I’m unclear: Why is immigration a problem???
In America, the core problem is mostly racial hysteria driven by conservative media. No one in MAGA world even talks about the 271,000+ Ukrainian refugees.
The other component is that the process at the Southern border is underfunded and has been for decades. There’s no appetite to fix it in Washington and there hasn’t been for my entire adult life. Both sides use it as a bargaining chip and then it inevitably becomes a campaign issue where compromise is impossible.
So, whereas a situation like more organized refugee resettlement allows — actually requires — the refugees to find work and housing (usually) within 6 months, even people obviously fleeing violence entering from the South have to go through an interminable and labyrinthian legal process to prove they aren’t secretly economic migrants.
If we had a functioning legal immigration system, this wouldn’t be an issue. If we had enough judges and facilities at the southern border to process asylum requests in a timely fashion, this wouldn’t be an issue. But to many in Congress, a “crisis” at the border is more valuable as something to demagogue than solving problems. (That was most evident recently when Republicans insisted border funding be tied to Ukraine aid and then reneged on the deal because — and they were quite open about this — Trump wants to campaign on immigration and they don’t want Biden to have an election year victory.)
I doubt the same thing is happening in the US, but in Canada immigration is definitely an election issue.
Building homes, schools and hospitals has not kept up with our immigration levels. Our homeless incampments are growing larger, more students than ever are in portables and wait times for the ER and surgeries keep growing.
Well, they can say it’s a problem but…
Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world,” the Washington Post reports.
“That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/27/economy-immigration-border-biden/
Remember, it’s an election year. So we got to talk about immigration to scare people into voting Republican and then immediately forget about it after the election.
Immigration only ever seems to be a concern when they’re running for office. And they’ve already shown that they have no interest in actually fixing the ‘issue.’
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Buried the lede:
Congress’ job approval rating has fallen to 12%.
Okay, so how many people do you think were surveyed to prepare this sizzling turgid article headline?
10,000? 50,000? More? Less? 5,000?
The answer is: .00006% of registered voters who have a telephone and answer their telephone for people they don’t know.
Just those last two parts should make you wonder who they’re really polling and what the likely outcome is obviously going to be.
Interestingly, this is the same percentage as voter fraud experts imagine there actually exists in a given election. Or, one person per state every six or seven years.
That’s relevant because this is a kind of “voter fraud” where voters are “informed” of a scary thing by “numbers” from “polls” but it’s really a thousand old people who want to spend 15 minutes on the phone with a telemarketer about their political views. How much did that cost the conservative PAC that funded it? Eh, $30k? For a headline in a respectable paper like the Gruandia? That’s money well spent in an election year.
