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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.

  • The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.

  • A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.

  • Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.

  • Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).

This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.

This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.

Edit: Trump weighs in

This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.

I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down.

At some point federal agents could arrest state national guardsmen. If they're afraid of forceful resistance, just send the arrest warrants to the guardsmen's home addresses. They can be physically handcuffed after the "crisis" is over. I doubt many people are willing to risk their freedom to defend Abbot's showmanship.

Alternatively...Biden could enforce the border. I know it sounds crazy, but at this point its a political win for him to work with Abbot.

Yeah on an object level it's insane that Biden is fighting to remove barriers to illegal immigration.

I recently read a Todd Bensman post that dropped the last puzzle piece in place. The Biden administration's illegal immigration policy (or lack thereof) just spent November and December in the spotlight, with even traditionally sympathetic media outlets raising eyebrows at the magnitude of border crossings and highlighting uncomfortable results in opinion polls. A handful of diplomatic meetings between the US and Mexico took place in late December, and in the opening weeks of January the Mexican government suddenly found an urgent need to shut down La Bestia, a train route traveling from Guatemala to the US border (technically with a "layover" in a Mexico City freight yard), and the primary corridor of illegal immigration from Central America for the entire Biden administration. Migrants are now being bussed to Villahermosa with increasing frequency and urgency, hot on the heels of the US diplomatic visit. Longitudinal flights from Piedras Negras (across the border from Eagle Pass) restarted concurrent to the diplomatic meeting (PDF, see last two pages - by migrant advocacy group Witness to the Border, so it's only an estimate, but probably close to accurate, especially for obvious signals like restarting known longitudinal flights). The Matamoros/Brownsville migrant camps were bulldozed at the end of December. There's a lot more actions taken in the last few weeks, but the upshot is that border crossings are way down, shantytowns aren't on nightly TV any more, and record-setting border crossings are momentarily a thing of the past.

I saw threads for the last two weeks wondering about Abbott's possible motivations. I believe comments like this illustrate the reason. The Biden administration is taking measurable steps to halt the flow of illegal immigrants (up to you if it's a genuine change of heart or just cynical ratings management), and the results have been observable. By picking a fight with the federal government now, Abbott shifts the frame from "the Biden administration is making measurable progress reducing illegal immigration" to "the Biden administration is fighting to make illegal immigration easier," which at a soundbyte level is a win for Abbott. Any subsequent moves the Biden administration makes to reign him in just turn into more headlines for Abbott, adding up to a serious perception problem at election day against Donald "Build The Wall" Trump. Consequently, the Biden administration wants to avoid escalation, and now they have a ruling in-hand that undermines any object-level obstruction by Texas without actually compelling Texas to do anything different.

That's really interesting but considering the sheer number of crossings we saw in the first 3 years of Biden's administration and the way they very publicly undid as many of the previous administration's immigration restrictions as they could, I'm not sure it moves the needle much for me. It's simply too little too late for any under the table actions Biden takes to change my opinion of his record on immigration as a voter, if he wanted to go that direction, it should have been done earlier in his tenure. If he'd undone most of Trump's restrictions but actually kept immigration numbers similar, I would be much more inclined to vote for him.

I agree. I don't think many voters are impressed by some kind of self-congratulatory back-patting exercise for solving a problem the administration itself is responsible for exacerbating for the last three years. I mentioned this in a different comment, but for consistency I'll repeat it here: the more I think about it, the less I think the Biden administration wants a narrative about progress, and the more I think they just want the border and illegal immigration out of the news. They're in a bad position, largely of their own making, and now any attempt to bring the numbers down just comes off as cynical optics manipulation.