- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
The G.O.P. abandoned a bipartisan border security bill that also aided Ukraine after Democrats called their bluff on immigration, agreeing to tough measures Republicans demanded.
Congressional Republicans thought they had set a clever trap for Democrats that would accomplish complementary political and policy goals.
Their idea was to tie approval of military assistance to Ukraine to tough border security demands that Democrats would never accept, allowing Republicans to block the money for Kyiv that many of them oppose while simultaneously enabling them to pound Democrats for refusing to halt a surge of migrants at the border. It was to be a win-win headed into November’s elections.
But Democrats tripped them up by offering substantial — almost unheard-of — concessions on immigration policy without insisting on much in return. Now it is Republicans who are rapidly abandoning a compromise that gave them much of what they wanted, leaving aid to Ukraine in deep jeopardy, border policy in turmoil and Congress again flailing as multiple crises at home and abroad go without attention because of a legislative stalemate.
The turn of events led to a remarkable Capitol Hill spectacle this week as a parade of Senate Republicans almost instantly repudiated a major piece of legislation they had spent months demanding as part of any agreement to provide more help to a beleaguered Ukraine. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and foremost Republican advocate of helping Ukraine, and Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who invested months in cutting the border deal, suggested they would vote to block it on the floor in a test vote set for Wednesday.
I always see “migrant surge at the border”. It’s been years and years and years of this. Has there ever actually been a surge?
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.
I live in south Texas and am constantly murdered by my Mexican neighbors. We work on cars together, help each other out with yard work, when my grandmother died they came to the funeral to support my family. We all kill each other with kindness.
So brave of you to carry on with life and befriend your murderers, especially after being murdered!
My life is practically the movie Coco
Clearly!
Republicans should take care of their own rapey-ness problem.
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.
This is especially true since 80-90% of the time, they do show up for court.
Republican propaganda notwithstanding, a lot of people are generally honest people who do understand the consequences of further pissing off the most powerful government in the world. A little surprisingly, that includes people who are in such a desperate situation that literally taking what objects or family members they can carry and swimming across the Rio Grande into a country they know will be hostile to them is the best option available.
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.
Yeah his interview on PSA was great. I have absolutely no problem sending more funding and support to the border, I just don’t want us to be assholes to these people and the Republicans and committed to their core at being assholes.
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.