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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.
Major mens rea issue divining the difference between they incompetently wanted to undo anything Trump did versus they competently wanted (approximately) open borders but backtracked after the last minute once they finally realized it was it was such an electoral albatross.
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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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