> The border being flooded is terrifying.

...

> And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.

Does typing this out not cause the slightest pang of cognitive dissonance?

Add to that the Democrats have been far more successful with apprehending and deporting illegal immigrants. This is a struggle among people trapped in their own bubbles, disconnected from and uninterested in reality or relevant metrics.

I don’t know if that’s true or not but “sanctuary cities”, “Abolish ICE”, blue city mayors complaining about a migrant crisis, and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes don’t inspire confidence.

If the issue was immigrants in general then possibly. But it’s about illegal immigration specifically and complete disregard for law and order when it comes to the millions crossing the border illegally and being encouraged to do so in many cases or no pressure to deport anyhow. Turns out that’s bad policy.

By the actual numbers, illegal immigrants are by far the group with the lowest rate of felony, violent crime, property crime, and drug-related crime: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...

The idea of illegal immigration being "complete disregard for law and order" is based solely in feelings of fear or animosity, not in facts.

This is precisely his point. Illegal immigration isn’t about identity politics, as it has nothing to do with race or gender or disability, etc. Your comment turned this into a conversation about identity politics.

Most discussions of immigration I've seen seem to be fixated on a subset of illegal immigrants. i.e. talk of border walls (only between US/Mexico, never seen discussion of US/Canada) when most illegal immigrants are coming via boring methods like through ports of entry and on commercial airplanes.

That’s fascinating. I definitely agree that there seems to be a fixation on the southern border. Do you have a source showing that a majority of illegal immigrants are entering through ports of entry or commercial flights? Would love to read it.

I didn't find more recent numbers than this in the minute I spent looking but I imagine they're available if you dig around: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecu...

That’s about 2016-2017. Estimates of illegal crossings in the South border were below 200k per year, I think, but over 800k last year.

Wasn't 2016 when the country was at peak "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it"? Regardless, do you have numbers for 2023 that include visa overstays, for comparison purposes?

I'd be curious to get more information on that. For example, it isn't only Mexicans and Central Americans coming through the southern border. Around 25,000 Chinese nationals have been apprehended on the southern border by the middle of the year, for example. You wonder how many HAVE passed through illegally.

Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like a better pro-immigration strategy for Democrats would be to agree with the fact illegal immigration must be stopped and to debate the methods to stop it. And then secondly, argue for opening LEGAL immigration to more people since there are many benefits to it when done in a controlled and deliberate manner.

These people try and illegally enter the US through the southern border because a CHANCE of a life in the US is better than dying in Mexico to your local cartel.

No amount of border wall or lawfare will change that for Mexico (I personally believe we should be working hard with Mexico to re-assert law and order, that WOULD reduce illegal immigration). No matter what we say, the horde of bodies will continue.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot them? How many strangers will we shoot, how many mothers and children, just to insist that we really care about that border? Will America be better when we kill a thousand people a day in the south? How will doing that improve the economy?

Implying a contradiction reveals the critic’s own identity politics perspective.

The permanent, irreversible demographic shift that conveniently favors Dem politics is only one of the many, many problems caused by turning a blind eye to unprecedented hordes of inherently law-disregarding third-worlders taking advantage of our weak border enforcement.

I never saw any Democrats focusing on Identity, it was always Republicans talking about it as a boogie man.

There are actual real genetic disorders Trans people are dealing with.

Republican's just chose Trans people as some small group dealing with a difficult to explain condition and decided to pile on them.

Republicans have been increasingly focused on identity politics and Democrats have been avoiding it for only the last year or so as it has become clear that it is a major liability for Democrats. They spent most of the last decade heavily emphasizing identity politics, and it’s become clear to them and everyone else they have been largely out of touch with the average American in that area. Now that there is a rising backlash, they’ve tried to distance themselves but Republicans have years of material to drag out and pin them with. I don’t think they get credit for trying to downplay a long-running strategic blunder in the 11th hour.

Decade?

Not really. If you want to go back a Decade, then it was legitimate equality issues.

You can't just say, people shouldn't be equal and claim you are fighting against 'identity' politics. Like women being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission. Why do Republicans want to go back to those days? Unless you actually listen to them, and they quote some Bible Versus about Women being property, then you see the actual agenda.

This is the classic motte-and-bailey scenario - that the entire radical gender movement is just trying to be nice to trans people. But overlooking trans women competing against biological women, biological reality, critical gender theory being taught to kids, pronouns, “x” as in Latinx and the adjacent drag queens reading to kids, etc.

"entire radical gender movement"

What is the term for 'take a couple isolated examples and call it a movement'? motte-and-bailey goes both ways.

There is no widespread 'trans women competing against biological women'.

Completely made up issue to stir outrage with the radical base.

> There is no widespread 'trans women competing against biological women'.

It's more common than you may think - see https://www.shewon.org

But… all of those were addressed by the Dems? Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists.

The people who bring the issues back to identity politics are not dems.

Unless… perhaps the solutions didn’t matter, and the polls themselves were much stronger than the results.

Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.

On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.

The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.

> identity politics

This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,

The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.

Inflation being a years-long painful problem to wrestle with was inevitable with all the stimulus pumped in to keep us afloat through the pandemic. We could have fared far worse, and many countries did. I don't know why the left didn't push on this argument harder to defend themselves.

You are not wrong, the Democrat strategy obviously failed, the racist right is significantly better at identity politics, because a) whites are still a majority and b) latinos are very christian and anti-socialist on average.

And Kamala Harris was an uninspiring candidate, the democrats have proved to be the definition of "lesser evil" without any true identity with teeth to speak off. Still, Donald Trump is a pedophile, a rapist, a good friend to Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand how anyone can be morally bankrupt enough to vote for someone like that.

I think the entire map was red on Tuesday in large part because of incredibly racists thoughts and posts like these becoming more and more prevalent. The idea that white people should not be a majority and if they are it's due to racism is an extremely disgusting and racist statement.