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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.

I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border.

What makes all asylum claims originating south of the border bogus? I'd have thought at least Venezuelans would get some benefit of the doubt.

Passing through multiple countries that are safe on the way up. Going to the United States isn't about finding refuge, it's a preference to make it to the United States specifically.

I'm a Canadian, and I think that all asylum claims originating south of our border are bogus. Once you've escaped whichever hellhole you're running from...you've escaped it. It's done. The refugee system is meant to handle emergencies, and "being processed as a refugee in a safe country" is not an emergency that justifies asylum.

Well, yes. But Canada's southern border is with the US, so the argument that it is a safe country is pretty solid.

While Mexico could be argued to be the same the case is weaker and Mexico alone probably has a lot of potentially-legitimate asylum seekers.

And Texas(probably) wouldn’t be pepperballing migrants at the border if they were from Mexico. They’re from a lot further afield. If you’re coming from Venezuela, you’re passing through Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica on the way up, all of which are safe countries that don’t happen to be as rich or developed as the US.

Don't forget Nicaragua. Their homicide rate is now down to 7.9/100k: still worse than Texas as a whole, but not as bad as Dallas or Houston in particular, and not even half as bad as such infamous US hellholes as "Philadelphia" or "Columbus".

Nicaragua will never be recognized as a safe country for political reasons(it being a communist dictatorship and all).

People should not be traveling, and especially not encouraged to travel if they have an “acute medical emergency”.

I personally know people who had acute medical emergencies in Mexico and were explicitly told by doctors there that they had to get back to the states ASAP if they had any realistic hope of surviving due to unavailability of high-level medical care there. And sometimes people have medical emergencies while en route. The point is that we're not going to tell someone in dire need of a doctor that they have to start hoofing it to the nearest Mexican hospital; we're going to put them on an ambulance.

encouraging children to travel alone is child endangerment. Giving special exceptions to children encourages them to do the very dangerous crossing and gets them killed. If you want to save children, take them from the border towns in Mexico - don't make them risk their lives. That is just cruelty.

I don't know that it's any less cruel than turning them away. In any event, I don't think that these new regulations are really going to change much. All the consternation about Biden's border crisis happened during a time when normal asylum rules were suspended due to COVID. The surge they expected hasn't seemed to come yet, which makes me think that the actual rules in place aren't going to change much at best, and at worst are going to encourage illegal crossings. The only real solution seems to be to make it easier for law-abiding foreigners to get work visas and give them official status as economic migrants. Second on the list would be encouraging economic development in Mexico, a growing prospect considering that COVID exposed the logistical problems with relying on China, and the political front isn't going to get any better. Even the Chinese are starting to outsource a lot of their manufacturing there because they see the writing on the wall.

The "being a victim of human trafficking" is a blanket rule to allow all women entry, as everyone traveling with a coyote is being trafficked in some sense

Sane rule would require coercion being part of the deal - otherwise anybody traveling with a guide can be qualified as being "trafficked". Of course, sanity long ceased to be a consideration in immigration law anyway.

for anyone who passes through another country to reach the U.S. border with Mexico without first seeking protection there

Would that rule require people to seek asylum in Mexico itself or Mexico is considered a war zone by default now?

Of course, Trump wanted to do this, but was stopped by the courts. The courts are strangely silent now. One wonders why.

Perhaps because it took effect only 2 days ago.

Or perhaps because the Trump policy was barred because "It is effectively a categorical ban on migrants who use a method of entry explicitly authorized by Congress in section 1158(a)", East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump, 950 F. 3d 1242, 1272 (9th Cir 2020), whereas the Biden policy, according to your quote, is not a categorical ban, but rather merely creates a rebuttable presumption?

Not everything is a conspiracy against your team.

IIRC most of the people currently migrating to the border had previously settled in one of the nicer parts of Latin America and are now trying to illegally cross the border because they heard facebook rumors that claiming asylum would get you permission to live in the USA.

I mean, the US seems like a nicer country to live in than Chile, but "having to live in Chile" is not a crisis and shouldn't be considered a basis for asylum.

Note that no one, most republicans included, seems to actually want a secure border.

The Republican base and the populist wing of the right want a secure border - but the Republican establishment absolutely does not and will fight to the death in order to allow a never-ending supply of wage-depressing cheap labour make it into the country. The "establishment" of both sides wants this policy, and so that's what you get. Illegal immigration is a problem big enough that it could propel Donald Trump to the presidency - there's a lot of demand for solutions, but the mechanisms of government inertia and corruption make sure that those solutions aren't implemented. The problem is just too profitable for too many key interest groups to actually be fixed without radical change to the system (or at the very least the human machinery of it).

Actually securing the border would be both directly costly (you'd need both far more physical infrastructure and far more border guards) and indirectly costly (exacerbating existing labor shortages; many red industries depend on hispanic labor). Nativists genuinely wish there was less immigration, but relatively few are willing to pay the price for it.

Actually securing it is as chrap as laying mines.

  • -12

You've been told before not to post low-effort drive-bys like this.

One day ban.

That is a simply intolerable solution which would destroy the reputation of the United States, even if you don't mind killing thousands of migrants, and what is more it would be enormously dangerous for the surrounding border populations of both nations.

I guess the idea is that if you lay enough mines, nobody will be dumb enough to try to cross the border, and then (almost) nobody will die.

As opposed to the current situation, in which lots of people are dying while crossing the border, by drowning or dehydration or starvation.

But I'm guessing this would require an insane amount of mines to achieve. And it would render large amounts of land on both sides of the border unusable. There has to be a better way.

There has to be a better way.

Fade in on a picturesque suburban house - white picket fence with a large and beautifully kept front lawn and garden - hydrangea, tulips, lavender and roses all blooming simultaneously in defiance of nature - framing a big two storey brick house with light trim. Suddenly a few dozen Hispanic people appear running in from off screen towards the house. As they approach the fence, an explosion throws a cloud of dirt and grass into the air, a severed arm lands on and destroys the roses. Seconds later another, this time a head bowls over the tulips. Soon the explosions are all that can be heard, and in the bay window of our home's first floor we see an upper middle class brunette with immaculate makeup wearing an apron and gloves over a blouse and dress. She gazes in dismay at the chaos on her front lawn and shakes her head, before turning to the camera:

Housewife: There has to be a better way!

Announcer: Everybody knows you can maintain a defensive perimeter with liberally placed mines. But it's not a pleasant experience - there are convoluted laws to follow, large amounts of mess to clean up, and nothing ruins a dinner party like incessant explosions punctuated by the screams of the dying. But we have always put up with it, because it was the only way to really stop Hispanic people from occupying your land. Until now! Introducing the Spic Span!* Thanks to a breakthrough in technology we have managed to utilise quantum tunnelling to allow Hispanics to bypass your property entirely! Simply replace your fence with a Spic Span, and any time an unwanted visitor touches it they will be instantly transported to beautiful Canada! That's not all though - buy within the next half hour and we'll throw in a second Spic Span free of charge! Why are we offering such an insane bargain? Our CEO has lost his mind and has been sectioned under article 63 of the mental health act, so take advantage while you can! No rainchecks.

*Spic Span concept courtesy of Xander Crews

Look how common car accidents are, and how frequent deaths from car accidents were before safety was designed into both the roads and cars. The migrants might stop, but the people who live nearby wouldn't.

Also visa overstays

Not as cheap as you’d think.

Assume we’re placing mines over 3,000 km of our border. And pick a nice, low density of 0.8 mines per meter of front (see Fig. 2-4). That’s 2.4 million mines right there, which is on the order of the amount in Vietnam or Bosnia. It’s over 100x more than we deployed in the Gulf War.

How much of that land belongs to the government, though? About 40%. Getting property rights or eminent domain is hard enough when it doesn’t involve explosives. This is where the real cost will come in!

Oh, and I guess it’d be an international gaffe, too. But that’s going to pale in comparison to the political capital generated each time a photogenic family of 8 gets distributed over the region.

I don't think any significant percentage of Americans will enjoy the kinds of tactics necessary to achieve successful mass deportations. It all depends on how it is reported, of course, but the kind of police state necessary to achieve a significant dent in the immigrant population will not happen without the end of functional democracy or will consist of the politicians involved performing self immolation to prove a point.

The level of police state necessary to actually overcome those, such as a full mandatory national ID system, intensive audits of homeowners to make sure they're not renting out the basement illegally, and other such things would in fact be a big problem for civil liberties.

I disagree - in fact the US already has a police state that's fully capable of doing all of those things. The NSA spying and tracking programs that Snowden revealed were not actually ended in any real way, and you could hook those up to the advertising databases in major tech companies (if this hasn't already been done) and identify 90% of illegal immigrants within a single day. This would be a big problem for civil liberties, but that's like complaining about how a fire would be bad for your garden when it is already a smoking mound of ash.

I mean, I for one am against the potential for police-state-on-tap that surveillance capitalism allows for, so I'm not very warm on the "crank it up" idea.

If you required people to be here legally to go to school, to work, to drive a car, to rent a place to live, to open a bank account, etc. then most people here illegally would leave.

Texas does require legal residency for most of that, although not all of it, and the laws are either unenforced by the police because they have more sympathy for the Mexican working class than the politicians who make the laws, or are routed around by sleazy businessmen who take advantage of their clientele's inability to complain to regulatory authorities.

And continental Europe is full of unreported illegal migrants; they just call them “failed asylum seekers”.

Not sure how it works in the rest of Europe but in Ireland those people are just called asylum seekers. Getting your third rejection on your appeal for the decision to refuse asylum doesn't change things for you, you just try again.

I do think there are many Republicans who would not like to see mass deportations, but I think 80%+ of Republicans would like to see a secure border.

The (admittedly moderate) Republicans I know generally would agree with this: the sentiment is generally in favor of enforcing the laws on the books, with the caveat that changing the laws to reflect reality is acceptable -- for example, by massively expanding work visas to provide a legal basis for those who currently cross as illegal immigrants to find work, which would require facing the thorny issues of what conditions would be applied for those visas. But there's a concern that the generally uncontrolled state of the border allows all sorts to cross: not just cartels, and not even just Central/South Americans. Take a look at the 2020 statistics (last page): there are literally hundreds of citizens of places as far away as China, Ghana, and Bangladesh, and Romania apprehended by Border Patrol crossing the Southern border (many of these may present valid asylum claims under existing law, but that's not clear from the data and is honestly a pretty poor route to encourage even if true). Most developed nations aren't opposed to or incapable of tracking names and dates of those that enter the country.

I'm a moderate Democrat and this has been my preferred position for a long time, but no one on either side seems to want to get there. Trump said he wanted his wall to have a great big door, but only tried to restrict legal immigration further. Democrats would generally prefer to ignore the issue. If work visas were easy to get for anyone without a criminal record and proof of employment then you'd have employment agencies working internationally to hook employers up with willing migrants. And there would be no cap on visas beyond the number of employers willing to sponsor them. A friend of mine who owns a whitewater outfitter and a number of associated tourist businesses in the mountains of Western PA has had reasonably good luck in the past with seasonal employees he's gotten under existing systems, and so, as far as I can tell has a nearby luxury resort. The one problem that arises is that some countries are better than others. He's tried to get Russians in the past but they all seem to disappear as soon as they get to New York. Jamaicans, on the other hand, are great. I first noticed this when I lived in the mountains and saw an unusual number of black guys with accents drinking at a local bar that mostly caters to rednecks. They obviously weren't tourists, and I started a conversation with them (there were few enough people there that everyone was involved in the same conversation, more or less), and they said they were from Jamaica and worked at the resort in the summer and went to Vermont to work at the ski resorts in the winter. The one complicating factor is that resorts in the middle of nowhere almost always provide housing, so that issue is taken care of more easily than if the employer is just a guy looking for someone to work in his restaurant and is used to hiring locals.

I suspect the pool of small business owners who benefit from cheap labor extends a good bit beyond agriculture. Source: my mother’s coworkers when she was working specialty retail.

Not sure that would actually change a vote. If nothing else, Trump made border walls a badge of loyalty. Maybe increased e-verify/deportations would get pushback, though.

I was thinking the same thing. Most people don’t think macroeconomic strategy all the time.

Interesting. Reminds me of the movie How to Blow up a Pipeline, which I saw recently. They actually have a red state conservative Christian type (literally the only one married with kids) on the team of ecoterrorists, motivated by government strong-arming use of his land to build, you guessed it, a pipeline.

I thought one of the issues was that, as with eg. the annoyance in Texas over high speed rail, the large Republican landowners on the border are unlikely to tolerate the vast effort, eminent domain and decade long effort required to actually build the wall.

This probably was true, but the shifts in Texas politics make it much less true- the border democrats are very much official, licensed opposition that the state political machine has more control over than the right flank of its own party(which was what championed opposition to the HSR line), and the political will certainly exists to give landowners big checks from the state government directly.

There are a range of employers who would love to have a large pool of low wage workers who aren't protected by labor laws, low taxes, and minimal environmental regulations. A de-facto guest worker situation where migrants can enter the country but have no political rights, no access to entitlements, and are subject to threat of deportation serves their interests. Agriculture, meat processing, and construction are all powerful economic interests capable of organizing and lobbying for their needs.

The usage of E-Verify is something of a proxy for the balance of power between anti-immigration Republicans and this sort of employer. Many states in the south have mandatory E-Verify but major border states like Texas and Florida do not, or did not until recently. When Florida tried to do Mandatory E-Verify in 2020 they originally amended it so that agricultural employers would be exempt. But as far as I can tell the 2023 bill mandating E-Verify that passed a few days ago does not exempt Agriculture.

It'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. There's already been substantial wage growth at the bottom of the labor market post-2020 so if farmer's have to start hiring legal workers it could drive up costs of fruit. Part of the case for immigration restrictions is that it would increase wages for native workers, but those costs would obviously be passed on to native consumers. I don't think it'll be a major issue for Republicans in 2024 because the President always gets the credit or the blame for economic conditions. But if Republicans ever did enact serious restrictions on the labor supply it'd be interesting to see how they'd handle the ensuing inflation.

Slavery, whether de facto or de jure, introduces a market distortion to the supposed normative state of freemen hiring freemen for all available jobs. Minimum wage laws drive the market demand for slavery. Thus, one potential solution is to have a lower state minimum for agriculture and other rural jobs. But then unionization picks up where the minimum wage left off, and reintroduces the demand for ununionized de facto slaves.

Unionization of Agricultural workers is really hard for a variety of structural reasons and at least in California the United Farm Workers is basically dead.

I completely agree with this. There is unfortunately a ton of this in the federal government.

For instance: the commerce clause, which seems to be used to justify just about anything that the government wants to do.

Or the fact that Congress seems completely unwilling to pass bills that have a single subject. Gotta tie everything together so that you can't block bad legislation without having unpopular knock-on effects! Bonus points if you make it so that the artificial consequence of your legislation is "the federal bureaucracy and the military shuts down", because there's basically no law so bad that a president will ever accept those consequences to veto it.

Gotta tie everything together so that you can't block bad legislation without having unpopular knock-on effects!

If it were just about that, this would be less of an issue if legislation were not fundamentally driven by alarmism and impulse. What you are describing seems to boil down to a bundle of legislation comprising A and B(ad) being passed because rejecting it would mean that A can't be passed either; but assuming there isn't a sense of A being urgent/every day that we don't have A being a terrible loss, surely the common-sense response would be to reject the bill and wait until the proponents of A are willing to introduce it on its own.

Instead, though, my understanding always was that the bill-bundling in the US legislative is a consequence of the erosion of trust between different interest groups. Many legislative proposals are strongly championed by a minority and weakly opposed by a majority; and since nobody actually can trust a promise from anyone else in congress to support another bill they actually weakly oppose in the future in return for some favour now, the only way complex trades (where everyone gets something they strongly want in return for a bunch of things they are weakly against) can be executed is by making the entire transaction atomic (that is, bundling all components of the trade into an all-or-nothing legislative package).

Only being able to pass a limited number of bills through the reconciliation process in the senate and avoid the filibuster probably adds to the incentive to compile everything into one or two laws.

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