The key problem with this story is that it doesnt actually show the Biden admin solving this issue (which was exacerbated so greatly by them) - it only shows them mitigating the ugly, immediately visible side effects.

The kids are no longer sitting in cages or crowded overflow facilities at the border, and are instead now sitting in newly erected temporary shelters further inland? Great, but these new facilities will also be full some day if the influx at the border continues unabated. Similarly, the article describes how the process of matching unaccompanied minors with relatives or guardians has been sped up, which is again great news, but once again missing the mark.

What's notably absent in the article are the two key metrics we should care about: how many minors continue to arrive at the border, and which percentage of them can be matched up with relatives or guardians. Without these two pieces of information, the article is nothing but a deceptive fluff piece.

I don't think that's a fair take. Increasing staffing, improving facilities, and fixing administrative hurdles will speed up the rate that these cases can be processed, which will solve the problem once the infrastructure is put in place. This is government working to solve a problem. The last administration basically went out of its way to gut these processes and used cruelty as a deterrent.

Honestly, the more I learn about these situations the more I see open borders as an inevitability. I'm no longer convinced by the arguments that "you can't have a welfare state and open borders", because all the data that isn't sponsored by highly biased conservative think-tanks shows that immigrants commit less crimes even when controlling for reporting, create more jobs and businesses than locals, and will frequently emigrate back to their home countries which results in closed border policies actually increasing the number of permanet foreigners in the country. We've made border crossings more dangerous as a deterrent under all administrations, and as a result people are coming and staying permanently instead of having the natural flow in and out of the country. We've restricted the outflow and caused accumulation.

Biden is doing something we haven't seen in America for a long long time. He's running the government effectively. Bush was a comical failure. Katrina, the wars, etc. Obama he basically just kept all the policies of Bush with a "raise taxes less than Bush cut them and pass a Republican healthcare plan" veneer of liberalism. Wars continued, drone strikes became the norm, etc. etc. Trump just wasn't interested in actually running the government. Biden is the first president to actually govern effective, and although I think there's a lot of slam dunks he could be taking, I think he'll do a lot of good by showing that responsible government can actually solve problems, which I hope leads the way for more competent leadership and less neoliberal boomer trash that's overtaken the government in the last 50 odd years.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Apr 30 2021 10:48pm

They don't care, they just want more voters.

The rate at which cases can be processed will not be the bottleneck long-term if the influx continues unabated. There will be more and more unaccompanied minors without relatives in the country, and the number of available guardians is not infinite (and exceeded by several magnitudes by the number of piss poor families in third world countries who would like to see their children grow up in America).




We obviously fundamentally disagree on the merits and perils of open borders. Just two things: first, I dont see how you could ever control for underreporting in communities which have a huge incintive to avoid contact with authorities, and with law enforcement in particular. Non-response bias is generally a tricky beast and very difficult to handle, let alone overcome.

Second, even if immigrants had lower crime rates than the domestic population, this would only tell us that the entirety of the immigrant population is not as bad as the folks from the ghetto or trailer parks. Say there is a 20/80 split between ghetto and non-ghetto among the domestic population, with the rate of violent crime being 20 and 2, respectively. Then, the overall crime rate among natives would be 5.6. If immigrants had a crime rate of 5, they would have a lower crime rate than the natives, but still two and a half times higher than the productive members of the domestic population.

In a similar vein, creating more jobs and businesses does not tell us anything about the quality of these jobs. Immigrants opening a lot of kebab shops or working as cab drivers does not mean that they are more productive than locals who are, for example, working as an engineer in dependent employment for a large corporation.




I can largely agree with what you're saying about Biden and efficient government. If Biden handles things the right way, he could indeed achieve some depolarization and regain some trust in the power of (good) government. If he fails, however, or gives in to the loony left, it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back and lead to some sort of "open partisan cold war" (if that term makes any sense...).

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 30 2021 11:30pm

Your first paragraph at the end is pretty disgusting. I think you should reread that and think about why you felt the need to characterize it that way. People come in response to specific events. Covid and the hurricanes last year are the most recent events that precipitated massive immigration.

We've been over the literature many times. They've got a pretty wide berth to "under-report" and cause less crime than locals. Here's something to think about. If you're there illegally, the same incentive to under-report also is an incentive to under-crime. You tend to want to avoid the law, which means you stay in line and follow the rules. Also, let's not pretend minorities are only targeted at the same rate as whites. They aren't, Arizona actually had a law for a while that they could just demand immigration papers from anybody even without suspicion. The best you've ever been able to do on this subject is "Well, maybe they do just as much crime because they under-report" even though you can't find anything to substantiate it and we have a loooooot of substantiation that they do less time. I think it's time you just drop this point already.

You're throwing around Ben Shapiro style crap hypotheticals. So I'll throw one back. The "productives" doing crime has been deprioritized by the FBI since 9/11, despite it's far greater impact on society since the monetary values are much higher than low-level crime, and they can facilitate low level crime. So even if we assume the higher classes commit less crime, which we can't do because they aren't investigated at nearly the same rate, then we still can't assume the quality of the crimes are less. A bank robbery pretty much always gets caught and only makes off with a few thousand. Money laundering tends to support drug cartels with millions of dollars which results in hundreds of murders and drug trafficking and gets a slap on the wrist.

You think most people work as engineers? Lol no. And even if the first generation immigrants don't start "good businesses", second generation immigrants overwhelmingly do. It's actually not in contention outside the political sphere that immigrants are amazing for a countries economy. I found that really interesting. There's a whole industry of think-tanks dedicated to turning out garbage studies that aren't taken seriously outside of politics because the literature is pretty cut and dry on the subject of immigration and economics. Libertarians actually got this one right. Borders are trash.



I'll remind you again that we have no reason to believe Biden will "cave to the left". He's not a wild card. We have decades of history on him. So why are you so intent on keeping this dishonest point alive?

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Apr 30 2021 11:56pm

My pespective on this issue is shaped more by the recent experience here in Europe. Once Germany and a few other countries didnt stop people from the Balkans abusing or asylum system for economic gain (keep in mind that we have a muuuch more girthy welfare state than the U.S.!) in late 2014 and the first half of 2015, an influx from Syria started. Once the first wave of Syrian refugees was allowed in in the late summer of 2015, all hell broke loose and we saw almost 2 million people pour into Europe within just a few months. In the wake of the European refugee crisis, the whole topic became incredibly loaded by both sides, with those on the left arguing, essentially, that it was our moral duty to take in a potentially infinte amount of poverty migrants under the guise of the asylum system. Merkel herself once famously said "in principle, there is no upper limit".

The situation was brought under slightly more control in the years after, but due to the moral blackmailing and strong pressure from our (very left-leaning) press, the influx was never truly stopped. Even now, there are over 250k poverty migrants pouring into Europe every year, and it's no longer sympathetic Syrian war refugees, the bulk of them these days are people coming from places like Morocco, Nigeria, Eritrea, Iraq or even Bangladesh - places with bad living conditions, but without recent, large-scale catastrophes which could explain a surge of out-migration from these countries. It's fortune seekers coming to improve their economic situation, not people fleeing a concrete disaster like a hurricane.

There is similar empirical evidence from the US-Mexico border as well btw: when the American economy went to shit in the aftermath of the Great Recession, immigration from Mexico grinded to a halt.



Yeah, right.
Maybe Democrats should go on the campaign trail with this slogan and argument if the evidence is so overwhelming. Whether borders are trash and should be fully opened is a debate they should be winning once they bring it up, shouldnt it?



It was not making a point, I was outlining a hypothetical. I did not say that Biden will cave to the left, I said IF he does that, there will be this and that consequence. And no, Biden doing that is not impossible.

Specifically, the empirical evidence you cite is not as clear cut as you pretend it is. These "decades of history with Biden" suggest that he always positions himself in the middle of his party. That's why he was a major proponent of the super predator crime bill in the 90s and now, in 2021, implements a platform to the left of Obama and Clinton. If the party continues to move even further to the left, experience would actually suggest that Biden will move with it rather than resist.

Now, to be fair, Biden is the leader of the Democratic party and has a certain degree of sway over where it goes. My expectation is that he's happy with where it currently is and does not want it to lurch even further to the left, so that he will try to rein in any attempts in this direction by the progressive wing. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that these attempts fail, the party moves on, and Biden will go along with it. I'm not overly concerned about this scenario right now, but we definitely cannot rule it out entirely.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 1 2021 12:37am

I'll respond to the rest maybe tomorrow. I'm going to bed. So gonna just respond to this part.

There's plenty of issues that the right has massively distorted with think tanks. Climate change was not in question in the scientific community since the 70's, and virtually all global warming models actually under-estimated the warming seen. During the 2000's there were tons of bogus studies pumped out by anti gay rights groups to show that gay people abused their kids, when it was all either fabricated or intentionally manipulated. The same thing is happening with trans issues now, where people are pretending hormone blockers are dangerous experimental treatments when kids can initiate puberty by stopping and it's only given by doctors who examine and talk to the kids themselves. And it happened with immigration and the economic impacts thereof. Immigrants and kids of immigrants are overwhelmingly good for countries.

Welcome to the real world, brought to you by your beloved CNN.



There's no excuse for shit like this