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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?
Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.
I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.
Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.
But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?
Trump has made me very fatalistic about this. The two options seem to be the following:
The Trump administration has been extremely effective at removing immigrants, much more than I would have predicted. The foreign born population has fallen by something like 3 million since he's taken office, illegal immigration is near zero, asylum claims are being denied at record rates, H1Bs are declining rapidly.
What's more, removals are accelerating. The "ICE goon squads" are doing their job in a more quiet, effective way than they were when Greg Bovino (a peacocking retard) was in charge.
I mean, if you want less immigration, it's hard to imagine a better alternative.
Edit: Just today, the DOL suspended nearly all of India-based Cognizant's visa filings. And news like this is like a weekly occurrence.
https://insiderwire.com/news/dol-suspends-nearly-all-of-india-based-cognizants-visa-filings
This number is almost certainly wrong.
Trump has been decent on the flow of immigration, but much less on the stock of immigration. Even if we accept the 3M number, that puts Trump still somewhat behind Biden that let in about 10M over his 4 years. And I expect the pace to decrease overall since Trump is likely to lose at least the House, and much of the decline is from self-deportations which will probably taper off.
The bigger issue is that there's a number of well-known loopholes in the immigration statutes that Dems have used that Trump just... isn't bothering to fix. I don't really blame Trump for not winning on the birthright citizenship issue since that's more of the SCOTUS acting like philosopher kings, which is outside of Trump's control.
Trump came in with the biggest momentum for immigration crackdown of any president that I've seen in my life, and at best he might be able to undo Biden's damage while still leaving the overall system just as prone to loopholes when a D takes over.
Yeah, I'll acknowledge its much harder to deport than to import which is why Trump's success is so remarkable, and far beyond what any reasonable person would have predicted. I'll also acknowledge that measuring the foreign born population is hard, although people on the low-IQ right saying "107 million" are full of crap.
Which ones? The crazy thing is that the Trump administration is somewhat responsive to randos on Twitter pointing out good ideas. Despite what everyone says, we don't actually have an imperial presidency on domestic issues and there are strong limits to what he can do. Tinpot judges have a lot of power.
Really we have to give a lot of the credit to Stephen Miller who is the 150 IQ turbo-autist that the country needs. If you're anti-immigration, and Stephen Miller isn't doing it for you, I don't even know. I think we're actually pretty close to the limits of what's possible.
Of course it will all be undone and more the second we get a Democratic president. Every election is existential now for the foreseeable future.
Immigration law is a trainwreck in general, so there are tons. One particularly noteworthy issue that Biden abused was the parole authority. This is something the 2024 bill would have ameliorated somewhat. Then Trump cynically torpedoed that bill with MAGA promising he'd deliver a much stronger bill if he became President. Then he did almost nothing statutorily.
Then another issue is Trump's border policies are constantly getting shredded by the courts, usually because he's trying to do something with an executive order when there's laws on the books from decades ago that say differently, so the courts rule against him. Instead of trying to fix the law he just looks for a different loophole for enforcement. It's a strategy with more wins than he had in his first term, mostly because he spent his first term losing hard over and over, and a few effective strategies bubbled to the top. But it's still wobbly in lots of places, and it's a very fixable issue.
Miller is great but is more like a local maximum -- Trump has given him broad leeway to do stuff with EOs and enforcement agencies but gives him little leverage beyond that.
Trump plus no bill is better than Harris plus bill.
Even if we accept the bill was a net positive by itself (it still had loopholes) executive authority is still far more important. And giving the Biden administration a win that they were doing something could have flipped the election which polling showed as much closer at the time. He ended up winning big so perhaps you still could have done the bill.
It would be impossible to pass anything right now without eliminating the fillibuster. I think we should get rid of it but so far we haven’t gone down that path. It would costs some political capital; though in my opinion smart people on both sides are thinking that we have too many checks/balances and eliminating them to boost the power of congress would be a good thing.
If the GOP got rid of the filibuster now it would give the Dems another issue to run on even if their smart people think it’s a correct decision.
One of the reasons I like getting rid of the filibuster the most is it would be a check on the Supreme Courts power as the SC would be more comfortable telling Congress to fix legislation.
Agree-ish, at least on the topic of immigration. Though I'd pretty strongly claim that the two were not mutually exclusive! It might have been a bit awkward for Trump when the Dems started implementing small chunks of his immigration-restriction agenda, but the Dems had already started their own crackdown on immigration by this point. The bill itself was mostly closing loopholes and getting funding for border enforcement, which I doubt would have moved public opinion much.
Too convenient of an omni-excuse for purple state legislators to never have to vote on anything controversial. Obviously it should be abolished -- by either side.
If it was a serious obstacle to immigration reform at the start of Trump's term, Trump almost certainly could have obliterated it.
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