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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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The US has experienced a lot of Asian immigration and it doesn't seem like it's approaching anything that could be described as "civilization-ending".

The level of wanton illegal immigration in the last three years, and the last four months in particular, are so incredibly unprecedented that you simply cannot look to the past for comparison.

This is civilization-ending, but the civilization doesn't end overnight, and by the time you would agree with the seriousness it will be too late to do anything about it. It might already be too late.

Do you have a source for numbers on the amount of illegal immigration? All the numbers I can find are at least a few years old so don't tell me anything about the last three years. e.g., Wikipedia has charts that only go up to 2016.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/border-numbers-fy2023

The 2.5 million encounters of migrants occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year (FY) 2023 represent a new historic high, topping the prior year’s record, as has been widely noted since the recent release of year-end government statistics.

2.5 million encounters in a year sure seems like a lot. Presumably some were encountered, sent back and came again, others were never encountered at all.

It's also significant that over half were non-Mexican, Guatamelan, Honduran but from other countries.

Colombian, Ecuadorian, Chinese, and Indian migrants also reached the Southwest border in larger numbers in FY 2023, albeit in much smaller totals than Venezuelans.

Recall the scare about a PLA 5th column entering the US? I don't know about that but it looks like the US borders are so open they're sucking in people from other continents.

Whats the actual deal with the Chinese illegal immigrants? Are the numbers actually high? If so are we to interpret this as the situation in China being much worse than we thought, or is it some clandestine operation? The latter seems super implausible. If the numbers of captured people are really that high I can’t imagine nobody would be caught with a suspicious gadget or spill the beans on interrogation.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that, in the past five months, at least 4,300 Chinese undocumented migrants have been apprehended crossing the southern border, which amounts to more than double the number for all of the previous year.

One immigrant spoke anonymously to MSNBC about his experience, saying he feared staying in China after speaking out against government corruption. Fearing further retribution after being jailed twice, he fled, following instructions left by those before him on Chinese social networking apps. Detailed guides, videos and maps helped him make the journey largely on his own.

According to NBC, it's primarily political refugees. People who aren't feeling safe in China looking for somewhere rich and unwilling to extradite. Though it makes sense to sneak in some sleeper agents too - it's not like it's hard to procure guns or explosives in the US.

You can definitely be persecuted for speaking out, and everyone knows this. It’s also very hard to verify that you’ve been persecuted, so a whole lot of people claim refugee status who haven’t actually been persecuted.

We had a guy join my church for a few weeks, and he reported that he’d also attended Baptist, Mormon, and a whole bunch more. According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.

According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.

You can just list off different churches you've attended and pattern-match to somebody else's semi-recent claim of repression?

It didn’t make much sense to me. My best guess is trying to accumulate people that can confirm that you attended church services.

IIRC religious refugees are resettled with their coreligionists by preference.