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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses

NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.

Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.

Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.

I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.

Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming.

One comparison I think is interesting is that the number of illegal border crossings each month in 2022 (~200k) is roughly the size of the Russian force that originally invaded Ukraine in February. Obviously those crossing into the US aren't an armed force bent on regime change, but I think it gives an interesting perspective to the scale of the problem that someone (wrongly, as it turns out) thought that was a large enough force to invade a country with more people than California.

Honestly, I think the Democrats have a branding problem in that they've been positioning themselves as Anti-Republican on this (among other issues) without universally wanting unfettered immigration either. But when word gets around that "Uncle Joe will let us in" and people start turning up, they can't exactly admit that some degree of restriction is valid and desirable, so they do things like quietly continue building Trump's wall.

I also think we need to reconsider the idea that the shibboleth "asylum" when said to border agents should grant months-to-years of legal residency until claims can be reviewed with no real teeth for failure-to-appear. It sounds nice in principle, but seems prone to abuse.

One comparison I think is interesting is that the number of illegal border crossings each month in 2022 (~200k) is roughly the size of the Russian force that originally invaded Ukraine in February.

I assume most of those are deported quickly. Do you know what proportion of the migrants manage to remain in the US long-term?

I was looking into that as well. I'm seeing about 180-220K "encounters" a month, of which 70-110K are immediately booted under Title 42. Unfortunately, the remainder are just flagged as Title 8 "apprehensions and inadmissibles." I believe this includes release-with-monitoring along with immediate deportation, detainment, or denial of asylum.

And of course, these numbers completely exclude any crossings that avoid the CBP outright.