• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • HobbitFoot
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      1 day ago

      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.