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politicartoons2014-06-22 09:32 am
hardblue.livejournal.com) wrote in politicartoons2014-06-22 09:32 am
Immigration Debate and Illegal Minors
Over the last two years, a crisis has developed on our Southern border: a children’s migration of increasing scale, in which thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America have made the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, many apparently motivated by the belief that some sort of legal status awaits them. [...]
The young migrants are not, obviously, deeply familiar with the ins and outs of U.S. politics; they’re following smuggler-spread rumors, for the most part. But the rumors exist for a reason: They’re fueled by a sense that “if you want to get into the U.S., now is the time,” a scholar of Latin America told The Washington Post. And the Obama White House has conceded that a “misperception of U.S. immigration policy” is playing a role — one significant enough to dispatch Vice President Joe Biden to Central America to clarify that we are not actually opening our borders to any minor who reaches them.
-- Ross Douthat at The New York Times
Although Obama has been fairly heavyhanded in deportations, there has been some more shows of compassion toward children immigrants. And we are in the middle of another round of debate over immigration enforcement and amnesty.
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Oh well, at least it's on the opposite side of the county from me, and it won't affect my city's budget (sarcasm, since the conditions are appalling)
On a more curious note. I hadn't really given this much thought this week (Iraq and World cup I guess) but it dawned on me I hadn't noticed any articles on the subject in the County wide newspaper. So I just ent an looked on every page in today's paper, and not a word. (back to sarcasm) Perhaps the problem has gone away?
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I suppose the issue is really on the back burner. This is perhaps
the most gridlocked issues for our gridlocked legislature.
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Heck, I don't want to play a blame card, I'd rather something be done. If the border is so secure how are hundreds (if not thousands) of kids getting in?
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but no one has come up with a knockdown idea for securing
the border. The idea of a Chinese/Berlin Wall is the closest such idea,
but that is generally considered impractical and perhaps not really
such a final solution, either - 14-foot fence, 15-foot ladders and such.
That's why Douthat makes that final charge: give us effective enforcement
first before we do another round of amnesty. But no one knows
what effective enforcement would look like, especially since our industries
need those workers.
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http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/what-caring-for-illegal-immigrants-costs/
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/unauthorized-immigrants-pay-taxes-too
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881584
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Seriously, while I have reservations about the claims of said links, I will acknowledge "my side" has a tendency to
inflate (ok, sometimes radically inflate) the costs. However, in this specific instance we can calculate, using actual numbers, the cost. If I was truly cynical I would surmise, from the speculation of cost of putting up 243 minor children at the Port Hueneme Naval Base, that was why articles about it stopped.
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The Great Wall of China worked... as a tourist attraction.
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than we are, in terms of how many get through.
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Los Angeles holds an annual rally of that sort - fighting for rights for undocumented, um, people and all the city does is shut down a big chunk of downtown to let it go on.
In any case, last I checked, illegal immigration at our southern border was at or near a net zero. And I guess we don't care about Canadians because reasons.
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Whoa, how do you check that! That sounds like our people
should be happy - no problem!
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It's a choose your own adventure sort of scenario.
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It all has to do with the economy. Fewer people were coming, and people were eve,n going home, or trying their luck in other states, because there was just no work.
It's kinda tongue in cheek but you can almost guage the illegal flow by driving by the areas where the day workers congregate.
Fizzy is correct, but I can't remember the actual method used for calculating the numbers.
Heck iirc they figure the number of people that get thru based on some multiplier of the people caught. My way of going by how many people are looking for work is probably just as accurate ;)
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but very clean.
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What alarmed me about the conditions in which they are being held wasn't so much about cleanliness or availability of resources as much as the punitive nature of it. The warehouse doesn't look like a group home, it looks like jail. there were images in the slideshow I saw of preteen girls in holding cells. They were even labeled "female juvenile holding cell."They looked so scared and confused. I'm not sure we need to be locking them up in jail like that. I was in juvy several times as a kid, but at least I deserved it.
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they are criminals, right? In a sense, they are trespassers, I guess.
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Many laws themselves I questions as well. That's an entirely different thread though.
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Tax dollars. The comeback is that it is easy to be
compassionate on someone else's dollar.
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for all those kids? Everything costs money,
except for sentiment, but sentiment alone
cannot be very comforting.
Of course, it is not all about money for some issues,
such as questions relating to discrimination, racial or sexual
or otherwise, in which case it is about opening up
people's understanding, though this can sometimes
be harder to get than money.
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Obama administration officials said the government is planning to open new facilities to detain and house the influx of migrants and ease the burden on detention centers in the Rio Grande Valley where horrifying conditions have been reported. Administration officials also said the government would send more immigration judges and lawyers to the region to bolster enforcement and removal proceedings. “We are surging our resources to increase our capacity to detain,” Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on a conference call, emphasizing the administration’s aim was to make conditions more “humane.”
[...]
Dara Lind, who’s been all over the story, notes that “the current system was built for 8,000 kids – not 50,000.”
-- Sully's Dish (http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/23/babysitting-on-the-border/)