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Post by factorychef on Oct 4, 2023 8:06:05 GMT -5
How would you deal with it. All you need is a battery powered Sawzall and you can cut through the border fence in less the 5 minutes.A friend of mine has been down at the Texas border and said you could look across the Rio Grande and there were people as far as you could see waiting to get in the US. He was in the Eagle pass area.
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Post by majorminor on Oct 4, 2023 8:37:06 GMT -5
Do something to raise the living conditions in the places they are coming from. Walls, checkpoints, border guys, helicopters et al might slow or slightly interrupt the tide from time to time but at the end of the day if it was you living in poverty with no future would you take your shot? I would.
Other than that about all that is left is crack down on employers and no proof of citizenship no benefits in welfare goods and services. It's cruel but it would slow things I'd bet.
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Post by Marty on Oct 4, 2023 8:50:08 GMT -5
I don't watch the news or follow politics so that makes me both uninformed and uninfluenced by such.
If Mexico is so bad that people are storming our borders would it be so bad to do something helpful IN Mexico rather than just protect the border. I don't think that it's too difficult to guess the problem is economic but also maybe a government controlled by or influenced by drug cartels and corruption. I don't think I'd want us to annex Mexico but if there is yet another Mexican revolution let's help the right people to get in government, right after killing off the Cartels. When most of us were young and smoking pot that came from Mexico we had no idea that we were helping those Cartels to become so powerful.
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Post by Cornflake on Oct 4, 2023 9:56:40 GMT -5
One component of the problem is that our folks at the border are required to follow the law. Somebody claims a right to asylum? Gotta do what the law requires. Our law badly needs revision. There was a serious attempt at revision under Bush II but it didn't get through. Since at the moment our representatives can't agree on what day of the week it is, comprehensive reform of the law isn't imminent. Meanwhile, would-be immigrants have learned how to game the existing system.
I think there have been efforts to get Mexico to hold would-be immigrants at locations away from the border. That's a good idea. I'm not sure where that stands at the moment.
Arizona started cracking down on employers years ago. The employer has to determine the immigration status of job applicants and refrain from hiring illegals. Their business licenses can be revoked if they don't. I haven't heard anything about the status of this effort in years. Last I heard, everybody thought it was working pretty well.
But I agree with Steve. You'd really have to see a lot of the Texas-Mexico border to grasp how impossible it is to wall people out who really want in. I think we should do our best while realizing that the problem is here to stay.
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Post by theevan on Oct 4, 2023 10:00:32 GMT -5
Not so many Mexicans crossing as before.
Many Central Americans, MANY Haitians, Chinese (yes, many), Venezuelans, Africans from various countries.
Nothing much we can do about Mexico's poverty level. This has more to do with our failure to secure the border and, in effect, turning it over to the cartels.
Me as beneficient overlord: -Build a secure border, whatever it takes, including war with the cartels. -Make a greatly streamlined process for legal immigration, NOW. -For the ones who get through, quit giving them every incentive under the sun. Send 'em back. Put as many resources into sending them back as are now used in housing, feeding, transporting, educating and so on. Make them go to the back of the queue with the rest who are doing it the right way.
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Post by Hobson on Oct 4, 2023 10:09:07 GMT -5
Having lived near the border for over 40 years, I have way more to say than 2 cents worth. All the ideas that anyone comes up with are meaningless without those who are in a position to implement them being willing to actually do anything. But the assumption that all of these people are good people who are just looking for a better life is clearly wrong. I think that having so many of them sent to some of the states far from the border is gnawing away at that assumption.
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Post by epaul on Oct 4, 2023 10:36:20 GMT -5
It is easy to look back and say "if only we had invested all the money we stuck into Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine and instead invested that time, money, and effort into the economies of our Southern neighbors...".
It's easy to look back and say that, but...
Umm, but...
Not sure what to put after "but"...
other than "nothing is ever easy and can't change anything now".
Going forward?
Tough one.
I suspect the real reason we haven't put a serious effort into building "their economies" is that too many big players in our economy are in competition with their economies and are opposed to pouring bucks into the competition. Ag and Oil in particular. Manufacturing was also a part of it, but manufacturing has already been been cut up by China and a bunch of shirt makers, so now, I don't think Business cares whether a shirt or guitar is made in Malaysia or Mexico.
Yes, there is the religion and Commie stuff, but a lot of that is just noise used for cover by domestic economic interests that haven't want to fund the competition.
But, if the Southern economies were sound and fair (and not concentrated with the elites... and now cartels) those wild commie guys that keep popping up down there wouldn't.
And, yes, we have thrown money around down there, but the money has gone to interests that tend to use it just to buttress their advantage, not build a fair and sound economy. On the other hand, how do you build a sound and fair economy? Probably never been done. Ours is probably as good as it gets, and we stumbled into ours and seem half intent on wrecking it.
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Post by aquaduct on Oct 4, 2023 11:03:43 GMT -5
How would I deal with it?
To start with I would never have let Biden get anywhere close to the Oval Office. That would have prevented a ton of the current disaster in this country.
But I guess it's too late. So now I'd say, y'all broke it, y'all fix it.
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Post by Russell Letson on Oct 4, 2023 11:35:25 GMT -5
I'm married to a refugee, and I know that as American as they became and as much as they prospered here, C's parents would much rather have stayed in Lithuania. But the prospect of the NKVD and the Red Army propelled them away, eventually to the US. (Otherwise they would likely have been propelled to Siberia, as many of their countrymen were. What else do you do with the people whose farms you've stolen?)
Which perhaps accounts for my sympathy for people who have been driven out of their home places by official or free-market thuggery, by poverty, and (sooner than we'd like) by climate change. Our immigration policies are certainly inadequate and entangled with unlovely social-political attitudes, but I'm not sure that there is any comfortable, inexpensive programmatic response possible to the demographic-political-economic forces that drive large migrations. Some of the conditions that operate in Central and South America might be mitigated by foreign-relations efforts, but for the most part, the ox is in the ditch.
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Post by theevan on Oct 4, 2023 11:39:44 GMT -5
I'd breathe a sigh of relief if we could just get back to pre-Biden levels of illegal crossings.
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Post by coachdoc on Oct 4, 2023 14:58:39 GMT -5
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Live up to our promise.
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Post by aquaduct on Oct 4, 2023 15:59:56 GMT -5
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Live up to our promise. Sure. But what's wrong with coming here legally?
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Post by Marty on Oct 4, 2023 18:36:04 GMT -5
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Live up to our promise. Sure. But what's wrong with coming here legally? Become a citizen and reap the benefits. Legal immigrants pay taxes, illegal ones don't if they can get around it. Why pay for the cow if you can get the milk for free.
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Post by aquaduct on Oct 4, 2023 18:49:59 GMT -5
Sure. But what's wrong with coming here legally? Become a citizen and reap the benefits. Legal immigrants pay taxes, illegal ones don't if they can get around it. Why pay for the cow if you can get the milk for free. Exactly. So somehow I should feel bad because illegals aren't openly welcome here (in theory anyways, with the Biden Administration thoroughly ignoring that fact)?
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Post by Marshall on Oct 4, 2023 18:54:33 GMT -5
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Live up to our promise. That was a different age. The statement should have read, “Give us your white European masses, and will give them free land we’ll steal from the indigenous people. “
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Post by Marshall on Oct 4, 2023 19:02:25 GMT -5
There’s a benefit to immigration. You get an expanding population and, thus, a growing economy. Look at China and Japan and countries with a shrinking population. You want Social Security, you need an influx of working aged individuals to keep it afloat.
Of course, it’s beneficial to control who and how many such people you allow in. Therein lies the rub. And Congress can ‘t get their act together to legislate meaningful immigration policy. So it’s left to the swings of the POTUS to make impromptu policy and enforcement.
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,852
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Post by Dub on Oct 4, 2023 19:07:55 GMT -5
I agree that immigrants expecting to live in the US should enter legally. I also think we should listen to what people in the border states have to say as they often take the brunt of it.
But…
US foreign policy has always operated to help our corporations get what they want wherever they are. In Latin American countries we've always supported our corporate interests over any local welfare concerns. We support the worst despots over democratically elected leaders. And we keep the "War On Drugs" going.
Nixon administration officials have admitted that the War On Drugs was a ruse to allow them to attack minorities (Blacks, Latinx, and hippies). If drugs were legal and cheap there would be no Latin American drug cartels. Drugs would be safer to use and the incidence of drug-related crimes would practically vanish.
How many people are robbed and killed these days over tobacco or alcohol? Sure, drugs are bad for people but so are alcohol and tobacco. So is fast and processed food for that matter. Instead of massive law enforcement spending, we could have additional tax income. I think the number of drug-related deaths would go down, not up.
We actually create the refugees that storm our borders. What if we quit doing that?
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Post by millring on Oct 4, 2023 19:11:03 GMT -5
The saying used to be "we need cheap labor." Now we just need labor. We have aged ourselves out of any reasonable hope to operate and produce what needs to be operated and produced. I work every day with folks who can barely speak English. I'm astounded at how they outwork me. Mexican immigrants operate every egg packing plant in the county, do most of the roofing and drywall, all the masonry work. We're only a town of 15,000 but the apartments and subdivisions I deliver mail to are almost exclusively Indian (the halls smell wonderfully of curry). Meanwhile the white American population is busting the seams of the retirement and nursing homes. They're all jammed to capacity and building more barns to store the old and in the way.
50 years of recreational sex and no reproduction is coming home to roost. We not only don't have a generation of producers, thinkers, and workers, we have a population ruled by the mental derangement caused by sex as mere recreation.
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Post by majorminor on Oct 4, 2023 21:23:02 GMT -5
Good luck fitting all that on your Prius bumper sticker!!
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Post by AlanC on Oct 5, 2023 8:19:27 GMT -5
The saying used to be "we need cheap labor." Now we just need labor. We have aged ourselves out of any reasonable hope to operate and produce what needs to be operated and produced. I work every day with folks who can barely speak English. I'm astounded at how they outwork me. Mexican immigrants operate every egg packing plant in the county, do most of the roofing and drywall, all the masonry work. We're only a town of 15,000 but the apartments and subdivisions I deliver mail to are almost exclusively Indian (the halls smell wonderfully of curry). Meanwhile the white American population is busting the seams of the retirement and nursing homes. They're all jammed to capacity and building more barns to store the old and in the way. 50 years of recreational sex and no reproduction is coming home to roost. We not only don't have a generation of producers, thinkers, and workers, we have a population ruled by the mental derangement caused by sex as mere recreation. I am probably deranged but I'm not trying to rule anyone. Attachments:
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