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About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
As an aside, I think it's in bad taste to use the term MAGA as if it was some kind of entity or group. You only do it once in the top-level post, but you use the term frequently in your replies below.
First of all it's extremely vague. There is no club of MAGA card-holders. You're just using the term to vaguely gesture in the direction of Donald Trump's supporters. When you say "MAGA won" what exactly do you mean by that? What is MAGA and what did it win? If you're referring to the Republican Party's trifecta victory in the 2024 election, I think it would be more appropriate to refer to them by their proper name. If you're referring to something else, then I think you should define what this "MAGA" entity is and what exactly you believe it won.
Secondly, it's disrespectful to refer to an entity or group by a term it does not use to refer to itself. I would say the same thing to someone who went around ranting about "SJWs" or "Feminazis" or "the Deep State." If you have something important to say about the United States civil service or a particular group of activists, your point is not diminished by calling them by their proper name. If you need to refer to them by a derogatory nickname to make your point then that's a clear sign that you don't actually have one.
This is fair.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/polling-shows-growing-number-republicans-identify-maga-movement-rcna201071
Seems like his comment is fine.
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So are they wrong for acting like "MAGA" is "some kind of entity or group", or are they wrong for disrespecting "some kind of entity or group"? Or is not a group, but we should avoid disrespecting groups which don't exist?
I don't know because, as I clearly said, it's unclear what "MAGA" is supposed to be. Is it everyone who voted for Donald Trump? Is it the so-called "base" of diehard Trump voters? Is it the Republican Party? Is Ted Cruz part of MAGA? Is Mitt Romney part of MAGA? Is Joe Rogan part of MAGA?
The answer is that it's wrong in two different ways: It's using a disrespectful nickname for some collection of people, and furthermore it's also badly-written because it's unclear exactly who it being referred to by said disrespectful nickname.
I took "as if it was some kind of entity or group" to be questioning whether or not it was a group at all. My point was if you're questioning whether it is a group at all, then criticizing one for disrespecting a non-group is silly.
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I see a somewhat more charitable explanation.
They (Republican leadership) know that it simply can't be done. If they could get rid of the filibuster* then still nothing that could pass the senate would pass the house and vice versa.
Thus they propagate talking points about the pointlessness of new law (e.g., see comments below). It's just cope.
*And they really cannot. The filibuster is so wonderful for senators of both parties that it is impossible to defeat in the modern hyper partisan environment. This is not an R versus D issue, it is a senate versus America issue. But only senators get to vote, so it's doomed.
It almost certainly could be done, though. It would just require Trump to spend a little political capital to move it along. Waffley centrist Senators liked to hide behind the filibuster as e.g. Manchin did during Biden's term, but there's 53 R senators which gives a buffer of 3 defections and they'd still be able to remove it. There have been plenty of news stories recently about how R's in Congress basically can't disagree with Trump on anything, so there's plenty of reason to think the filibuster could be overcome here.
Not with 10,000 men could you defeat the filibuster. It is folly.
Manchin didn't hide behind the filibuster. He openly wielded it. The democrats who were hiding were the three dozen or so who were balancing their public statements with shat they tell their private stakeholders. You know what makes a Senator's job great? Being able to decry high drug prices while being cozy with the pharmaceutical lobby.
Both parties have adopted absurd positions that senators would be loathe to implement under any circumstances. Definitionally, there will be a caucus with the majority and the ability to do things. By having a filibuster with a tantalizingly close threshold to reach, they are never accountable while always having something to campaign on. "Just give us a little more, and we'll make all your dreams come true." It's a self imposed restriction that makes their lives great. It'll never go.
The filibuster already was partially defeated, first on lower court nominations, then for SCOTUS appointments. I guess you could claim those were different and didn't really matter compared to the filibuster on everything else, but that would just be a handwavy just-so story.
I specifically said:
Voting for judges is not analogous to having to vote on an 6 week abortion ban or Medicare for all. It's a painless carveout specifically because it's a nebulous vote (yay or nay for a person who refuses to say anything).
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On filibusters and the Senate..............
The US senate is an odd institution.
The house does the legislation. The executive executes. The courts maintain constitutional sanctity. The states already elect governors to represent them. What is the role of the Senator ? It made made some sense until the 1913 (17th amendment), when Senators were effectively subordinate (selected) to Governors. That way, state elections served as a useful way to remove both unpopular governors and senators.
An elected senate is just odd.
Most democratic nations don't have anywhere near as powerful of a Senate (or equivalent institution). The Indian Rajya-Sabha & House of Lords can only delay a bill by a short amount. A balancing counter-weight also makes sense in a parliamentary system where the executive (Prime-Minister) is selected by the house (making the house too powerful) unlike the US where the President is separately elected.
This means, in India, a person only thinks about 2 elections. Once for their state (governor, who selects senators) and once for the nation (house, which selects the executive). A British person only thinks about the Commons.
In comparison, An American must think of 4 elections. The governor, senators, house reps and the President. That's exhausting. Only takes 1 lapse, 1 midterm rando, to block legislation for the next 6 years. Doesn't the US already have enough checks-and-balances ? The house churns every 2 years. The last time someone held onto Senate+House in a midterm was in 1978.
I am just learning about the 17th amendment & the history of filibuster. so bear with me. Some wikipedia exerpts:
Appears that it made things worse than better. In an era where they were capable of pushing constitutional amendments, it's hilarious to think that they were complaining about deadlocks. Yeah buddy, try getting anything done in 2025.
Interestingly, the most important change on senate filibusters was also made in the same decade (1917). Clearly they knew filibusters were a bad idea. House filibusters were eliminated in 1842 ! Not sure why they left it half-complete in 1917.
The purpose of senates and similar elder chambers in most bicameral systems is to:
With this in mind and the general American distaste for titles and nobility, the oddities of the American Senate are unsurprising.
Yes Senates are anti-democratic. This is no accident. They are designed by republics to specifically thwart the passions of democracy.
That's why I specifically compared it to other bicameral systems.
Can't slow down a stationary object. The Senate can only limit the power of the house, a house that already moves at snails place. The Executive and Courts wield their power independently.
Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.
All elections become popularity contests. Why make the senate elected, if the goal is to bring in experienced statesmen.
The American system was created for a different America. A white-protestant nation run by proven men who rose up the ranks through merit (college, military achievement). 75% of the Senate had a college degree in 1945, when less than 5% of the nation had gone to college. The need for fund-raising and media-access meant that running for office was exclusively limited to the elites. This meant a high degree of consensus on what America should be. Therefore, they worried about the excesses of democracy.
In 2025, America is a diverse nation with public-office having exceptionally low barriers to entry. Consensus is nonexistent and core values of various groups are at odds with each other. In such a place, the system should encourage compromise. This means giving power back to the house.
If an downstream institution can unilaterally torpedo a bill (Senate filibuster), then the house would never go through the painful process of reaching compromise. The congress can override the president, but not the senate.
I'm not quite sure what killed the ability of Congress to do its job. There are many suspects. Including the filibuster. But I can assure you that if it ever did regain some measure of power, it would still be necessary to have breaks on the car. The history of functional parliaments is full of nice sounding stupid bills that almost became law but for some high chamber pointing at the practical problems with them.
Maybe getting rid of the fillibuster would help, but the American Republic is chockful of vetoes precisely because it's designed to make exercising power difficult. I'm not sure that would be enough to be worth the trouble.
Because one is bigoted against nobility, presumably.
There are alternatives, I like the idea of a random sampling of taxpayers personally, provided the right caveats.
Take it from someone who's having it imposed on them by circumstance: parliamentary regimes are a terrible idea when your country is experiencing factionalism.
I think that devolution/decentralization/"states rights"/localism is a better and more fitting solution to this problem actually.
In the UK we sort of did that (city Mayors, Scottish/Welsh/NI governments) but the result always seems to be hard left nonentities who have very little history of practical achievement (even less than our top-level MPs). I’m not sure if that’s a structural problem or simply what the regions prefer, but implementing localism in a way that doesn’t end up with virtue-signalling parasites constantly invoking ethnic grievances for more money seems like a serious problem.
I know it didn't go very well in the UK, but I think it would be a better fit for the US where there's already some good local institutions per state that actually hold some power and responsibilities (with their own budgets and such).
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American statute is not stagnant. It certainly doesn't line up with what I'd like but plenty gets done.
Wealthy people that cleared the early years never had particularly low life expectancies. The average age in the American Senate at the moment is indeed shameful but it's not a product of medical advances.
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The Senate was always meant to be a powerful counterpart to the House. It was supposed to be the "cooling saucer" that could take up long-term projects like court appointments and treaties, while more immediate concerns like the budget were left to the more representative House. It was also part of the big compromise between big states and small states as to how representation should be handled, and helped allay Southern fears that the North would come for slavery (at least for a time).
There really was quite blatant corruption before the 17th amendment, not just "corruption" in the modern sense where the government doesn't do everything an uninformed populist citizen wants, and so the populist hallucinates that "the system is broken!!!" I do fully agree that the modern Senate is too much of a vetocracy though.
Americans don't care that much about state elections of governors any more. And while that still leaves the Presidential AND House AND Senate elections, they all happen together every 2-4 years so it's not that crazy or hard to keep track of.
In 1789? Abolitionism didn't really get going until the 19th century was well on.
Not true, actually. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" include a plan for gradual emancipation through colonization, and he was a proponent of the portions of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from newly-acquired US territories. Virginia was contemplating a plebiscite on emancipation in the early 1830s. If anything, support for slavery got stronger as the 19th century wore on, via what should really be a quite familiar process of reciprocal polarization between south and north. The William Lloyd Garrison radical abolitionists and Calhounian "positive good" types fed on each other to the exclusion of what had been the predominant view that slavery would eventually shrivel and die on the vine after the banning of the slave trade in 1807 (which was done at the first instant the Constitution allowed it, btw).
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I guess I still don't actually understand what your working model is here. Setting aside whether the new legislation would have been good or not for the moment, it seems clear and obvious that there are plenty of statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry that weren't being used. With that fact well established (at least to me), I immediately become very skeptical of anyone that tells me we need new legislation to accomplish something that they're not even trying to do with what's already on the books. So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive - perhaps there's some poison pill in the law I missed, perhaps they want the optics of saying they did something, perhaps they're shooting for a compromise lock-in that I don't want. From a game theoretic perspective, I would love an off-ramp from this equilibrium, but it's very hard for me to believe that the Defectbot that just did 243 consecutive tats has responded by agreeing to cooperate after only one tit.
I guess our disagreement is about whether the current laws provide statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry?
I don't think I speak for OP here, but I think the best working model I've found for the behavior of both parties on immigration issues is something more personal and emotional than rational:
Democrats have a vague idea that there should be some limits on immigration, but mostly don't want to make any migrants feel bad. They will reject any course of action that might make migrants feel bad. This is based in a primordial sense of empathy: Talking to an immigrant you know they are a fellow human being trying their best and you don't want to hurt them gratuitously.
Republicans have a vague idea that there should be fewer migrants, but mostly don't want to make any illegal immigrants feel good, and preferably want to make migrants feel bad. This is based in a primordial sense of justice: migrants broke the law and must be punished not rewarded.
I think this model will prove to be significantly more predictive of actual policy than pretty much any other model that I see people working with. When people ask, "if they were really for/against immigration, why wouldn't they do X?", the answer will frequently line up with whether it will be too mean or insufficiently mean rather than whether it appears to accomplish the stated policy preferences.
Can we call it too mean/too naive for a bit of equilibrium?
I think too nice/too mean provides better equilibrium.
Actually that would provide negative equilibrium, and it is the default I expect people would go to so I'm stepping in quick, because the equilibrium I'm looking for is in emotional valence. Too nice/too mean would solidify the manichean premise that one side are being 'good' while the other are being 'bad' and I think we see enough of that already. Some republicans might revel in the cruelty, but that's just the lizardman constant, some number of people are always doing that no matter the side. Republicans need a way to defuse that angle, and I think naive is a strong response - to the point without being too insulting.
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It’s the same “legalize another 20 million illegal immigrants and then we’ll stop illegal immigration, we promise :^)” song and dance that Democrats have been doing since the era of Ronald Reagan. The first part always happens and then second never seems to materialize. That in turn incentivizes millions more illegal immigrants because they figure that if they can hang on long enough they will eventually get citizenship.
And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.
Strong disagree here. You're overindexing on what happened in the last few years and assuming different legislation would be functionally identical because that's just how the system works. In reality, a lot of what Biden did was available due to how current laws are written, e.g. not having hard "shall" clauses that gives wide bearing to executive fiat.
US v. Texas had been decided before your post last year on this topic..
Yep, lack of standing of Republican plaintiffs is another thing that legislation could explicitly address.
Did the bill you highlight as The Best Option In Decades involve anything that would have done so? Or did it demand every case get sent to the DC Circuit, which has both a long history of limiting immigration enforcement and unusually strict standing analysis and limits on what judges could be appointed that favor progressives?
But after even that, would it matter if they did? From the opinion I linked above:
Oh, well, that's just Alito's summary, surely he must be exaggerating th-
This already was a "shall" law. Indeed, the oral argument (and that Solicitor General question on constitutionality!) was driven by the extent that "shall" had already been sprinkled throughout the relatively recent additions to immigration laws, driven by long periods of neglect by Democratic administrations!
What possible reason could or should anyone expect new versions to behave any differently, or actually apply longer than needed for additional epicycles to develop? How green would someone need be to think it'd just be This One Statutory Construction Gimmick that would make it matter here?
The Lankford immigration bill didn't change venue as far as I understood it, so you'd sue in the district where you're harmed, the appeal to your regional circuit. There was nothing special about DC in the bill.
You're right that the bill didn't change anything explicitly about standing, but I never argued that the bill should be the last word on the issue, simply that it was far better than the status quo for fixing a lot of other things. Now that MAGA won the 50-50 it's functionally irrelevant since Republicans could make whatever type of bill they want, within reason.
In terms of US v Texas, standing demands injury, causation and redressability. The case held Texas had injury & causation but no judicially cognizable interest absent special statutory authorization. In other words, it wasn't a case of just ignoring "shall" requirements, it's that the laws were poorly written (or weren't written with these types of plaintiffs in mind in the first place). By contrast, in Nielsen v. Preap (2019) and Johnson v. Guzman-Chavez (2021), the Supreme Court enforced the INA’s “shall detain” for criminal-alien detention. Those were “shall” duties plus clear statutory schemes that provided judicial review. Long-term neglect by prior administrations underscores why Congress must match “shall” with funding and remedies. When that has been done, “shall” has repeatedly proven enforceable.
From your own link of the full text of the bill, the one that's in your write-up from the last time you tried this:
This actually shows up three times, once in SEC. 235B. PROVISIONAL NONCUSTODIAL REMOVAL PROCEEDINGS., and a second time in SEC. 240D. PROTECTION MERITS REMOVAL PROCEEDINGS, and a third time in ‘SEC. 244B. BORDER EMERGENCY AUTHORITY. It's the only times 'original jurisdiction' shows up in the entire bill!
Someone told you this, a year ago. In the thread you're linking to, now!
You never argued that, either; you just asserted it, and then shrugged when people repeatedly pointed that there was no reason to suspect any such improvement, and many reasons to suspect that it would make things worse. Your post last year was nearly eleven months after US v. Texas's opinion had dropped, and yet here today you still repeatedly pointed to "shall" terminology that US v. Texas held does not and likely can not ever be legally binding.
Yes, yes, I can read. I can also read the multitude of examples in the dissents and concurrence for Texas highlighting both how capricious the application of this novel standard was, and the opinion's unwillingness to commit to any statutory language being able, either as a matter of constitutionality or practice, of having done so in the immigration context.
Oh, boy, I'm sure these are accurate and complete summaries of the cases at hand. Let me get a big drink of water and --
That is, Nielsen revolved around the question of whether a statute commanding that the government "shall take" custody of this class of criminal aliens only applied if those criminal aliens were detained immediately after release from jail. It had nothing to do with a requirement for the government to take custody of those criminal aliens and not doing so.
That is, Guzman-Chavez revolved around whether the government was allowed to do something that statute mandated that it "shall" do, not whether the government must actually do so.
So, now you've proven zero out of three attempts to show "shall" as enforceable in any approach at an immigration detainment or deportation context, despite the very laws in question being driven by long periods of administrative neglect of the law. Do you care to try a fourth time? Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake? Do you think anyone reading you could possibly miss it?
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It's another thing that Joe Bidens poison bill did not address.
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I agree that Biden had the power to have Obama-level illegal immigration, i.e. about on par with Trump's numbers. I also agree that his refusal to enforce the laws on the books is what caused the spike in immigration. Then he did start enforcing them once it became clear that immigration was a huge liability, hence why immigration numbers started plummeting before Trump took office. I strongly disagree with the notion that the bill was somehow a "trap". It was created by a Republican immigration hawk, the text was out there for all to read, and Trump couldn't come up with many actual issues with the bill so he just cooked up lies to try to sink it. Legislation can have unintended side effects, but it's not like its a haunted house with secret compartments filled with woke lawyers and a million illegal Hondurans. Policies are also not etched in stone and can be amended if they turn out bad.
But you can put all that aside since that's in the past now. MAGA won the 50-50 and now has (or had) the opportunity to create almost whatever immigration bill they wanted. And what did they do with that chance? The answer seems to be "sweet nothing".
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The proposed deal would have allowed in thousands of migrants a day, over a million a year, iirc.
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
Yeah it was actually open borders all the time forever with no limits, because it would have handed 100% of the control of the border to a small cult of DC activist judges.
This wasn't true to any serious extent, other than how laws are always interpreted by the judicial system
How many illegals are here?
How did they get here?
Given that they are in fact illegal, how and why did existing laws and enforcement mechanisms fail to keep them out or remove them once they were in?
Why were these failures not anticipated when the laws were written? Should they have been?
If many previous laws did not work, why should we believe that passing additional laws would change things?
To what extent are these failures the result of willful policy? How would the new laws prevent such policies?
The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident. Add those issues on top of being 40 years old, and yeah, I'd say it's hardly a surprise things aren't exactly in the best shape today.
The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it. With that dead, Republicans could have (or could still do, I guess) their own party-line bill now that could fix a lot of the issues.
Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.
The last really significant federal gun control legislation was also in the 1980s, IIRC. This does not appear to have impeded enforcement of those laws when the Federal Government considered such enforcement desirable, despite similar "compromises" and "incoherencies". We also see very inconsistent and lackadaisical enforcement of these laws in a large majority of cases, the straw purchase prohibitions being a particularly egregious example, but it really does seem to me in these cases that the problem exists between chair and keyboard, not within the text of the laws. We also have examples, several of which @gattsuru has laid out at some length here, of how legislation Blues find inconvenient is simply ignored; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is my preferred example, but it seems to me that there are plenty of others.
It seems to me that political nihilism is spreading because it offers superior predictive value to the process-is-legitimate frame you prefer. If you disagree, I think it behooves you to engage on the details, rather than simply arguing by assertion. We can directly observe that the Feds and the courts routinely decline to enforce laws they don't want to enforce and have been doing so for decades, and often enforce "interpretations" of laws that do exist that converge on simply making shit up. We can directly observe that even repeated Supreme Court "victories" on specific questions of law change nothing, and we can infer that the Supreme Court backs down when faced with sufficient resistance from the states and executive.
How? What is the core of the problem? Is it that laws say "may" rather than "shall"? Where can we see this actually making a difference in this or other issues of public policy? Why did they write the law so poorly, and why should we be confident that a new law would be written better? Because the nihilist argument is that ten years from now, whoopsy-daisy, it turns out this new law also had "compromises" and "inconsistencies" that, gosh darn it, mean we have to let in another twenty million illegals wouldn't you know it shucks howdy.
I'm looking for anything specific. I'm looking for a nuts-and-bolts argument about why the process you're pointing to actually matters, preferably with examples of it mattering in a way that resulted in durable facts-on-the-ground wins for my tribe, because the alternative is that we are being invited to accept paper "wins" that will turn out to not actually be wins when it's too late to do anything about it. I think our interests are better served by taking a blowtorch to the legitimacy of our "shared" political institutions, rather than trying to reform them. I'm open to arguments that I'm wrong, but it seems to me that table-stakes for such an argument is some actual examples of my side winning through the "legitimate" process. Otherwise, if your argument is that every law my side writes just turns out to not be written properly to give us what we want, and every law the other side rights is unquestionably perfect and does even more than they claimed it'd do when they wrote it, that seems odd to me.
You're running out of trust. The institutions run on trust. If one person doesn't trust the system, that person has a problem. If a hundred million people don't trust the system, the system has a problem. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, the system has a problem. You may think that's stupid and unfair, but at some point you have to engage with the realities of the situation.
To add on to this, it seems obvious to me that Trump is focusing on the march through the institutions. He doesn't care about legislation because he's operating under an older theory of power: removing his opponents from positions of power and installing allies in their places.
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If you're looking for any specific thing, my old article goes into the asylum fraud loophole that the bill explicitly would have fixed. And yes, "may" vs "shall" is a very important distinction when writing legislation. Most things are written in "may" terms as a rule to give the Executive flexibility to respond in reasonable ways if situations change. Of course that leeway can be abused which happened with immigration, and that's when "shall" is necessary if you think the Executive isn't going to do its job. If you want an example of this in action, look up 8 U.S.C. §1226(c) and court cases Nielsen v Preap as well as Johnson v Guzman Chavez
If you want another example of what legislation could fix, look up US v Texas (2023). Republicans tried to sue the federal government to get them to enforce immigration restrictions, but were thrown out for lack of standing. That's something that could be addressed by legislation.
I'm not really going to touch the rest of your post on the legitimacy of the system more broadly, since we're so far apart that I doubt it would be productive.
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Given that Trump single-handedly mitigated the vast majority of the border problem in about a month, we now have definitive proof that the entire border issue was a deliberate intentional undertaking by Joe Biden. So we're left with two possibilities:
democrats other than Joe Biden don't actually want an open border. In this case, all a future democrat president needs to do is not deliberately throw open the gates of the border and invite billions in. Seems easy to me.
democrats desire an open border with a fiery passion that burns with the heat of a thousand suns, and they are willing to stop at nothing to facilitate a flood of billions of migrants into the United States. Of course if and only if this is the case, then a future democrat president will throw open the gates of the border and deliberately invite billions in.
If option 1 is true, then no border bill is necessary. Successive administrations can continue the current secure border. Buuuuut, if option 2 is true, then it's extremely positively strong evidence that the democrat written, democrat supported border bill that the democrats tried to pass alone with zero republican support, is actually designed to increase migration.
Of course to your other point some new border laws would be nice, and I hope congress can at least make an attempt to do it. I haven't seen anything indicating they won't try, it's just that congress critters seem preoccupied with other bullshit like the budget fight right now.
Agreed. This is an utterly bizarre time to take a "victory lap" for that border bill. From my recollection, even before Trump got involved there were large elements in the Republican party agitating against it, including the prominent hawks like Cruz and Cotton. The fact that it was initially "bipartisan" was simply because there were/are some open borders Republicans still left, and also because the negotiation team thought they had a mandate that said "any deal is better than no deal" which was absurd.
The fact is, our immigration laws are STRICTER than even Trump's enforcement. He is particularly lax on things that could really rustle the ire of the business community. He's abstained from any raids on meat packing plants, construction sites, and similar venues. The idea we need new laws to satisfy border hawks is pretty much a myth. Unfortunately, because of how courts cannot compel the executive to execute the actual law, the only way Republicans could ensure a future Democratic administration actually enforces border laws is with some sort of draconian contingency law that gores a Democratic ox if border crossings exceed a number. It would have to be something like "all snap payments are suspended for 6 months if border crossings exceed XXXX IN ANY MONTH, and cannot resume unless 6 consecutive months of compliance are certified". ANNNND there would have to be a reliable way to do such certification that cant be gamed by Democrats, which seems unlikely.
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I don't think most Dems support or have a "fiery passion" for open borders, but I have seen plenty of evidence for the policy preferences. Who needs to see more? Loose, executive bound grey immigration policy subject to change is where we are. Open the tap, close it a little, obfuscate what you want to hide, and figure out issues whenever-- or never. If Trump's term passes without any lasting changes I'll probably try to become more apathetic on the issue. I would like to see something done with asylum. Additional brrrrrr: drive forever electoral growth by printing limitless political capital in perpetuity.
The Democrats win back the Whitehouse, signal or even campaign on concessions in whichever areas are electorally expedient, then quietly reverse policies they don't like. They pivot focus to whatever and its business as usual. It can and will happen again.
I would expect the hardline immigration and demographic critics to be loudest in demanding legislative backing. The politicians I can understand, but interested voters and advocates I don't. A political crisis that requires permanent intervention, but never any resolution is exhausting for normies.
Maybe fiery passion is a bit of a hyperbole, but fact is that their policy preference is opener borders. So I can't see any way that the bill which was supported by democrat leadership and most democrats and zero republicans would actually be a big sacrifice of their own policy preferences.
Democrats have never "handed Republicans a major victory" for free when the Republicans didn't even want it.
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I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
I say "citation needed here." Even Trump isn't enforcing the laws on the books to their fullest extent. The idea we need more laws to fix the problem doesn't pass the smell test. If anytime a Democrat gets elected they stop enforcing the law, no law is going to fix that. As much as I think it would be brilliant design to make welfare contingent on border enforcement, that's never passing. And certainly nothing like that was in the 2024 law that fizzled out. There was nothing in that bill that could have prevented what Biden did in the first three years of his presidency, which was, essentially, tell ICE agents to do a different job. Because law enforcement and prosecution is the job of the executive. If he wants to dismiss cases against Ethyl Rosenberg because he loves commies, he can. The only recourse is impeachment + removal. And it simply will never happen for the border no matter how flagrant the violations because Democrats are not going to get onboard.
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Have we considered that while Joe Biden and his grand vizier Ron Klein didn't want open borders, the increasing radicalism of the democratic party(and I specifically mean the party, not the base) made it near-impossible to implement non-open-borders policies due to staffers and undersecretaries?
In any case, I suspect the de facto equilibrium is 'when there's a democrat in the white house the borders are open, even to serial killers claiming asylum from bigfoot, but the Texas governor shuts it down and the border patrol just lets him, regardless of actual orders'.
This is possible, and if you've read Matt Yglesias' works on "The Groups" and how they influenced Biden, it may have been the cause. I'm not sure exactly how much % of the blame they should get, but it's almost certainly higher than 0.
Again, strong disagree here. MAGA is overindexing on Biden's 4 years due to recency bias and since it lets them ignore Trump's inaction on an issue that's critical to them. Even Obama's second term had illegal crossing numbers that were about on par with Trump, although Obama probably kept it that way because he knew immigration could be a bombshell if mishandled rather than from him having his hand forced by explicit legislation.
I agree that there is a possible future democrat who will have strong border controls. But this scenario isn’t very likely; Obama still had a reservoir of moderate-ish(or at least willing to take orders) mid level talent and that’s increasingly difficult for democrats, for one thing, but also polarization just drives the parties farther apart- Trump has stronger border enforcement than Bush ever did(or tried to do). Likewise Biden had border chaos that Obama didn’t even gesture at.
Politics is unpredictable. Democrats could run to the center. But they’re currently refusing to moderate on trans issues, which are even more lose-lose for them.
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Is that what happened under Biden? Because I don't remember anything close to that happening under Biden. I remember Texas getting sued a lot and ICE agents removing barriers put up by Texans.
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Joe Biden literally flew in half a million illegals in the chnv program, and kept going until his last day in office. I can't see how that can be unintended, and not a single democrat opposed the program.
That type of program was probably more typical of the type Biden wanted to have overall, i.e. a much higher number than Trump but still "controlled" in a sense of having some numeric cap, with preauthorization and other checks. I still oppose that type of thing, but think it's different from what was happening at the (land) border where anyone could say "credible fear" and be let into the country.
Also I'm pretty sure there were several Dems who did criticize it, like Adams, Hochul, Cuellar, and some others.
None of these politicians have criticized chnv at all, or at least I'm not able to find any reference to that on google.
Hochul and Adams didn't criticize it directly by name, but they did complain about immigration's burden on NYC, and many of the chnv arrivals were going there.
Were the complaints about the burden on NYC before or after TX and FL began sending the illegals to NY?
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Complaining about burdens is just asking for money, which is right in the Democrat wheelhouse. No deviation from party line really needed. If they demanded a tax cut or repeal of gun control because illegals...then we have something.
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When did you start seeing this response? I don't remember any biting policy changes up until election season began in earnest. I think there were some local actions in NY and Chicago (and memorably, Martha's Vineyard) to the migrant busing policies, but I will admit I don't follow politics that closely and I might have missed something.
The vibe I remember felt more like "all in on open borders and accepting any and all asylum claims, up until they saw how that polled with prospective voters 24 months later."
It grew in strength over time. Even in early 2021 there were some rumblings with Kamala Harris making her "do not come" speech (satirized by the right as "do not cum"). Then agreeing in principle on a conservative immigration package that I talked about. Biden doing stuff like trying to reimplement "remain in Mexico", and eventually cutting deals with the country to try to staunch the flow of immigrants without having aggressive enforcement at the border. There were always progressive groups chanting for open borders throughout the process, but the more centrist left realized they had an issue fairly early and gradually picked up steam.
This wasn’t a satirization — it was just a very silly meme, especially when juxtaposed with Trump saying “I’m gonna cum… woooah.” (And then brought to new levels of hilarious with “oh yeah, he did score!” from Boris Johnson, and “we must cum together” from Bernie Sanders.)
Obviously I don’t have statistics, but I’m guessing this was a meme that a fairly broad (if generally male) segment of the population found funny.
Not every joke about a thing a politician says is a form of political speech.
Sure. I remember the meme and found it funny.
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We actually don't. Even assuming your logic behind that (Biden could've done something but didn't) is true, that doesn't prove whether his lack of action was deliberate or the result of incompetence.
Rather than lack of action, it was actually Joe Biden's deliberate action to throw open the border and invite them in.
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Also, why does nobody talk about building the wall anymore? The one thing that the recent kerfuffles over deportations have shown is that it’s inherently a nightmare to kick people out of the country. You have procedural hurdles which can theoretically be removed, but there’s also significant reliance interests which can’t be removed. A wall wouldn’t have this problem.
That wouldn't put an end to the problem. NGOs literally fly them into the country.
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To be clear, there's already 700 miles of fence along the border. It was built long before Trump came along.
To the extent that a physical barrier is effective at preventing illegal immigration, they've already built one.
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The Wall was always partially/mostly symbolic since it's not like it would stop people committed to getting through it, and it wouldn't do anything to touch people overstaying visas which was a big part of the problem. Sure it would help, and it wouldn't cost that much so it was always worthwhile, it just wasn't something worth fighting tooth and nail for relative to other parts of enforcement.
I wholeheartedly agree though that it's a heck of a lot easier to stop people from getting in beforehand than trying to deport them afterwards, for logistical and political backlash concerns. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
There was a bipartisan group of Senators who tried to broker a deal: build the wall in exchange for writing DACA into law. Trump (or perhaps just Steven Miller, who was Trump’s negotiator) wanted to make some changes to legal immigration. He got changes to family reunification and the diversity lottery included in the proposed bill. He then insisted on reducing immigration quotas, Democrats refused, and negotiations ended in a deadlock. DACA remained in place and Trump didn’t get any of the changes he wanted to immigration law.
I don’t think Trump would have had to fight “tooth and nail” to get the wall built after he had just won an election where “Build the Wall” was one of his primary campaign promises. All he had to do was to sign off on a deal that was a clear win for him. Yes, he would have had to sign DACA into law, but he was never all that committed to deporting child arrivals anyway. His primary criticism of DACA was that it should have been done by Congress, and under the deal he rejected, it would have been.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I was only vaguely aware of the Gang of Six stuff, but I looked it up and... yeah, it's bad. Typical Trump sabotaging actual reforms and failing to make deals.
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What makes you think republicans(other than Trump) actually want a no illegal immigration ever situation akin to Australia or Japan? They want to signal to their base, not eat a welfare bill, and have the ability to tell them to go home when they’re no longer useful.
It's not really about getting to 0 illegal immigration as that's not plausible, it's about having better control over the levers of who gets in, and preventing crazy Biden-era spikes. There's definitely a lot of cynicism when it comes to R politicians on immigration, with how the base wants strict controls but plutocrats want cheap labor, so politicians dance like they're making a change and then do nothing to keep the donations rolling in. MAGA was supposed to be the end of that, but unfortunately it seems like they're too broadly incompetent to actually do much of anything other than temporary fixes.
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