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What is the progressive policy on immigration? I've heard all the reasons why Republican plans are racist and xenophobic and all that but not much substance on what should be in place instead. It seems to me to be the left's version of a GOP Healthcare plan. "We have one and it's totally great but it won't be ready until next week."
Does someone want to enlighten me?
The progressive policy on immigration has been repeated for about a decade and a half now - path to citizenship for those who've grown up in the US, looser immigration restrictions, higher quotas, more judges to address backlog, etc. There have been a few attempts at implementation but all of them were ultimately shut down by Republican intransigence.
Today's executive order doesn't conflict with any of those things.
In fact, all it does it put a temporary limit on extralegal border-crossing asylum claims to 2,500 people per day. So it does not, in fact, "shut down" asylum claims, nor does it increase deportations of people who have been living here.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry
Is the United States supposed to take in an unlimited number of unauthorized border-crossers every day?
Is that the way it's going to go down? The right falsely accuses the left of being for "open borders", and the left's response is to actually just take the bait and make that their stance?
Because if that's the new progressive litmus test (it's hard to keep up since there seems to be a new one every day) then we have well and truly jumped the shark. Even progressive hero FDR turned away tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees:
In 1933, and again in 1937, the Roosevelt administration modified the “likely to become a public charge” restriction, but kept it in place. German Jews attempting to immigrate to the United States in the 1930s were still often rejected for economic reasons.
As a result of these legal and administrative obstacles to immigration, less than 20% of the German quota was filled during FDR’s first term. The Roosevelt administration focused on domestic problems, chiefly combatting the Great Depression. Though Americans certainly had information about the threat Nazism posed to German Jews, few could have imagined the persecution would escalate to mass murder. FDR did not take significant action to aid German Jews, either by ordering a diplomatic protest or by publicly supporting increased immigration.
Some people on this website who claim to be "on the left" are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don't give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.
Some people on this website who claim to be “on the left” are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don’t give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.
The last one. Many are under the delusion that if fascism wins, it'll make the left suddenly REALLY popular.
That’s like wanting a zombie apocalypse because then your neighbors might overlook your weird personality and hang out with you since you know how to crack zombie heads and start a fire.
Also, the number of asylum seekers arriving at the borders are making the path to residency and citizenship slower for the people already in the US. Processes that usually took a week are now on hold for 4 months or more because a lot of resources are used for the asylum seekers (yes, government should hire more people)
Is the United States supposed to take in an unlimited number of unauthorized border-crossers every day?
yes.
Is that the way it's going to go down? The right falsely accuses the left of being for "open borders", and the left's response is to actually just take the bait and make that their stance?
no borders is and has been the leftists stance.
In 1933, and again in 1937, the Roosevelt administration modified the “likely to become a public charge” restriction, but kept it in place. German Jews attempting to immigrate to the United States in the 1930s were still often rejected for economic reasons. As a result of these legal and administrative obstacles to immigration, less than 20% of the German quota was filled during FDR’s first term. The Roosevelt administration focused on domestic problems, chiefly combatting the Great Depression. Though Americans certainly had information about the threat Nazism posed to German Jews, few could have imagined the persecution would escalate to mass murder. FDR did not take significant action to aid German Jews, either by ordering a diplomatic protest or by publicly supporting increased immigration.damn, sure sounds like letting people in who need help could have saved an awful lot of folk
So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:
- The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
- There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
- We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous
Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just fix the backlog without congress" or just making wild assertions like "oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to" or similar things that aren't how the federal government works?
I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help." But if it's just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he's a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that's all his fault, I'm not into that conversation.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy
Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.
I don't know for sure, but I do know that someone who has posted 2550 threads in 11 months (~8 threads/day on average) lives online and should be generally disregarded by any normal, rational person. Ask yourself what kind of person has that much free time to post on reddit/lemmy/social media...
Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. I just want to (a) answer krashmo's pretty reasonable question (b) have ozma's refusal to answer my question to be able to refer to in the future, to make the point to other people, when he inevitably posts this bad-faith bullshit a few times a week every week from now until the election.
I definitely appreciated your response. It was thorough and very civil. To be honest I was kind of expecting people to downvote me and not provide any reasoning why so an actual answer was a pleasant surprise
Dude I'm fuckin trying 🥲. Immigration is the one of the bad-faith criticisms that really gets under my skin because it is personal to me in a couple different ways, and this thread is absolutely filled with people who are talking pure bullshit about it for malicious reasons.
Anyway I am happy if you found my input to be useful. I'm gonna go back to just pretending this tide of total crap isn't washing around the rest of the thread and restrain myself from spending the rest of my night typing hostile and condescending replies to it all.
Immigration is an interesting topic for sure. One of many that climate change is likely to force more urgent action on in the relatively near future. Hopefully we have a more well rounded approach in place by then.
I know the feeling you described well. It's easy to fall into the rage bait trap. Good on you for taking the high road, even if only temporarily. I'm trying to do better at that myself.
I lost the battle, now I'm being super mean spirited to some obvious shill in some other thread. It is ok. I feel like it's probably more productive than not, and I am enjoying myself in a kind of this-probably-isn't-healthy way. 😃
Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.
It doesn’t seem like a mistake to me to treat people with the respect of generous interpretation.
Do you have specific knowledge of this person, or is this the story you tell yourself about others by default? If so, why?
Well, ultimately I want a utopian Star Trek universe with no borders but that's kind of a pipe dream right now, so I'm just throwing my arms into the air in the interim.
I share your dream, but the current nationalist system will have to collapse first because there's too many people who think their dirt is special dirt.