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I'm having a hard time seeing how this is easy to do, or even possible. We actually do have a lot of good immigration laws on the books. The problem is that, until Trump, they were just not enforced. Remember how Biden said he needed a law to strength the southern border? And then Trump fixed it almost immediately? This is similar to gun control. We don't need more laws. We just need the will to enforce existing laws.
The most important thing is not to pass any new laws which come with amnesty. Because that was tried before. The result was millions of new citizens while enforcement was just forgotten immediately.
I'll go further though. Congress is hard to work with because there are enough crypto-democrats to prevent the passage of any genuinely useful laws. The SAVE act is the most salient example. A lot of Republicans who got primaried like Thomas Massie and John Cornyn revealed their true colors once they no longer had to answer to voters. Its just easier in this world to be a Democrat and collect applause from the genteel classes.
The courts are also nigh-impossible to fix. There are nearly 700 judges who can issue an injunction against an executive order. Probably at least 100 of these are on the Kentanji Brown Jackson partisan level where they don't care what the law says. Their goal is to block Trump. Thus the strategy to rotate to a new executive order playing whack-a-mole. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "no executive order is lawful enough that I cannot find a reason to block it".
The problem with many of the immigration laws is things like they say "may" instead of "shall" so they can be turned off whenever a D executive decides not to enforce them. Then another issue crops up when states sue saying "hey well you have to enforce at least enforce the laws that say shall" and then they get thrown out of court for lack of standing.
Funny you say that since the 2024 bill was actually supported by many Democrats! Then Trump had an overwhelming amount of political capital to spend at the start of his term to force something even harsher through Congress, but he never even bothered trying.
This particular issue was basically fixed in 2025.
I feel like this is that two screens thing we've talked about.
May, shall? Who cares? Certainly not the Biden administration. Certainly not blue city DA's.
Trump was met by insane resistance from Democrats and a good deal of resistance from his own party from day one. A lot of the latter took place in the form of slow-walking. But the craziest thing to me is the idea that any bill signed by Biden could have been a good bill. This was the guy who let 10 million illegals walk across the border. He could have stopped it at any time! So clearly he wouldn't sign a bill if he believed it would meaningfully restrict immigration. Sure he was a doddering fool, but his people knew exactly what they were doing. This bill just gives them political cover to say they're doing something. They weren't.
Maybe I'm not enough of a legal expert to discern the difference, but it seems to me that Boasberger and Sparkle Sooknanan keep doing their thing. Lower judges can just ignore the Supreme Court. Sure they'll get a tongue lashing but impeachment is off the table. Of course the Trump admin could simply ignore those same judges, but they seem mostly not willing too. I'll admit my certainly is less on this one.
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