This doesn't even pass the sniff test for me. You're telling me that "by far" more illegal immigrants get on an international flight - possessing the paperwork necessary for customs/immigration, the money for the flight, and the logistics of getting to the airport in Mexico, flying to Canada - where, for a number of months out of the year, any kind of foot travel is just straight up deadly - then getting across the US border again? That makes no sense in my head whatsoever. The CBP data says there were 2.5 million encounters at the southern border, and 189k encounters at the northern border. Obviously it's not really a straightforward number to know exactly how many illegal immigrants cross from which border, but I'd say encounters with illegal immigrants is a halfway decent proxy. Being off by significantly more than an order of magnitude suggests it's probably not the case. Do you have any information that would suggest otherwise? The idea that this is possible seems crazy to me, at any point, even with outdated data - but I'm guessing your line of work is way closer to this data than I am. @GTE I think "doesn't seem like the best idea" is at the heart of the issue, and "willy-nilly" is a bit of a misnomer. Statistica says that, for the last 20 years (up to 2022 which is the last year they have the data), illegal immigrant populations haven't fluctuated by more than ~1-2%. CIS seems to place the Statistca numbers in the right ballpark. Legal immigration has a variety of categories, and many of them are the same as Canada - highly skilled or valuable people, families of citizens, refugees, etc. There's a cap on these numbers. Statistica, again, has some tracking on categories - but they don't add up to 3 million per year so I'm not sure where your number came from. Per year it seems more like 1 million in addition to whatever illegals cross, but there aren't 2 million illegal immigrants entering every year. I'm not saying there's zero issue with immigration. I'm asking what the specific concern is. Because the illegal population isn't growing that much, and population growth in general isn't that problematic.
I literally linked to that same batch of statistics. "Encounters" is not the same as "number of people who successfully crossed the border and are living in the US illegally at this time." Encounters encompasses both people who have been blocked from entering the US, as well as people who have presented themselves for asylum (whose numbers are subsequently likely to be double counted in the "legal" immigration). Unless we are to believe that the CBP has a greater-than-50% failure rate at patrolling the border (that is, for every single immigrant that the CBP encounters at the southern border, more than one is slipping through, which doesn't seem sensible), and those illegal immigrants are somehow being missed by all of the agencies and private groups who are studying immigration (since the illegal immigrant population doesn't seem to be growing by that much), then I still don't know where the 3 million number is coming from. Assuming there are a million legal immigrants and that's contributing to your 3 million number, are we to believe that there are two million people entering the US illegally over the Mexican border, every single year, and then vanishing into the interior of the US despite multiple agencies attempting to study this? Like, in the last 5 years, ten million people have just shown up and nobody can account for it? edit: that would be an average of about 4 people illegally entering over the Mexican border every single minute of the day, year round.
Again, my data is old. The majority of illegal immigrants are over-staying a visa,usually a tourist or student visa. They are educated, are not poor, and have no trouble getting into the US or Canada. If you are from a place like Honduras, yes it's far easier to fly to Canada and drive across the border to enter the US. You then just don't drive back. The crossings at the Northern border generally go uncontested or impeded, thus the discrepancy in numbers. Tactics like false documents work better when the agent may see a Honduran passport once a week instead of 20 a day. Encounters isn't a proxy for illegal immigrants at all. It's at best a proxy for crossings made outside of official channels. There are individuals who cross the border illegally every day and go back every night. This is what I mean by the scope of the issue. Asylum seekers are coming in overwhelming numbers, and they are, in my humble opinion, manipulating a system in ways that they are coached to. They, by and large, do not go back and do not intend to. When granted access to it, they strain our social systems and rarely find stable employment that doesn't rely on social support. The common narrative is a woman whose child has a health issue or disability that would doom it in their home country, but here they are protected and have things like wheelchair ramps everywhere to make their life easier. The vast majority of border crossings are just that: passage. The CBP data is difficult as fuck to extrapolate an illegal population. Up until the Trump administration fucked it up, we used Census data as an estimate, because it was better. Are there 3 million immigrants coming in? Sure, maybe. How many of them are leaving vs. How many are staying? CBP deports some, but the vast majority go back of their own volition. The ones we seem to be concerned with are the ones that need the most support, have the most issues or run the highest risk of some criminality. Not disputing that in the least. That data isn't anything CBP collects or reliably touches, outside of asylum seekers, and even then it's not great (they don't have to tell CBP shit beyond their asylum story to cross). We simply don't know how dire their situation is until they start their resettlement process. At that point the legality of their entry is less important, because the prospect of deportation becomes more distant. It's a quagmire, to be sure. But there's so much bullshit there, influenced by political narratives that only seem to serve the status quo.
I was too busy sending sweet nothings to Zuckerberg so can let me into his Hawaii bunker when the world goes down. Also:
Well, you can't count what you don't know but let's say it's not two million and only 200,000. I'd still argue that having a more secure boarder is better. Obviously we're not going to agree and that's ok.
We don't disagree on that at all. Less illegal immigration is better than more. But that money and those resources come from somewhere, and Trump's policies were more about tangling up the legal immigration processes (and, of course, the stupid fucking wall). So the question is: how big a problem is this, and how many more resources should be devoted to it?
From an economics standpoint, it feels like a manufactured wedge issue a la abortions. From a security standpoint, it's contextual to a locality. Would illegals overrun and overwhelm a typical small border town police force? Absolutely and that's a legit problem. Are they a menace to America writ large, more so than the litany of other threats? I'm not seeing that. My mindset shifted a LOT when the data showed most illegal immigrants were not poor, had no issue getting in and out of the country and generally led a full existence without needing government support. The illegal immigrant narrative that's focused on illegal border crossings feels like the welfare queens or super-predator narratives that were incendiary, had a touch of prejudice, and were ultimately not substantiated by the data. The exception is the asylum seekers, which is a loophole that simply needed to be closed.
@downndirty Maybe I watch too much 60 Minutes. But they've had several segments showing people just streaming over the southern border. And maybe it is prejudice, but these people don't look like they're headed for Silicon Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7zYluW9iE @Binary Seeing that the Chinese are the fastest growing group of migrants, I'd say it's the upmost of national security to stem the tide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7TNP2OTY2g
Shrug. Believe what you wish. The fact that a higher percentage of the US population is of immigrant descent (1st or 2nd generation) than any other country on Earth is a big fucking deal. We need to figure out immigration more than any other place, because more of us are immigrants. There's something icky about just shutting off the tap, just as icky as letting every fuck-weasel yahoo set up shop in your kid's school. People cross borders, legally and illegally. So what? They also cross back. To the folks who have worked the border, it's like saying "people illegally text and drive, or drive too fast." It's a problem, and it's worth enforcement. I struggle with the fundamental problems that immigrants cause that forces them to the top of our national list of priorities.
Boggles my mind that having a border so porous that people can sneak over to work, sneak back that night and then do that again, day in and day out, doesn't raise a red flag for you.
I mean, what border is that closed? No wall, no physical obstruction, and we're talking1900+ miles? I can't think of a 500+ mile border that is locked tight. The DMZ is 150 and people cross it all the time. For the last time: IT IS AN ISSUE. No argument that it's a problem and it needs to be addressed. Is it the top issue? Nope. From a national (not local) security standpoint, the scale of threat that can walk over is like the quantity of weed someone can carry in their pocket: it's not worth enforcing at a national/federal level, because the potential harm is so small. It makes sense to control crossings by road, rail, plane and boat, because it's an entirely different scale of risk. The dimebag isn't a security threat worth the federal government's attention, the truck load is. The local and state authorities may want to enforce it at that level, and that is an issue that we will never hear the end of. It feels like I'm saying "it's a sign, not a cop". Enforcement isn't 100%, never will be. It's a border with our top trading partner. Billions of dollars and millions of people move across it every day. This is the logic that led to the wall, and the fallacy is that the border needs to be impermeable. It doesn't. We as a nation aren't losing anything by someone who can get lost on a fishing trip and wind up on the wrong side. I support more aggressive monitoring, and CBP folks getting better tools, and less bureaucracy, because I have seen first hand how difficult their job is and how frustrating it is to be hamstrung by the idiotic shit they deal with. I also think that if the political rhetoric weren't so amped up, the expectation that a secure border means zero illegal immigrants and unauthorized crossings would be seen as absurd and a tremendous waste of time and resources.
They’re also not strong. Up here, we make the mints strong so the cops don’t get cute during the RIDE programs.