We want to restrict immigration, but don't want to pay more for farm products or to abolish NAFTA and reduce border crossings.

I was listening to a Reason Interview podcast recently with Kat Murti, she said that working towards legalizing marijuana was becoming difficult, because people are under the impression it already has been legalized. I think immigration policy has a similar problem: a lot of people who want to build a wall don't think of all the things we haven't tried yet.

Republicans are never willing to punish employers, despite these being the obvious targets for enforcement as they have names/addresses/Tax-ID where punishment can be executed.

I was pleasantly surprised to see mandatory e-Verify in HR2, but of course HR2 is mostly performative trolling designed to embarrass Biden and derail the Senate border deal. I do not know if even the current MAGA Republican party would put mandatory e-Verify into a bill they were expecting to pass.

put mandatory e-Verify into a bill they were expecting to pass.

The answer to this question, regardless of the antecedents, is determined by 'how many exceptions does mandatory e-verify have' and 'how strict is enforcement'. The American economy has key and politically influential sectors utterly dependent on illegal labor and often getting sweetheart regulatory deals anyways; e-verify for nonfarm hourly workers(and it doesn't apply to slaughterhouses) only, and contractors are exempt, is a fairly toothless law but one that could probably pass.

Republicans are never willing to punish employers, despite these being the obvious targets for enforcement as they have names/addresses/Tax-ID where punishment can be executed.

If you try to punish employers you get pushback about how we are hurting all those "hardworking people who are just trying to support their families".

Yes but you get that pushback from the same Dems wherever you crack down on illegal immigrants. It's only policies designed to prevent people from employing illegals that get pushback from republicans.

Maybe a bit, but the real reason is that employers of illegal labor donate to the Republican Party.

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