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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29987 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.

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.

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