Biden's "Crisis" at the US-Mexico Border

… huh?

  1. “The wall” was never built. It was never going to be built
  2. These are not people hopping over the border. These are people lawfully presenting themselves at border crossings. Once again, on here, people seem to keep conflating those things…

Probably worth dissecting some more but most of us (and most of the media) blamed Trump for being cruel, not having a problem in the first place.

2 Likes

Pretty sure I remember the government nearly (actually?) shutting down because of the wall demands made by Trump

2 Likes

Trump invited that with his rhetoric. If people hear “Immigrants are bad”, and then see immigrant kids in cages, they are going to connect the two…

Then there is the REALLY crappy “take kids away from their families” thing. That was one of the worst parts. Unaccompanied minors are a problem. “Newly unaccompanied minors because we took away those accompanying them” is a separate problem that is on Trump.

:iatp:

During the previous administration, there were bills with bipartisan support from a majority of both the House and Senate that had funding to increase the number of judges, increase immigration staffing, and spend more on physical border security. It sounds like you think that would have helped.

Those bills never became law because they didn’t include `wall’ funding so Trump killed them

2 Likes

Blame Trump for what? Immigrants coming here? I just heard blame for family separations and putting kids in cages.

1 Like

I don’t draw that distinction.

The fundamental challenge is that a bunch of people are in a bad situation in their home countries, and they want to move here for safety and/or a better life. We can accommodate those pressures, expend a lot of resources in a probably futile attempt to block them, remove the motivation…or accept the current mess that is the status quo.

I do think those would have helped ameliorate the issue to the extent we could have done so. Sounds like Trump pressed the button against it for very poor reasons.

The other point to be made is that if we don’t ramp up processing for those trying to immigrate legally (whether as a refugee or otherwise), it just increases the problem of people entering illegally.

1 Like

Are you certain of that?

There are apparently a large number of migrants who do queue up at the border crossings.

There are also some number of migrants who cross away from the official border crossings. This is arguably legal under international law, in the sense that refugees are not to be penalized for unauthorized border-crossing when necessary for their safety if they report to the proper officials as soon as practical once safe.

And then there are also some number of migrants who don’t bother with reporting to the proper officials.

Yes, because I am only referring to people who present themselves at border crossings. Those that do not are in an entirely separate category, and the two are getting conflated.

…and part of what I’m saying is that you’re making an artificial distinction.

International law recognizes the right to cross a border in an irregular fashion when seeking refuge, assuming they are coming from an unsafe area (and the US State Department recognizes the Mexican border states as unsafe). And regardless of that fact, the pressures driving that migration (and likely solutions to the challenge of such migration) are independent of the mode of migrants’ border crossing.

Oops.

image

Why don’t the October numbers line up with the September numbers from the previous year? I guess 2019-2020 fit fairly well, but the others don’t.

1 Like

Biden makes Harris point women on border issues.

Um, because September and October are different months with different numbers?

That’s a pretty big jump between Sept '20 and Oct '20 (in the '21 line), which isn’t a continuation of a trend from earlier, and doesn’t continue as a trend after. Sept '18 to Oct '18 isn’t quite as big, but still looks strange.

The numbers are probably right - they just look funny.

Looks similar to the jump from April 2019 to May 2019. :woman_shrugging:

Possibly. Horizontal lines on the graph would help a bit.

1 Like