Political Memes

The progressive policy on immigration has been repeated for about a decade and a half now - path to citizenship for those who've grown up in the US, looser immigration restrictions, higher quotas, more judges to address backlog, etc. There have been a few attempts at implementation but all of them were ultimately shut down by Republican intransigence.

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:

1. The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
2. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
3. 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.

Well, ultimately I want a utopian Star Trek universe with no borders but that's kind of a pipe dream right now, so I'm just throwing my arms into the air in the interim.

My policy is to eliminate all national borders. This will mean an extra $10,000 per person in GDP in developed countries and an extra $20,000 per person across the global south. Plus we'll save a ton of money not guarding imaginary lines in the dirt.