So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn’t matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:
The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
There’s a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
We’re rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it’s fuckin dangerous
Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren’t racist or oppressive). He’s unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like “make ICE not racist” or “just fix the backlog without congress” or just making wild assertions like “oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn’t want to” or similar things that aren’t how the federal government works?
I’m open to almost anything; I’m happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it’s grounded in “X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help.” But if it’s just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he’s a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that’s all his fault, I’m not into that conversation.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy
Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.
I don’t know for sure, but I do know that someone who has posted 2550 threads in 11 months (~8 threads/day on average) lives online and should be generally disregarded by any normal, rational person. Ask yourself what kind of person has that much free time to post on reddit/lemmy/social media…
Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. I just want to (a) answer krashmo’s pretty reasonable question (b) have ozma’s refusal to answer my question to be able to refer to in the future, to make the point to other people, when he inevitably posts this bad-faith bullshit a few times a week every week from now until the election.
I definitely appreciated your response. It was thorough and very civil. To be honest I was kind of expecting people to downvote me and not provide any reasoning why so an actual answer was a pleasant surprise
Dude I’m fuckin trying 🥲. Immigration is the one of the bad-faith criticisms that really gets under my skin because it is personal to me in a couple different ways, and this thread is absolutely filled with people who are talking pure bullshit about it for malicious reasons.
Anyway I am happy if you found my input to be useful. I’m gonna go back to just pretending this tide of total crap isn’t washing around the rest of the thread and restrain myself from spending the rest of my night typing hostile and condescending replies to it all.
Immigration is an interesting topic for sure. One of many that climate change is likely to force more urgent action on in the relatively near future. Hopefully we have a more well rounded approach in place by then.
I know the feeling you described well. It’s easy to fall into the rage bait trap. Good on you for taking the high road, even if only temporarily. I’m trying to do better at that myself.
I lost the battle, now I’m being super mean spirited to some obvious shill in some other thread. It is ok. I feel like it’s probably more productive than not, and I am enjoying myself in a kind of this-probably-isn’t-healthy way. 😃
Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.
It doesn’t seem like a mistake to me to treat people with the respect of generous interpretation.
Do you have specific knowledge of this person, or is this the story you tell yourself about others by default? If so, why?
So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn’t matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:
Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren’t racist or oppressive). He’s unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like “make ICE not racist” or “just fix the backlog without congress” or just making wild assertions like “oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn’t want to” or similar things that aren’t how the federal government works?
I’m open to almost anything; I’m happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it’s grounded in “X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help.” But if it’s just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he’s a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that’s all his fault, I’m not into that conversation.
Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.
I don’t know for sure, but I do know that someone who has posted 2550 threads in 11 months (~8 threads/day on average) lives online and should be generally disregarded by any normal, rational person. Ask yourself what kind of person has that much free time to post on reddit/lemmy/social media…
Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. I just want to (a) answer krashmo’s pretty reasonable question (b) have ozma’s refusal to answer my question to be able to refer to in the future, to make the point to other people, when he inevitably posts this bad-faith bullshit a few times a week every week from now until the election.
I definitely appreciated your response. It was thorough and very civil. To be honest I was kind of expecting people to downvote me and not provide any reasoning why so an actual answer was a pleasant surprise
Dude I’m fuckin trying 🥲. Immigration is the one of the bad-faith criticisms that really gets under my skin because it is personal to me in a couple different ways, and this thread is absolutely filled with people who are talking pure bullshit about it for malicious reasons.
Anyway I am happy if you found my input to be useful. I’m gonna go back to just pretending this tide of total crap isn’t washing around the rest of the thread and restrain myself from spending the rest of my night typing hostile and condescending replies to it all.
Immigration is an interesting topic for sure. One of many that climate change is likely to force more urgent action on in the relatively near future. Hopefully we have a more well rounded approach in place by then.
I know the feeling you described well. It’s easy to fall into the rage bait trap. Good on you for taking the high road, even if only temporarily. I’m trying to do better at that myself.
I lost the battle, now I’m being super mean spirited to some obvious shill in some other thread. It is ok. I feel like it’s probably more productive than not, and I am enjoying myself in a kind of this-probably-isn’t-healthy way. 😃
It doesn’t seem like a mistake to me to treat people with the respect of generous interpretation.
Do you have specific knowledge of this person, or is this the story you tell yourself about others by default? If so, why?