Republicans Agonize Over Supporting Bipartisan Border Bill They Insisted On
A bipartisan bill to address the surge of migrants at the southern border is sowing discord within the Senate GOP as Trump urges them to kill it.
Senate Republicans are in deep distress over whether to support a plan to fix the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border that includes key concessions they had demanded from Democrats months ago in exchange for approving new U.S. aid to Ukraine.
The bipartisan legislation is expected to be unveiled as early as Friday, giving senators time to review the text before a planned procedural vote next week. But with former President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and much of the right whipping opposition to the bill before it has even been unveiled, its future in the Senate appears to be in serious jeopardy.
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Republicans have for years called on President Joe Biden to address the crisis on the border, insisting that the elevated flow of migrants is an urgent national security threat and calling for legislation to address it. But with an agreement in sight after four months of negotiations, many in the GOP now say that Congress doesn’t need to pass new legislation and that Biden ought to simply take executive action to fix it. Some have openly admitted they don’t want to give Biden a victory ahead of the November presidential election by letting him take off the table an issue on which he rates poorly among the electorate.
Crisis is a pretty flimsy term to begin with. I think it meets "crisis" definition just based on the pictures of the camps on the other side of the checkpoints. Based on the ridiculous appointment/app system. The backlog.
I think it's a crisis. The ridiculous idea is that this is a crisis caused by immigration. It's not. It's a crisis caused by cruelty and incompetence on OUR part. The immigrants have, by and large, done nothing wrong.
Our own unwillingness to invest in the bureaucracy of legal immigration (which includes nearly all southern border immigration -- refugee is a legitimate immigration status and refugees are not "illegals" even if you care about that kind of thing) has caused it. We just can't manage the number of people coming in. And that unwillingness and inability to process the immigrants has CAUSED the crisis.
We could handle it. We could send reservists and national guard to get down there and process paperwork. Organize the logistics of bussing and all that. And longer-term, we could also invest in that bureaucracy. We know -- and should fucking pray -- that immigration will not stop any time soon. We know this is a service the government is going to need to provide for the long haul. We can't keep pretending the border is a thing we can shut down -- not to even mention how ridiculously good for the economy population growth through immigration is. How massive the ROI is for these kinds of services.
We could also set up single payer healthcare, sweepingly reform housing policy, pass a new and updated NLRA, and so many things that would ultimately make this a stronger, better country and improve things for everyone. But the right-wingers prefer suffering and cruelty to progress, and the progressives we have are too busy fighting among themselves and trying to compromise with uncompromising psychopaths to get anything done.
I agree with almost every word you said, but I think you're wildly underestimating the problems.
We're looking at an additional 3,141,000 souls coming in 2024 (my extrapolation based on current numbers), and that's only from the Southern border. That's more people than live in our 3rd largest city (Chicago)! That's a stunning number, and significantly up from previous years.
Let's pretend we let every human in from the Southern border, everyone, no exceptions. And let's pretend we had our shit perfectly together in 2021, everything running smooth. Could we have ramped up to an additional 1,407,000 immigrants from 2021 to 2024?
Adding another "Chicago+" worth of souls, in a single year, is not a simple matter of political will and throwing money at the problem.
tl;dr: Whether we stop or encourage immigration, we got a humanitarian crisis on our hands.
Climate change is going to make it much much worse. Once Mexico and Central America experiences a couple wet bulb days then it'll be an actual migration.
We can't stop 200million. We can't stop .0005% of that if it all came at once. For the love of God bullets can NOT be the answer to that.
I haven't really spoken to the problems. I agree, they're profound.
It's going to take a massive and meaningful logistical build-out just to process and transport these people in a remotely equitable way (meaning spreading out the burden so it does not all fall on just a few specific cities). We already cannot process the numbers coming -- so of course we cannot handle larger numbers.
But also, there's no choice but to do it. We aren't going to stop people from coming through domestic policy changes other than guards in gun towers shooting everyone who comes near. We do not control the domestic policies of the countries they are fleeing, but clearly things in those countries must be pretty fucking bad because people do not uproot and abandon their entire life and history lightly. We couldn't shut it down even if we wanted to, and every attempt is just another expensive human rights disaster.