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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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  1. The 5k per day is way too much. Combined with the Presidency getting to suspend the act for I believe 60 or 90 days. Then courts would have to get involved. So you can run high to get to the trigger then ignore it for 45 days. Tell the immigrants you back to not come for a month. Run some to get to the trigger. Ignore it for 45 days. Just not enough teeth that they would ever close the border.

  2. It’s further formalizing that 5k a day asylum seekers are fine. We should honestly just ban asylum at the border which we can do. Make them file at an embassy and have true causes. We have virtually zero true asylum cases at the US border. They are safe in Mexico. They can email Senators/Lawyers etc for asylum cases outside the country.

  3. This entirely depends on the courts. Conservatives are not good at controlling those type of asylum claims. If you get liberal judges on those courts who accept not being American makes them a little poor and boom asylum claim accepted then the act does nothing. And again asylum should not be initially approved inside the country.

  4. Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans. This is obvious we did NOT have these issues under Trump and no laws have been changed in the interim. Like you say above Trump closed immigration doing things that were “trivial to repeal or ignore”. Electing Trump is what we need to close the border. He’s done it before. Biden could do the same thing.

  5. Which brings up the big problem with the bill. It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open. There were no teeth in the bill to force a Democrat to close the border.

If you disagree with the “teeth” then please quote in the bill the “teeth”. How would this bill limit President AOC to 10k “asylum” seekers per year?

The Border Emergency Authority is a "break in case of emergency" tool that's specific to the crisis happening now. It sunsets in 3 years, so it won't be relevant if AOC takes office in a decade unless it's renewed. If it's not used then it would be no different than the status quo, but the rest of the bill expanding funding for border security and plugging asylum loopholes would still be in place. It's in no way formalizing that 5k migrants a day is "fine", it's simply a trigger when opaque and extraordinary measures can be taken.

Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans.

Trump was really no better than Obama when it comes to border crossings. A lot of it is driven by the relative strength of the economy, but also by non-US factors like the state of Latin American countries especially in the Northern Triangle. Your answer of "Trump didn't need this" is exactly the handwavey "Biden Bad" thing I was talking about in my earlier post. The assumption you seem to be coming to is that the tougher laws are all just a ruse, that Biden must be doing something sneaky, but this is effectively unfalsifiable.

It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open.

This law doesn't open the border. If you think it does, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what the bill does.

Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?

You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.

I find it interesting you did not try saying these are real asylum seekers.

I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power. Biden could have stopped this but chose not to.

Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?

I presume you mean "close the border to illegal immigrants". I agree that would be the best, but it's like saying "why don't we make murder illegal". It already is illegal, it's just a question of enforcement. This bill would have beefed up enforcement.

You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.

I presume you did an autocorrect error and meant to type "Northern Triangle", not golden triangle.

The causes I listed aren't excuses, they're explanations that lie on a continuum. It's like judging the performance of a CEO based solely on the stock price, when you really need to understand the whole underlying environment to make a proper judgement. If the company grew by 10% but the rest of the sector grew by 50%, the CEO probably screwed up. Similarly, extraneous factors affect enforcement at the border.

I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power.

You keep saying this but that doesn't make it true. At the very least this bill would have given more money for enforcement and closed an obvious loophole that illegals were abusing to enter the country. If Biden actually used the bill to its full effect (which he said he would) then it would have done even more.

I mean a clean bill where we close the border. And not the I claim asylum bullshit.

When people say "close the border" they typically mean closing it to all traffic entirely which would be utterly silly. There's tons of trade that goes between the border, and plenty of American nationals come and go all the time.

I agree the asylum stuff is BS, but again, this bill does crack down on much of that. I'm fine with a few statistically irrelevant dissidents coming through if they're seeking to evade persecution from a genuinely authoritarian government torturing them, but I'm not fine with people fraudulently claiming they're a refugee for essentially no reason, which is what a lot of the economic migrants are doing now.

Even if you think all asylum should be ended, surely no asylum > a little asylum > a lot of asylum. So I don't know why you'd oppose the bill.

The bill barely does anything to eliminate asylum.

I have repeated told you why I oppose the bill. But it summarizes to I believe the bill would increase immigration I do not want. You are fine to disagree with my logic. What is not fine is acting like I haven’t told you why I oppose it.

The bill lacks any teeth to limit immigration during a Democratic Presidency. America is also very bad at letting the legislature get a second crack at legislating. The Dems offered the GOP very little in this deal. Biden would claim victory if the bill passes, probably enforce the border during the election season, and once the election was over every loophole in the bill would be utilized by the left to flood the border again with immigrants.

I prefer to just boost Trumps chance at election which would allow us to actually fix the border.

If Dems gave us a real bill with teeth and banned the current asylum situation I would vote for the bill and give them the win, but they are not doing it.

The bill barely does anything to eliminate asylum.

The bill eliminates a huge loophole with asylum...

At this point I think we're just talking in circles so I'm going to bow out.

And I disagree that it sufficiently closes that gap.

I’ve never disagreed with your logic and understand why you believe it does. My issue has been the denial of my agency to look at the facts and view the bill as a net negative (when including political calculations) for those wanting much stronger restrictions on immigration.

When people say "close the border" they typically mean closing it to all traffic

Where are you getting that idea from?

When people say "close the border" with no conditions, it usually implies they want to close the border unconditionally, like for military or pandemic reasons. When people are just talking about illegal immigrants, they can pretty easily specify "we should do something about illegal immigration.

That would be the literal meaning of the phrase, but people often speak in shortcuts. I don't think it's a good idea to read so much into it, unless you actually talked to someone who supports "closing the border" and specifically asked them if they mean closing it to all traffic.

It wouldn’t necessarily limit Dem presidents much, but it would allow a GOP President much more discretion against mass illegal immigration. Given the Dems will do what they want anyway, that would have been a win.

I think you just made the argument for why they killed it. If you think the bill does 0 to limit immigration during a Dem presidency then the best course of action was maximizing the probability that Trump wins the election. Giving Biden a legislative win hurts Trumps election chances.

I am confident enough that Trump can crush immigration just by being POTUS that it’s not that important to have a bill.

This gets to my origional point that I disagreed with that the right killed the bill for shits and giggles. They correctly identified that winning the POTUS limits illegal immigration and the bill would still allow a Democrat to have an open door policy. The GOP wasn’t offered anything in the deal.

You really have to jump through mental gymnastics to get to this conclusion.

"We must not enact tougher immigration laws so that the guy who says he wants to use the tougher laws loses, in order to get a guy who I say will enact even tougher laws but who failed to actually enact any lasting changes".

Or, you know, we could just enact tougher laws now, then continue fighting for them later?