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

“Limited resources” isn’t really a good argument when there are so many jobs unfilled. Instead we seem to be in a situation where we have more resouces/opprotunities than we have workers to use them.

Beyond that our immigration system is a nightmare. We don’t allow in nearly enough immigrants (as you can tell by the labor shortage) and those that we do allow in need to jump through all kinds of excessive hoops. But we have a labor shortage and a bunch of people wanting to come here. Seems like these problems kinda solve eachother to a degree. I don’t understand why youd get stuck up on “line jumping” instead of focusing on how we can improve our immigration system to allow enough people in.

Of course it is a good argument. What is the point of immigration policy if people can simply walk into the country unchecked?

I know it sounds really mean or harsh to say this, but countries should be doing what is in their best interest for their own citizens. You are almost certainly right that immigration policy needs to be improved in several ways but to simply say there’s a labour shortage and therefore keeping borders secure is pointless is missing the mark in a big way.

Immigration systems are theoretically in place to pick the best candidate for the citizenship pool. It’s like hiring at a company, would you support removing HR hiring practices and letting anybody join whenever there’s a position to be filled? I hope not for your companies sake.

What does this have to do with what I said. You said you dont want immigrants because of limited resources. I illustrated how that argument doesn’t hold up when you consider the labor shortage.

Ok? doesn’t change anything I’ve said.

This is a strawman. I never argued anything about making the borders less secure.

But they don’t really do that very well. We need lots of low skilled labor that would be easy to attract but we aren’t doing it.

And if we needed a bunch of unskilled workers and there were lots of them applying, I’d hope we’d consider hiring some of them.

Borders are part of immigration law and policy; you might not have said it explicitly but that’s basically what i interpreted. If you aren’t saying that and are for keeping borders secure and simply allowing for some kind of fast-track that still vets good ‘candidates’ then fine.

One thing I will say is that I think fisking responses is really hard to read and often times results in a lot of nitpicking. Just respond to the body of text with a cohesive argument and be done with it.

Completely agree. I didn’t even read the replies because they weren’t concise and couldn’t get to the point.

We provide poor people with benefits that are worth more than the money they make. As long as that is the case, I’m not convinced that there is an economic argument for filling low wage jobs. At least, it’s not obvious.

Imo, the conversation needs to be split between ideals and practical reality.

Hype is speaking more to ideals. What the laws should have. How we should implement them.

JB is speaking more to reality. We will not pass good laws. We will not pass any laws. “US immigration reform” means a series of presidents overturning each others executive orders. All we will ever do is either crackdown or not-crackdown. And JB thinks not cracking down is better for the economy.

Interesting how the migrant caravans no longer exist.

(There was at least one in January 2021 that never came to the US.)

Point is, that was such a political (I would personally say, xenophobic) kludge.

It was always a fox news generated crises.

We still have people showing up at the border, like we always have. It just varies depending on how messed up Latin America is at the time. Let’s figure out how to make that region better rather then spend money on walls.

I thought the caravans had existed for years and presumably still continue to exist.

The difference is that they got media coverage for a while because it fit with someone’s political narrative.

They will be back next time Biden does something good and Fox News needs a distraction. They often appeared when Fox didn’t want to cover something particularly dumb that Trump did.

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Fox decided that CRT was going to dominate the next election cycle. That seems to be fizzling out. Caravans will be back next spring.

They don’t really exist anymore in the context people think of from the news stories (hundreds or thousands of people). There was one with 7000-8000 people under Biden’s presidency that was stopped at the southern Mexico border.

It’ll probably happen again the next time there’s a major destabilization in Central America.

This is good to hear. That was what was so inexcusable about the wave that happened a while back was that somehow Mexico didn’t stop them. Mexico is huge, there’s no excuse for them being able to go across all that territory unstopped.

assuming it is illegal or bothersome to Mexico to have such a march. I have no idea.

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You don’t think the US is capable of applying pressure to Mexico to keep that under control?

Not really, no.

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Applying pressure, yes. Being successful…not sure.

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So, I haven’t really followed this particular situation that closely. But I will say that my Dad (who essentially thinks Trump is an a-hole with good policies) routinely touts this as one of Trump’s accomplishments: getting Mexico to secure its southern border to stop the [majority of] immigrants before they reach OUR southern border.

I honestly don’t know enough about it to rate my Dad’s claim as totally true, mostly true, kind of true, mostly false, or totally false. But it’s something he brings up routinely. :woman_shrugging:

Reuter’s article about a migrant caravan from the Northern Triangle, US pressure on Mexico, and a bunch of other topics from this thread.