The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.
It’s in our face. And it’s changing our society.
Yup, same in Europe. There's constant fear mongering with racist undertones in the media about illegal immigrants and refugees, it's driving people crazy and violent against each other. All the while they're conveniently distracted from the root of their social ills.
But what I would say is: countries have distinct cultures, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to preserve them, which implies controlling the rate of immigration from different cultures. The U.S. would be quite different if we replaced half the population with people from Iran, China, or even England. There is a happy medium.Pros and cons.
I love the irony in this statement.
(Of which I suspect you're completely unaware)
Ah that's the problem. But you're ok with the fact that your grandpa immigrated and changed the society as well?
Why?
low cost, low overhead, no risks due to INS rounding up your people, and no tariffs due to NAFTA.
the reason they want the in the US is to work in services to keep costs down, because overall wages have not gone up and the costs of everything domestically needs to trend down -- and that means cheap labor.
Asylum applications are often contingent upon finding and keeping employment. ICE immigration prisons sell prison labor sold to state governments and corporations.
The public debate between "Immigration is a human right" and "Immigrants are criminals" is out of touch with the actual considerations motivating the laws and policies by US institutions.
None of those dynamics contribute to higher incomes for anyone aside from bosses and investors.
But maybe exploitation of cheap labor for personal gains is what you were referring to?
This is just such an absurd take. How much reality do you have to suspend to believe that corporations around the globe have all zoned in on a policy of somehow propagating a narrative through public life about immigration so that they can exploit illegal immigration.
I know we're in the anti-capitalism, anti-big-corp zeitgeist, but come on.
Some approximate stats:
Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year.
The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m.
One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by those statistics/events.
Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations. More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?
Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei.
Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.
> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?
I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.
> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.
The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.
"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.
Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.
The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.
More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]
A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.
For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/09/before-co...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...
One of the best things the US can do for its economy IMO is get back to being better at brain drain, and helping naturalize the people ready to work hard in general. They make jobs and help drive the American spirit because they basically have to. That's a tough message for people in struggling industries & towns, but it's hard to make a competitive & growing American economy when the job makers and doers are instead growing the economies of competing countries.
As a job maker, successful scientist, OSS supporter, & thankful refugee granted citizenship, immigration has become simultaneously one of the most American things to me... and one of the most bizarre.
(And specifically the towns where most buildings have been destroyed and most people died or fled.)
There are situations where the situation is so manifestly bad, that a prima facie approach to granting refugee status to asylum seekers (aka "opening the floodgates") from a specific location is the kind thing to do.
We've for instance seen countries do this for Syrians in 2015, Rohingya in 2017, Ukrainians in 2022.
But of course this is only viable (among other reasons, politically) for specific groups at specific times, whereas for other groups or at other times the case-by-case treatment of asylum requests has to be done again.
BTW, looking this up I was surprised to learn that the right to asylum initially did NOT cover people fleeing war, and some countries still do not consider it a valid reason to get a refugee status, among them the USA.
Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow the repressive government and create a new beautiful shining beacon in the southern cone.
An implication of your statement is that Putin does this to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that these people weaken rather than strengthen us.
[1]: https://www.state.gov/assessing-the-results-of-venezuelas-pr...
Of course some would like to forget that prior to the progressives taking over policy, Bill, Bernie and Barrack were all against illegal immigration. We have the interviews, the statements, speeches, etc.
There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member of the democratic party in office today in federal office supports some degree of border control, and frankly the degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most republicans want.
The GOP has successfully planted the idea that they are for a wall that lets no one through and the dems will let everyone in, but it's much more like two sides bickering over whether the wall should be 10m or 15m tall, whether or not there should be razors at the top, and exactly how many palantir/anduril terminators should be purchased for intercepting people, 1000 or 1200.
Edit: and you don't believe in global warming? Too rich!
Cooper also claims that the Holocaust happened by mistake, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to him.
I heard no such claims, but also he hasn't finished his WWII series yet, so a little premature to dismiss him
Edit: When I said conservatives, I meant conservative values
Cooper's deliberate misreading of the Wannsee Conference is Nazi apologeticism.
"Well, they didn't really mean to commit genocide, they just whipped up public hatred, confiscated all their assets, and banned them from working! So of course they had to commit mass murder!"
Who are his sources, David fucking Irving?
And let's not get started on the pipelining of extremist views to people who would normally consider themselves moderate or centre-right and are now spouting insanity...
That controls the general immigration policy debate, too. American employers in key industries like construction depend on immigrants for cheap labor, and the unwillingness to provide a legal path for those workers guarantees that people will keep taking huge risks to come here illegally because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. I would highly recommend reading this article: note both the former cop accurately stating that you can’t arrest your way out of a market imbalance and the lack of reception for the proposals from the construction company owner trying to have a legal path for workers. These people aren’t dangerous, they’re working hard and supporting families, but they’re brown and speak Spanish so we don’t respect them and businesses love to have workers who can’t complain about mistreatment.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...
The problem is that the asylum seekers are committing fraud if they are immigrating for economic reasons, and that fraud is being encouraged by the government and NGOs. JD vance, Elon, and Trump have talked about this several times but the media usually interrupts then or make a straw man argument about racism instead of covering the real issue, which is that these immigrants are being brought in as low wage, temporary laborers to undercut American workers.
If you have a reliable source for the claim that large numbers of people are lying on asylum applications and that this is being encouraged by the government, you should edit your comment to cite that so there’s something to be objectively discussed.
Like go to any construction site, any restaurant -- you're gonna see a bunch of Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc.
As wages haven't gone up, Americans need cheaper and cheaper labor on the low end to be able to, like, eat, and lots of big business knows this. The GOP owned Congress under GW Bush could have locked this issue down, and if they felt so compelled they probably could have swung that during the Obama era if they were willing to push. Instead it's a boogyman they can use to rile up voters while keeping costs low.
I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.
Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.
Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.
Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.
Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.
Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.
> if they are making our lives worse
They (legal and illegal immigrants, for this discussion specifically from Latin America but I suspect more broadly) certainly are making my life better and I'm not convinced that they're making the life of the average American worse.
I've seen a lot of convincing arguments for why immigration helps us, and they seem to mesh with my understanding of immigration to the US being historically a good thing. I can't say the same for arguments from the other side. Often the claims are totally baseless, such as claims that illegal immigrants are as a whole dangerous, despite having a lower incarceration rate than US-born citizens. Other times they're just myopic (most of the claims related to jobs imo). Sometimes they're just blatant racism (white-replacement theories).