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This again? If Biden wanted to cut down on illegal immigration, he could do it now, without any additional Congressional authority. So why is it Trump's fault? Your analysis is riddled with errors, such as:
The Obama administration began counting repeated deportations of the same immigrant as multiple deportations. This was well-known at the time and confounds a simple analysis. Moreover, you neglect to discuss DACA.
If the number of illegal immigrants increases every year, and in 2016 the increase is lower than previous years, that's not a "historical low"!
You then proceed to list many many things Trump did that Obama did not do!
The "shithole countries" remark was not something Trump said in public as part of a "PR" strategy. It was something allegedly said in a closed meeting. Are you saying that Trump is responsible for rumors about him?
So what? You were arguing just a few paragraphs ago that these policies don't matter! Trump's policies didn't do anything, because Obama was better, but then Biden undoes Trump's policies, which makes everything worse!
You should know by now that organizations endorsing bills and proposals is totally cynical, and it really makes me question your ability to digest evidence for your position if you have to point to some organization (that nobody had ever heard about five minutes ago) and say, "see, the authority says so!" This is a common scam politicians run all the time: ideological report cards, union endorsements, lobbyist fact sheets, etc. etc. Who cares?
Hmmm, why didn't conservative Republicans trust a deal that would allow more immigrants in exchange for a promise that this time money would really be spent on the border?
This is reading Trump's mind.
Yeah, "the idea". What happened to California after Reagan's amnesty?
My ideas are nuanced, yours have a kernel of truth, his ideas are extremely oversimplified.
No, I just think you're not very astute.
This was unnecessary to your otherwise very good points.
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... Okay? Ben's not arguing Biden is blameless here, just that Trump is blameworthy. Yes, Biden and the Dems aren't doing this out of sincere care for immigration, they're trading a better chance at getting elected for a concession to the public's policy priorities. Trump should, by the values of his own voters, take the deal and reduce his chance of winning because this would hugely reduce illegal immigration.
Dems make a problem much worse.
Dems then demand “Republicans capitulate on X, Y, and Z and we will slightly partially ameliorate the problem.
If Republicans rightfully say “fuck you,” Democrats then respond “I guess Republicans care more about elections instead of fixing the problem they claim to care about.”
Any party that wouldn’t say “fuck you” is a party that will get rolled. The republicans sole position should’ve been “you broke the border, here is the bill to fix it. If you won’t pass the bill, then you will lose.” The republicans allowed this charade the moment they entertained a “bipartisan bill.”
And OP’s post are proof of that.
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Dems don't need new laws to stop illegal immigration. They aren't enforcing the laws that already exist. Why would passing more laws make Dems enforce them?
The politicians who created the problem, who could stop the problem at any time, are saying they need new powers to stop the problem. The politicians who want to solve the problem say that it's a bad bill. Trump wants to run on the border? But Biden could solve it today.
Biden can deport 15 million people today? The law mitigates some percentage of the legal challenges by pro-migrant groups that would be inevitable (and will be) in any executive-led effort.
sure, Biden can reimplement the Trump policies which required detention in the US or release into foreign countries to await their removal proceedings because these policies have already been upheld in court
and then re-arrest all people he illegally released on parole and have them detained or removed to Mexico to await their removal proceedings
he can do that right now; he of course won't do that because he the Biden admin wants the immigration, they just don't want to suffer the electoral consequences of what he's doing
which legal challenges are mitigated by this bill?
the bill definitely opens other pathways for challenge, e.g., the entirety of 235(b) and process by which applications are reviewed as well as mandatory release into the US under a president who wanted to reduce migrant numbers
the bill may as well be a jobs program for immigration lawyers and provides billions more to those "pro-migrant" groups
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The surge at the border is consequent of Biden's decisions. He can't change those? He could reimplement Remain in Mexico, he could suspend Catch and Release, he could stop granting asylum. He could reimpose the Trump policies he suspended.
In fact, he doesn't need Trump to pass the border bill. If this is a great bill that Democrats are happy to have, they can pass it in the Senate and leave it to the House. They're not even trying this, they don't want to do anything, they just want to run on how Republicans won't do anything. This is maybe the best going scam in American politics: tearily tell the voters that we can't do anything, our hands are tied, unless you vote for me again...
Anything Biden does will be challenged, that's the nature of being president. Why does that mean he can't deport naybody? He could if he wanted to.
Because the left faction of the Democrats hate it and oppose it, which is why they need GOP votes in Congress? I mean this isn’t in any way new. The real question is that if this bill really does nothing and wouldn’t stop any immigration, why did Liz Warren, Bob Menendez, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey and others vote against it?
Hmm.
This is political sloganeering: Markey wants it both ways, saying yes and no, hoping voters like one answer or the other. If Markey really believed that this is a bad bill, and that Trump killed it, shouldn't he be thanking Trump? Wouldn't he be gloating? No, he just lapses into cliche: American values, better life, cynical Trump, etc.
Markey probably didn't even write his own statement. Someone in his office wrote it, and he signed off after making some changes. Now his statement exists as a fact in the public record I'm supposed to take as evidence of something. But taking it seriously is like trying to understand a LLM: it's just a rationalization for whatever was already decided upon.
(I'm not arguing that Markey wanted the bill to pass and is just giving kayfabe. I am arguing that his position is obviously, blatantly, contradictory. If I had to resolve that contradiction, I imagine that he thinks it was a bad immigration bill, and that his blaming Trump is purely cynical.)
This is my frustration with many discussions about politics here and this conversation in general: I think way too much credence is given to the imaginary fake facts the political world creates. "The bill was a good bill because the Border Patrol endorsed it" is like saying OMB predicts Obamacare will reduce the deficit: these are just press releases. They are treated very cynically by the people who make them. Take again Markey's statement: he wants to blame Donald Trump for leaving the border in chaos, because Trump (supposedly) stopped a bill Markey wanted stopped. Huh?
Which is back to the whole problem with the frame of OP's post: the frame that Trump tanked a good immigration bill was invented by politicos for cynical reasons. We could have given you this great border bill (that we don't want), but Trump stopped us, because he's selfish, while his supporters cheered, because, uh...? It's actually much simpler to assume that conservatives thought it was a bad deal, which explains neatly why they opposed it, why Trump opposed it, and why cons cheered when it was tanked.
You could argue that cons were wrong for thinking it was a bad deal, but the frame here basically accepts, uncritically, a cynical idea pushed by Democrats that they themselves don't believe.
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I addressed this in the post. To summarize, yes, he could fix it now, to at least some degree. Reimplementing the Remain in Mexico would help. The problem with all of these fixes though is that they're bandaids on bullet holes that don't address fundamental issues like this bill would have.
His hawkishness was specifically a reference to this chart. Yes, Obama was also more willing to give amnesty than Republicans ever were.
Multiple people referenced the exact same remark shortly after the meeting was over, so I think it's safe to assume he really said it. If you want to keep contesting that specific statement, just choose any of his other ones. His hostile rhetoric towards immigrants wasn't exactly a secret.
The overarching point on Trump was that his policies were bombastic and good at catching headlines, but that they didn't do much in practice. Comparing the number of illegal immigrant border encounters during Trump's term and Obama's second term is quite similar. Biden was worse than both of them because he tried to go back to Obama's policies, but by then the asylum loophole was well known.
I can grant that in a theoretical alternate universe where Trump didn't do anything on the border, immigration could have surged far worse than it did due to exogenous factors and immigrants catching on to the loophole faster, so Trump's actions might have stopped a surge that would have happened. It's tough to know for sure, but it's plausible.
Multiple senators such as Tillis said this was the reason. Trump himself motioned at the idea on Truth Social when he said he didn't want to "absolve" the Democrats on the issue.
Can it the personal attacks. I enjoy debating people who disagree with me because I think it makes my arguments stronger, but I've had problems in the past with you reverting to personal attacks.
The Biden administration themselves are the people who built the networks that tell immigrants about the asylum loophole. All those organization and NGOs organize this are Biden aligned groups.
And had the bill passed they'd be telling immigrants to claim they were waterboarded, since it is a form of torture that leave no physical evidence on the victim, for which they'd qualify to remain in country.
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But it can't be a PR strategy if it was said in private and not meant to be publicized.
PR doesn't end with just public facing statements. For example, if an organization is established to help the poor but all the workers openly hate poor people, that's a PR issue since news organizations or even just the poor people themselves would eventually realize how much the organization loathed them.
And again, Trump's loathing of illegal immigrants has never been a secret by any means.
It's in the name: Public Relations. Your argument is that Trump's PR was too mean, and damaged the cause of immigration restriction. But when pushed on this you fall back to claiming that Trump hated illegal immigrants. What's the point of blaming his PR then? If Trump hates immigrants, it doesn't matter what his PR is, because by your logic he would still have hurt the cause just by being Trump.
You really seem to want to catch me with supposed double-binds and contradictions instead of actually addressing important points.
If the contradictions are true, then fair enough. Like earlier when you mentioned "hey you say Trump's restrictions didn't do much, but then say that illegal immigration exploded when Biden removed them". I could certainly see why someone would think that was a bit weird so a clarification was justified, and even with that clarification I probably wasn't giving Trump enough credit to what might have happened if he didn't do his EO's.
But this is just a nothingburger. I feel like I'm reading the following: "first you said 'immigration', then fell back to 'illegal immigration'. Aha! A concession! Then you said Trump had bad PR because of saying stuff like 'shithole countries', but he didn't say that in a televised address, meaning it wasn't public, yet PR has the word 'public' in it. A contradiction!"
To the object-level claim here, if Trump says something inflammatory to a group who all then promptly leak it to the press, then yes, that's a PR problem. The two options Trump has are either 1) get his leaky ship in order, or 2) think it but don't say it, or at least say it in ways that aren't so clearly controversial. Every time you hear the media complaining about "dogwhistling", it's just Republicans doing this. But Trump never seem to get the memo, which is why he keeps shooting himself and the cause of immigration restrictions in the foot.
You want to claim that Trump had bad PR, using as an example something that was leaked from a private meeting, assuming he even said it. Trump's PR is bad because of things other people said about him? This is like saying Biden's PR is bad because of "Let's Go Brandon".
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You talked about it, but that doesn't really address it: If illegal immigration got worse after Biden undid Trump's policies (which is Trump's fault because his PR was mean), why can't Biden just redo them? Why are they bandaids? According to your line of argument: Trump's policies, which didn't do anything, and don't work, prevented the Biden mass influx of immigration, which can't be stopped, unless we adopt some new Biden policies (like building a wall). Mhmmm.
Illegal immigrants!
It is also just absurd. So Biden won’t take steps to partially solve a problem because he wants a bigger solution (even though Biden made the problem worse) but the Republicans are stupid for not taking a solution that OP believes will partially solve a problem because Republicans think it will get them a better solution later on?
Who, whom indeed.
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Fairly sure you are technically wrong on “illegals immigrants”. Being intellectually honest when these debates were going on the asylum seekers are “legal”. They are allowed to claim asylum without proof but that status makes them legally allowed to be in the U.S.
But I too just call them illegals immigrants for dramatic effect. But the Biden administration has in fact found a way to make them “legal”. It’s embarrassing that illegal is technically wrong.
Read the Trump comments in the piece Ben linked. They were all Trump remarks clearly about illegals. Ben claims Trump was too mean to immigrants, eliding the difference.
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Again, he could redo them. He could (and should) reimplement Remain in Mexico to at least reduce the current surge somewhat.
But they're mere bandaids because they don't address the root issues, the most major one being the asylum loophole. The best long term fix would be to remove the asylum loophole, which Trump tried to do but failed since he wasn't willing to do more than executive orders on immigration. Remain in Mexico would be better than the status quo, but it would still be subject to periodic legal challenges, as well as Mexico deciding they don't want to keep all these people and helping them enter the US.
Sure, illegal immigrants. The point is that calling them things like "animals", or saying they're "coming from shithole countries" is needlessly inflammatory if the goal is to pass substantive policy.
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