I don’t think there is a clearly correct answer to this question, but I think it is correct to view politics in terms of what your priorities are. I think some of the arguments we have around here are between people who might have similar policy preferences but disagree on which policies should be prioritized and how much compromise they are willing to accept.
I think you should talk it out and try to figure out your priorities. And there are different ways to think about priorities. If we are going to discuss the politics of the Biden administration in a pragmatic fashion, maybe we should talk about issues in terms of what order Democrats should roll out bills for discussion. And since the Senate is the legislative bottleneck, what I really mean is what order should bills be debated in the Senate.
Are Democrats making a mistake by pushing a Biden infrastructure plan before addressing immigration? Or is that the correct political play?
We’re not fixing climate change in a time frame that makes it practical to back burner the border until we get it done. A big popular infrastructure bill or voting rights… both of those are really just vehicles for delivering filibuster reform so we can unjam the legislature and get the government moving again. That is more important than immigration, but we should have started the process of getting immigration as unfucked as possible in preparation for doing comprehensive immigration reform in ~2023. In 2023 after voting rights, infrastructure/climate change and a big minimum wage hike (to take place immediately after 2022 if we can’t get Manchin and Cinema to tolerate it).
But yeah saying ‘it’s been 60 days since Biden took office and kids are still in cages’ is pretty aggressively unreasonable.
I say this as someone bitterly disappointed that we couldn’t find Cinema and Manchin’s price on minimum wage in the COVID bill.
If Biden gets all these kids in decent hotel rooms then that is a compromise I can live with for now. How close is he to getting there? I haven’t seen any numbers on the articles.
Obviously they should be free to go to their families, but I’m willing to accept this isn’t politically possible for Biden because this country is hot garbage.
But a decent hotel room with a bed etc is at least somewhat ok. Do volunteer social workers have access to them? I couldn’t find that either.
This is a gross oversimplification of what is happening down at the border, and what would be happening if there was no government intervention at all in this scenario.
I mostly lurk, I usually agree with Wichita on most issues, but my god,I guess I’m just glad I don’t live my whole life dwelling on every on every negative thing about our society/government all the time. And expecting everyone to use this thread as a place to vent as he does? It would be all doom and gloom all the time. Maybe some people want that. I mean what, people can’t even be happy about little victories because everything is still shit? Sometimes it seems like doing that gets you the shitlib label around here by a select few posters.
Does anyone have a legit statistic/source right now for what the average stay is right now for an unaccompanied minor at an ICE facility before they are transferred? Because I’ve seen things all over the place. Big difference between kids spending 3-4 days in those buildings before they are placed somewhere else versus 3-4 months.
HHS is much different though. HHS facilities are not what those pictures were of. I’m talkign about how long kids are held in the ICE “concentration camps” before being transferred to HHS.
Splain. I’m under the impression the vast majority are sent ahead without parents but have other family over here already. I don’t see why we can’t just have the family take the kids in.
Because a not insignificant number of those kids are not heading to family and are maybe human trafficking victims and it’s not immediately obvious which ones are actually going to family and which ones are victims. It’s one thing if it really is Aunt Joan, but the government has an obligation to make sure of that because a lot of kids are trafficked into prostitution and worse in this country through this route, and kids spending a few days or even weeks in one of those facilities is a lot better than a lifetime into prostitution or worse. The fact that everyone involved is generally undocumented makes it even harder.
That should be pretty easy to determine. They should just explain to the kids look we can either put you up in a hotel while we find you somewhere safe to live or we can let you go to your family. If you’re concerned at all then stay here while we sort things. If they choose to stay with the government then you know something shady was going on.
Are you under the impression that most kids who are being trafficked/about to be trafficked realize that they are being trafficked/about to be trafficked?
Well they should know if they have family in the country who can get them or not. Obviously you should only release kids to people who can show that they are related in some significant way. Like if their plan is to meet some dude at the corner of 35th and 9th or whatever then that’s not cool but if some relative can come get them they should 100% be released. It doesn’t worry you that “we’re saving them from traffickers” was the exact argument of the trump admin?
Yeah I can’t support the tent idea. It seems pretty harsh. When you can have months of unbroken 100 degree days, it’s not fun.
And I agree abuse at these facilities exists. The problem is any kind of temporary housing situation it’s hard to manage and is almost always a problem. Even if it if not staff, it is inherent in the people amongst each other.
I don’t know how to solve that one. A lot of money would help some, especially on the staffing side, but there is no perfect solution.
Getting them in a comfortable and controlled environment and processed as quickly as possible seems like the right path.
I am also not going to support just releasing a bunch of minors to roam around. It’s hard to even argue against this without sounding really insulting so I will leave it at that.
I feel the administration should definitely be doing “moar faster” but I have begun to notice this administration does not expedite much of anything. I think at times Trump brute forced stuff through red tape. This administration will cross ever i and dot every z. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t that general principle is going to change.
The trump administration used a true thing as a pretext for horrors. And I still disagree that it is as simple as asking hte kid if their uncle Jon who maybe they’ve never met is actually their uncle and i snot in fact going to traffick them.