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A great man once said feeble minds discuss people, mediocre minds discuss events, and great men discuss feeble and mediocre minds. As befits my station (see: flair), I will endeavor to do the first two.
Yesterday, Ron Desantis proudly shipped 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. See Breitbart and Fox News’ takes as well. The individuals were supposedly offered a plane ticket to Massachusetts, without being told they were being sent to a small, isolated island unprepared to receive them as part of a political stunt. Amusingly, not sharing a border with Mexico, Desantis actually had to source his illegal immigrants from Texas. I suppose rustling up 50 of the 772,000 homegrown illegal Florida Mans was too difficult, or may have upset some core constituency, who knows. The only shelter in Martha’s Vineyard has room for 10 and is obviously not equipped in the way that Boston, New York or DC would be and the plane ticket to those places would have been much cheaper.
Also of note: see the Fox News article for the Florida legislature’s $12 million
‘immigrant relocation program’Own The Libs/Desantis for President fun.I can stomach a border wall and even see the necessity, despite disagreeing with what it represents. I can sympathize with people living near the border and dealing with crime and drug cartels. But manipulating impoverished people seeking a better future and treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points and ‘own the libs’ absolutely turns my stomach. Which, judging by the Breitbart comments and replies I expect here, laughing at my pearl clutching is absolutely the point. You want me to be mad, you want me get up on my soapbox and bleat some self-righteous Soyjak lines about muh poor illegals so you can get mad right back and it feels good.
So I guess I won’t do that, although I never know what to say instead. I’m sorry that you hate Obama and Clinton (see: Breitbart article) so much that the thought of them having to deal with poor third worlders is amusing. I’m sorry that you’re so angry about illegal immigration and the libs that we’ve come here. Please, let’s all try to treat our countrymen better and do what we can to dial down the hate.
... some relevant context here:
Massachusetts isn't a statutory 'sanctuary state', but mostly because the courts decided to do that for the legislature. Most major cities are, or have effective rules equivalent to such, for what little it ever comes up.
Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.
It's also ridiculously rich and notorious for large and sudden parties: the perspective that it couldn't scale to shelter for 50 really doesn't pass the sniff test.
There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').
There's been big mess about releasing undocumented immigrants minors in a handful of cities to relatives, 'relatives', or sponsors, which is required in by law and existed under the Trump admin but has scaled up dramatically, with a lot of !!fun!! questions about consent that would normally scare people given ICE Airlines, and abuse of the policy has probably been tied to a recent high-profile homicide.
A lot of the scale-up of that problem is downstream of aggressively coached asylum claimants, who -- while generally not actually falling under the statutory examples for asylum -- began to be released on recognizance in far more cases in recent years. Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities (edit: which sometimes then bus them again to random suburbs), gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.
I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million
‘immigrant relocation program’Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.Undoubtedly illegal immigrants have plenty of disposable income and familiarity with the Massachusetts transit system.
Regardless, ship them to Boston for 1/3rd the price instead of nakedly stoking partisanship for political gain. And why is the Governor of Florida concerned with Texas, and using funds his legislature approved for the state of Florida to ship illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts?
Border crossings, or at least apprehensions as a stand-in for crossings, from 2010-2020 were lower than they had been for the previous 30 years. The total number of illegal immigrants in the country flatlined in the same time. Moreover, there appears to be a limited ability for us to control how many illegal immigrants show up at our borders.
If by 'reins' you mean this story, it's not clear to me how the media mistaking reins for whips is related to federal ICE policy.
Your argument being that there should be a better federal support and/or shelter network to be certain that illegal immigrants can be humanely treated? Your terms are acceptable. Even if we tied it to border funding or some other carrot, I doubt Senate Republicans would care - Trump, at least, was offered border wall funding for protection for dreamers and wound up shutting down the government instead.
The governor of Florida is paying to fly illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts to score political points. I'm too stupid to rationalize how that is in the best interest of the citizens of Florida, so I'll leave that to my betters.
I'm thinking that there may be at least one person on Martha's Vineyard who fits that category, especially for a ferry system that charges a buck a ticket.
There are a number of fun power of the purse legal or correct focus of government questions, but I'm rather skeptical that you'd have been soothed if the Florida legislature have phrased their funding expenditure slightly or if Texas had independently decided to pay for shipping undocumented immigrants to Florida as a pit stop.
Interestingly, the 2021 numbers broke the 2000 record, though NPR gives some estimation caveats. There's some fun questions about how comparable these numbers are -- NPR's waffling about gotaways applies as easily in the opposite direction, not just for this year but also for large parts of the lulls. But more interestingly, the surge had resulted in a large number of policy changes to discourage unlawful immigration, most notably the 1996 IIRIRA.
The media doing so, alone, doesn't particularly control. The President of the United States, in response to the media outrage, informed the country that " promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences," while the Vice President said "it evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery"... still doesn't exactly control, but it has a lot of impact on the day-to-day operations. Not because that particular sort of behavior was especially common, or even because horseback operations, but because Tall Poppy.
((The agents in question were found to not having been using the reins as whips, or striking the immigrants; they were punished under a slight stretch of other different use-of-force rules.))
And there's been a lot of stuff like that. Individually, you could maybe argue that each one is merely a skeptical and restraining eye. In combination, Border Patrol has been told to not try very hard, and they know it.
No, my argument being that "treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points" has been a common practice, and there's been crickets, at length. I don't know the correct solution to this problem; there are reasons I could see federal support or shelter networks to help, but there are also plausible ways that they're likely to be impossible to scale up or even to make the general scale of the problem worse in ways where the ultimate cost to life or safety is greater. There are some interesting and difficult questions to ask on that matter!
I just know very few people were horrified about it happening, even for very large numbers, and even with far greater humanitarian impact.
Which is interesting. Why didn't Trump accept that bill? Or, for that matter, why did the bill receive mostly Democratic support in Congress? The link just shrugs, perhaps Trump was incompetent. Which, to be fair, not exactly a bad null hypothesis!
But there was also a contemporaneous leak describing the White House's perspective. Maybe that leak was wrong! Maybe Trump somehow -- unusually -- managed to pull the vast majority of Republican politicians to his whims, and trick the Democratic Senators. But it's strange how the writer here can't even seem to imagine the possibility that a 'compromise' bill is actually not giving much to the other side, while demanding a lot.
Can you make any deep guesses about why DeSantis wants to do this, or why he -- and several other states, many of whom have been running similar operations -- believe that it makes effective political points? Was he born wicked, or was wickedness thrust upon him?
Maybe so, but the people ranted about how soft Obama was on the border and how much better Republicans would do if we enacted their policies. Well, Trump got elected and not much changed; the trend towards increasing numbers of migrants potentially started in 2018 before being masked (heh) by COVID or not. I don't have a counterfactual world where Trump won reelection in 2020 to see what the numbers would be today, but I think there's a pretty good argument that even if we gave repubs everything they asked for (at least mainstream repubs, defined as a majority) the numbers would still be relatively high. I'm not convinced by the folks saying the entirety of the crisis is due to the fact that we wouldn't build the wall and improve morale among Border Patrol agents.
I agree with what you say here, but your original claim was that federal ICE policies have hobbled border patrol. Whatever, forget it.
Your contention here being that the current administration was under fire for the bad conditions at their border facilities, so they shrugged and started bussing all the people to random cities rather than where the people actually wanted to go? And your claim is that, in the article you cited, the relatives they are supposedly being bussed to do not exist and were fabricated? Before you accuse me of strawmanning I'm just trying to fill in the gaps here, I genuinely don't see how the evidence you cited is equivalent to Desantis or how ostensibly bussing children in border facilities to relatives is treating them as chattel.
So is your argument that Senate Republicans would, in fact, accept a compromise?
The bill that you linked seems to be healthcare-related, not immigration, or else I'm just unfamiliar with the arcana of congress.
Neither; I suspect he wants to do this to amass political power and support a 2024 presidential bid. In the same way I don't think that Biden really cares about student loans or a lot of the diversity stuff, I think he does those things for his partisans. Doing what your constituents want isn't a bad thing, the real problem is when politicians of all stripes do things to hurt the outgroup and we cheer them for it.
There's some fair and interesting debates about the effectiveness of conservative policies, or even how and when conservative policies are in the realm of the politically possible, but I don't think it's very useful to try to extrapolate from the 2016-2020 to what would happen if "we gave repubs everything they asked for". Trumpist policies -- regardless, or because of -- their (lack of) merits, did not spend a lot of time being actually applied. Most famously the DACA stuff, which not only was blocked at length, not only was eventually turned back at SCOTUS under iffy legal reasoning, but also just took until June 2020 just to finish the court cases that eventually told Trump to try again.
There are plausible arguments that this is bad policy, or that perhaps someone more competent could have turned in into bad policy instead of merely bad paper. There's plausible arguments that the proposals, even if 'not bad', would not actually reduce immigration if implemented. But it's a very weak argument about the effects of implemented policy.
((And, separately: the metric has been a measure, for a long time.))
No, my separate claims are that :
The federal government was releasing large batches of adult undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers at bus stops, usually without notifying the state government, and often with wide disregard for the capacities of local shelters.
The federal government has bussed or flown minor asylum-seekers to sponsors including relatives, as required by law.
The federal government has bussed or flown 'minor' 'asylum-seekers' to sponsors that 'include relatives', and then each of those prongs turn out to not be true.
I don't know for certain whether ICE gave them a big list of options to pick, just really hates that one bus stop in El Paso specifically, or if they give each immigrant or asylum-seeker a spin on an oversized wheel of fortune. Presumably someone actually wants to live in the Bronx, so it's possible that the immigrants getting bused there requested it specifically.
But I'm rather skeptical of a dividing line, here, when one side of this looks like the uncaring treatment of chattel being forced to be used for political purposes by an unarmed Florida government PR team, and the other side looks like the caring treatment of armed ICE agents.
Senate specifically is a funny example! The Senate actually voted, 68-32, in favor of a pretty expansive and pretty progressive-favored slate, best-known as the Gang of Eight Bill. It struggled in the House through a lot of 2013, and Eric Cantor's loss in 2014 killed it in the House, especially since a lot of the conservative criticisms -- that the enforcement side would be neutered by Democratic efforts -- seemed a little prescient as DACA continued to grow.
I linked to the vote for an amendment that the healthcare (and other random crap) bill: the text of specific to the amendment for that vote is available here. For (stupid) reasons, this is how Congress tends to do a lot of procedural stuff.
That's true, but it's kinda useless without a deeper consideration. It's almost always possible to rationalize some deep reason why a bad policy that hurts the outgroup is acktually some great and necessary goal for the broader movement which "will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor, cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits, lower prices and raise wages, give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations", and also polish floors and server as a dessert topping.
There's a really obvious reason, here, and without being willing to touch it, this comes across as special pleading.
DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'
He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration. ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate. He slashed the number of refugees accepted. All much more relevant than DACA, and the former was his signature immigration campaign promise. I think it's quite useful to extrapolate from the Trump presidency, actually.
Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors. Desantis obviously didn't manage to find migrants with relatives or sponsors in Martha's vineyard. The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.
DACA -- a program that prohibits removal and supplies work permits for those covered -- has a "laughably tenuous" connection to how many undocumented immigrants cross the southern border?
Trump threatened a government shutdown for 5 billion, got 1.6 billion with a ton of caveats, and then it and a bunch of other attempts got shot down in court (tbf, in the case of the emergency order, probably correctly).
If you mean arresting and deporting immigrants without other convictions, with the kicking in doors figuratively, yes. (I'm not able to find statistics on ICE's actual no-knock arrests, and because ICE's warrants explicitly don't allow them to break into buildings, I don't know that they happen enough to be meaningful.)
Fair, albeit this seems a real small deal from someone dismissing DACA, especially given the statutory limitations for the refugee program.
And then it carefully glosses over the adults. The El Paso bus stop ones don't even really bother with that fig leaf.
My point isn't to compare equivalence between these programs; my point is that no one cared about it.
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