You know that’s… A good point. I personally don’t care that people are turned away, I just want people given the chance, to do it safely, and to help those in immediate danger.

CARAVANS of MURDERERS and RAPISTS they said. Republicans have a very fertile imagination. Very dystopian and very dark, and not at all bound to reality, but very fertile.

It’s hard to find good data on this, partially because illegal migrant crossings are, well, illegal, and so those migrants intend to cross without being found, and won’t appear in any statistics. But in the cases where migrants are caught in process and are able to be sent back over the border, well, they are going to pick another place to try again. So those numbers are likely to be inflated a bit, as the same people may be caught multiple times.

But what’s not in dispute is that the number has been rising every year, and the current structure we have to process them can’t catch up. Republicans are aghast that sometimes, when we catch an illegal on our side of the border, all we can do is give them a court date and release them. But if our system is overloaded, there’s not much else they can do.

And the bussing of migrants from Texas to Chicago and New York might be a political stunt (and possibly illegal itself), but it’s an effective one. It’s hard to deny the numbers when they show up at the bus station. But it further emphasizes that the people running Texas think of these migrants as little more than cattle.

I think it’s important to add that this “surge” is a statistical surge, not a literal one. “God’s Army” is not going to come to the border and find a big hole in the wall, and migrants pouring in. Yes, there are a lot of migrants currently on the other side of that park, but thats because it’s easy to get to. they can always just find a different place to cross. The border is so massive that people can leak through, a few at a time, and still amount to a statistically significant increase.

In an election year!? Of course there’s a surge!

I find it really odd that a migrant caravan or immigrant surge always seems to start on January in even years, and often are more frequent in years that are divisible by 4.

They suddenly disappear, never to be heard from the Wednesday after the first Monday in November.

I can’t quite put my finger as to why but maybe someone smarter than me can look into it.

Found some data that is digestible. Their have been peaks, but a lot of the noise about the border during the Obama years was the GOP boy crying wolf. But now there is actually some real shit going down at the border and a lot of people are only now realizing that there is a fuck load of people trying to get asylum. Way more border encounters than ever before.

Although, I do wonder how many of these encounters are a result of the new trend of migrants willingly surrendering to border patrol. I imagine that, in the past, many more people did the opposite and were not counted as an “encounter” statistic. They were never encountered at all.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics

I can’t put my hands on the actual statistics so my numbers could be off, but I was listening to an interview with Chris Murphy where he said that in the last 10 years, there’s been a jump greater than an order of magnitude in immigration 500/year to 8000/year with no increase in tools or people to assist.

It can be easy to get lost in all the media noise about this. Honestly, the best thing to do is to look at the data. The US government has been tracking “southern boarder encounters” for decades.

I’m rushing to a meeting right now and don’t have the time to grab some data, but as I recall, the previous to high peaks were around 1.6m encounters a year. And that had everyone freaking out. I believe the US is hovering around 2.4m southern border encounters for 2023.

My numbers might be a little off, but the point is, border encounters are significantly higher than they’ve ever been. Which is why even blue state governors and mayors that are pro-sanctuary are holding press conferences and asking for federal intervention.

A few things:

U.S birthrate has fallen below replacement. Without immigration we would be facing the same issues as south Korea and Japan. An declining population will lead to higher wages and a collapsed real estate market. This will lead to long term economic stagnation and then decline.

Illegal immigration supplies a steady stream of poorly educated people to be exploited by their wealthier Republican base. Immigration reform is a talking point for Republicans. The leadership absolutely does not want it to happen.

What they want is to slow down generational integration into the main demographic from the children taking advantage of opportunities.

They want the parents who immigrated to work in the fields/factories for a pittance. The more scared they are of being deported, the less noise they will make when they are abused. They also want their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to do the same. It’s what the Jim Crow laws were meant to do, keep the black people slaves in all but name.

So they fight against education and social services that allows people to escape the cycle of poverty.

Any president can shut down the border at will, Nixon and Reagan dabbled in it, obviously Trump did, it’s not some unheard of precedent.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s not some sort of precedent like the supreme Court codifying or later overturning roe versus Wade. “Closing the border” is not numerically effective, is subject to change according to every administration, this does not tie foreign aid together with southern border crossing closures, and it’s ridiculous to think that the Biden administration isn’t aware of that, especially since only one third of illegal immigrants come through that southern border.

This is a simple Democratic win-win counter-move to idiot conservative attempts to stop funding Ukraine to resist Russia.

Republicans gambled that Biden would never agree to stricter immigration controls, and so the Republicans would be able to kneecap US support of Ukraine, proving they don’t understand anything about border control, immigration, politics or logic.

This is about as easy a win for Biden to prove how spineless and how many of the Republicans are acting in bad faith, as well as to stop gap a real, though not fundamental or critical issue.

There are finite resources to be distributed, the US doesn’t have a robust immigration system or a social care system in place, and every year, over 10 million people, or about 3% of the US population, illegally enters the United States.

Biden agrees to a measure that, while dumb, forces Republicans to either follow their deal or prove publicly, in an election year that Republican politicians are even less trustworthy than you may have thought.

With the major fracturing going on right now within the Republican party, the Republicans are basically handing Biden an easy and major political win by abandoning one of the central party they have campaigned on and many people voted for them because of.

Republicans who vociferously advocated for border reform are now withdrawing in droves after having their demands met, further cementing how pathetically partisan the republicans really are, that they have no ethics or social responsibility, all they’re trying to do is make somebody else look bad and get their guys back in the right chairs.

With the United States population growing by 3% every year, and those 3% not being a part of the system that can recognize, employ, benefit from the significant value that immigrants add (and have always added) to the United States, agreeing to funding expanded border enforcement is a win-win for the Democrats.

They prove they’re willing to work with Republicans, it does stop gap what is an important, though nowhere near critical issue in the United States, and the Republicans look like absolutely untrustworthy fools in an uncommonly important election year.

All the Democrats have to do is look like they’re taking the higher road, and they technically are, and they get everything they want whether the Republicans honor their word, which was unlikely, or the Republicans run away because their scheme was exposed, which is happening.