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As a voter, this seems to be an ongoing vibe from the Biden administration, and I'm not sure I like it. It feels like they're focus grouping every decision and trying to sweep tough-but-necessary decisions under the rug without actually having to make a stand on the issues. When it works, it feels pretty competent, but on several issues it's recently felt like very limp-wristed leadership when they try to claim "we're working on it" while they point generally to actions they've been intentionally hiding under the table.
Look at the shipping issues in Yemen: the administration gave out lots of "final warnings", and it seems that even when they finally decided to strike back -- after what, at least to me, comes off as an unreasonable number of shots fired at American ships to tolerate -- they did so weakly enough that they've had to repeat their attacks several times and still haven't resolved the conflict. I get that there's a suite of left-wing activists (many now protesting the administration's handling of the Gaza war) that were pushing for peace in the Houthi-Saudi war, frequently accusing the Saudi coalition of genocide, and that it broadly looks like the US is having to pick up that battle where they left off. There are people in their coalition in favor of unrestricted immigration, too. But their actions in both cases seem chosen first to limit outrage from the extreme corners of their voting bloc, and actual effectiveness is a much lower priority. If it was actually working, that'd be one thing, but I think the average concerned voter was looking for something more decisive (see Operation Praying Mantis), rather than a slowly-escalating quagmire. Similar to the Obama administration's "red lines" in Syria, it looks weak to me as an observer.
But on immigration specifically, the Biden administration came into office and specifically and publicly undid many of the policy decisions of its predecessor ("remain in Mexico", "build a wall"), claiming those were unnecessary and cruel. But here we are a few years later, and they've had to walk some of those back: they're building a wall and at least moving toward involving Mexico in the process. But they can't acknowledge that, maybe, their opponents might have been partly right on the issue (because, in a large part, of their coalition with "Orange Man Bad"). And while they claim to be working on solutions, I haven't seen anyone propose either reforming the asylum process in question. Could we surge resources to handle the backlog of cases and hear every case in, say, 24 hours? Could we increase the standards to promptly toss out a large fraction of the cases that will eventually be denied anyway? AFAIK the asylum system is entirely defined by Congress and Executive fiat and surely gives some legal leeway here. I honestly don't have any good suggestions for preventing physical crossings or handling deportations of the unwilling, but surely someone has some.
Sure.
First of all, you implement an immediate 40-year prison term that explicitly pierces the corporate veil for any hiring of illegal immigrants. E-verify? Mandatory. Second, you remove any and all sources of aid or welfare to illegal immigrants until they voluntarily sign up for deportation. Third, you go over to the NSA building and get them to run a search through their system for all the undocumented and illegal immigrants in their system. Every single one of them that is currently employed has a letter sent to their employer informing them that they're either going to fire their immigrant employee or go to prison for the rest of their life. The number of crossings will go dramatically down when there's no way to profit or sustain an existence in the US as an illegal immigrant, so you'd be able to save on the border defence as well.
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