He needs to show he’s right wing of Biden.
Biden was the most liberal President the US has ever had, so that’s not really necessary. He’s not doing it to stick it to Biden, but instead because he’s a racist asshole doing racist asshole things.
Biden was a very liberal president, but immigration was probably one of the more conservative things his administration did.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Almost no one, for whatever reason, understood what was actually going on.
The massive spike in the number of people trying to cross the Southern border, coupled with the way Trump fucked up the rules governing how they get processed, meant that there was a massive backlog of human beings who we hadn’t been able to deal with yet. There were big open-air camps in Mexico, on the border, with thousands of people living there for months waiting for their turn to enter the country. Some of them were sick, some had babies, pretty much all of them had no job and no money and no house. Just living in a field somewhere, in the heat.
Then, on the US side, there were thousands upon thousands of people who were waiting for their asylum cases to be heard, or their deportation hearings, for upwards of a year. Sometimes they were in custody, in massively overcrowded facilities run by a racist and indifferent agency. Sometimes they were kicking around loose in the US, with their court dates, which can bring its own set of politicize-able problems. And, of course, there was as always the huge undercurrent of people who were totally off the radar of the system, having seen what being on the radar looked like.
Biden to his credit was trying to fix it, partly with simple measures like the app to request asylum, but chiefly by increasing immigration judges and resources so that we could handle them all without them getting caught in a Kafkaesque pit. The Republicans, of course, hated that idea, and defeated it every time it came up. The left also hated the idea, because the propagandists convinced them that having more immigration judges would be a tyrannical oppression of all Latinos everywhere, and presumably wanted him to do nothing at all. Eventually, he tried promising the GOP some cruel things they had asked for, to try to get it done. That also didn’t work, but it did severely piss off the left, because there was finally some accuracy to what he’s always been accused of, that he was trying to put some additional cruelties into the system. The sum total of his immigration proposal was still a big reduction in the misery, though.
I don’t know how it got reductionismed down into “Trump is cruel and Biden is cruel, they’re the same.” I also don’t know why the Democratic messaging felt the need to lean into the idea of being “tough” on the border. I suspect moronic overpaid “strategists” were involved, who couldn’t survive a week on their own without the DNC-teat to steadily suck on. But regardless, that was always just messaging. Biden’s actual efforts were a pretty sustained amount of attempting to reduce the cruelty, and in a lot of minor ways that didn’t require congress, he did succeed.
Now, of course, the misery is going to increase tenfold, and on purpose, instead of because of a failure to succeed. We did it, Patrick.
Inb4 “oh isn’t it convenient that whenever Democrats are in charge” and so on.
Biden definitely tried to solve the problem. However, immigration was being drummed up as a big issue and it was one of the few issues attracting people to vote Republican, mainly due to fearmongering.
And an oversimplified account of immigration was used to paint a “bOtH sIdEs” argument to get people who would vote Democrat to not vote.
You can join the conversation over in [email protected] about the people who before the election were posting a tide of how Biden was identical to Trump on immigration, where they are now, why they might have been saying that, and so on. Your input would be welcomed.
I definitely noticed a lot of these kinds of accounts leading up to the election and have noticed that they all seem to have evaporated once the job was done. It’s a shame more instances weren’t able to do something to be more effective about containing and shutting them down before it was too late.
One thing I’ve noticed about Lemmy, which I find incredibly naive, is that many of the people who use it seem to think it’s completely irrelevant. Like, I’ve seen people repeatedly saying that Lemmy or a particular Lemmy instance is just some tiny corner of the internet and let’s not pretend it has any significant impact. That, to me, reminds me of the way people used to talk about the internet, and later the way people used to talk about reddit.
Lemmy doesn’t have to be big to be influential. It’s a collection of extremely online and often very politically vocal people. Conversations that start here have a potential to carry further. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of reddit, which had a much greater influence than was really understood at the time as well.
This may not be a huge platform, but that may actually make it a better target for getting a message out, because the signal to noise ratio is better. You actually have a chance to get some eyeballs on your topic of conversation and have some folks run with it. That then spreads out to the rest of the internet and to flesh-and-blood communications. It doesn’t just stay isolated and contained here.
Lemmy is part of the world, a part that we’re all engaging with. Let’s not pretend it’s insignificant to our own detriment.
I definitely noticed a lot of these kinds of accounts leading up to the election and have noticed that they all seem to have evaporated once the job was done.
I put up a graph in those other comments, showing a big spike in certain stories before the election, and then dropping right back off again after the election, which corresponds with my anecdotal impression that they were just getting spammed like a waterfall all during the time right up to the election.
It’s a shame more instances weren’t able to do something to be more effective about containing and shutting them down before it was too late.
I 100% agree.
One thing I’ve noticed about Lemmy, which I find incredibly naive, is that many of the people who use it seem to think it’s completely irrelevant. Like, I’ve seen people repeatedly saying that Lemmy or a particular Lemmy instance is just some tiny corner of the internet and let’s not pretend it has any significant impact. That, to me, reminds me of the way people used to talk about the internet, and later the way people used to talk about reddit.
Yeah. It’s clearly got a small userbase. But everything you say on the internet has a small audience, whether the site is small or large. You’re going to have anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand people reading your comment. That’s how it works. Which means, whatever place, is a place worth taking seriously and keeping as a decent place. If nothing else I would like just on a personal level to be able to talk with people about politics without these robots entering the room and saying “You hate Biden we all hate Biden he betrayed us he’s bad don’t vote for him” and then arguing vigorously in bad faith if anyone tries to disagree with them. Honestly, the aspect of it pissing me off on a personal level is probably a more significant part of why I put energy into it, than anything “objective” about how much impact it has.
I just think of Lemmy as my little space, and it annoys me to have people abusing it and cluttering it up with crap.