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Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
If nothing is done, the immigration will not necessarily be Latin American.
We are already seeing people flying to Latin America from India/Africa with the intention of migrating to the U.S. Oh, you think that they were simply tourists who wanted to visit the wonderful country of El Salvador?
https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-travelers-fee-migration-dd176d85871e54a9eb8695f8fb03a65d
The cost to secure the Southern Border is trivial compared to the costs of unlimited immigration. Honestly, I hate to say it, but Donald Trump was right about the wall. It's the right thing to do and it wouldn't be that expensive.
We'd still have to deal with the problem of people flying in on tourist visas though.
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Immigration is unfathomably high right now.
There are some people who hate hispanics, but most people see illegals as unfortunates, generally good people, but we really need to not have any more of them. They run into condescension and annoyance at poor English language skills but actual hatred for these people is not socially acceptable or common.
As opposed to the cooperative and non-disruptive way they cross the southern border? It's obviously just blue cities arguing Texas should have to deal with the negative externalities which are inevitable when hundreds of thousands of third worlders stream across the border.
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As opposed to the hundreds of thousands streaming across the border, which is done in a minimally disruptive and maximally co-operative way? If the sanctuary cities don't like the reality of how illegal immigration actually is done, maybe they should stop finger-wagging at the states that have to bear the brunt of the migrants turning up on the other bank of the river first thing.
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Are they really that exorbitant? The US could secure a much shorter southern Mexican border, or the even shorter southern Guatemalan border. The latter is just 459km vs 3145km between the US and Mexico, almost seven times shorter.
They’re probably not the exorbitant. For comparison , Israel used to face a similar issue with it’s Egypt border, where African economic migrants would just stroll in. We built a fence. The border is roughly 125 miles long, in a desert area. The US-Mexico border is about 2000 miles long, so it’s about a 1:16 length ratio. The population ratio between Israel and the US is about 1:37, and the gdp ratio is about 47. Fudge a little for the US border being more remote in some places, but it’s clear that y’all can totally afford a border fence.
A decent chunk of the US-Mexico border is not passable anyways, so the remoteness probably cancels out.
The real barrier is just Israel being willing to do things the west won’t.
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If you’re correct that other non-violent measures are exorbitantly expensive and/or ineffective, I am in fact willing to countenance just shooting them. You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming. (Or would start openly acting like proper invaders, in which case a lot more people would start being okay with shooting a lot more of them.)
I agree with you but when you look at the fact that the Europeans let in millions of Syrians because of a single picture of a Kurdish kid washed up on a beach you realize pretty quickly that gunning down migrants doesn’t have majority support.
Enough terror attacks in Europe and I can see the Europeans hardening to the point that they do it, but the thing about Guatemalans is that they’re Christians and they don’t practice the same overt cultural and religious hostility to Europeans that many migrants from the Islamic world do, so the public is unlikely ever to have enough contempt to resort to those tactics in the US.
Fear is what leads to policy like that, and while Europeans are increasingly scared of large scale MENA immigration (see Houellebecq, Zemmour, etc), Americans aren’t very scared of Central American immigration even if they oppose it.
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The first time CBP mows down a family of six, public support would evaporate in an instant (though the odds of such a policy ever making it to implementation are basically zero, since it would be comically unpopular and probably unconstitutional to boot).
How many people do you think will continue buying "invader" rhetoric when the bodies of children are being paraded around on every media outlet in the world?
The overwhelming majority of the people currently streaming across the border are military-age men. If shooting broke out, the odds of a family of children getting smoked is far lower than the odds of some brazen young men.
Whether "mostly military-age men" it is or isn't true, it would be astronomically unlikely there wouldn't be at least one adorable family among the body count. All one has to do then is find them, take a bunch of pictures of the bodies, and distribute them widely, while completely ignoring the rest, and your work is done.
Even if there are literally zero adorable families naturally coming over, the cartels running the operation on the other side aren't stupid. Surely they would be willing to ensure there are a few like that and make sure they get covered.
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In the name of equity and inclusion, I’d be more than okay to go without age- and gender-discrimination when it comes to distributing bullets for border enforcement.
In which case:
Would apply even moreso, as military-age men are presumably the most risk-tolerant group.
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Source? This does not look like the overwhelming majority are men, especially once you ignore the more action-laden pictures of fence climbing and violent clashes. Are you sure you are not just instinctively copying points from the European migrant crisis?
This could be a result of selective reporting on the part of either right-wing media, left-wing media, or both. I have seen tons of video of migrant caravans, and of migrants camped out near border checkpoints or in front of migrant processing centers, and it’s always at least 75% young men. Now, again, this could be due to the narrative being pushed by the sources of media that I consume. And, similarly, I’m sure you can acknowledge that The Atlantic is strongly pro-migrant and would at least be tempted to selectively display the most sympathetic images possible.
There are some attempts at statistics, claiming 46% female. You could of course choose to extend your argument by saying that these too are fake, but at that point, what would be sufficient evidence to persuade you?
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I recently looked up the numbers after @Steffieri called me out on the same assumption. Women are in the majority among legal migrants, and make up 45-47% of illegal migrants depending on survey. It's not overwhelmingly male, but it's not majority families either.
It's tough to get numbers for different kinds of illegal immigration, though. "Streaming across the southern border" isn't even the most common form of illegal immigration most years.
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Easy - kill the men, deport the women and children.
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