The debate exposed how comfortable America is with hating immigrants - eviltoast
  • macattack@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Does AOC need to visit a border to talk immigration when migrants are being bused into NYC daily? Curious if you live in a place where migrants are being bussed or not, because I do, and the reason no one is talking about migrant camps at the border is because they have migrant populations within the neighborhoods in a way that they didn’t pre-covid. There’s two migrants w/ toddlers less than two blocks from my apartment that panhandle daily. There’s migrants panhandling outside of the places I grocery shop and the bars that I frequent downtown. Immigration is tangible in a way that it wasn’t pre-Covid

    I think that, irrespective of party, Americans across the board have become more concerned about immigration, partially due to fear-mongering by Republicans for sure, but also due to Democratic strongholds getting a steady flow of immigrants (bussed in by Republicans, fwiw, but a level of immigration that they were not prepared for) and the conflicts for city resources and care have had an outsized impact on perspective/policy and expectations by the population as a whole. It isn’t that Democrats suddenly changed their perspective while everyone else remained the same. Every group of individuals polled increasingly became concerned about migration.

    It’s easy to frame it as ‘Dems don’t care’, and I’m not sure what you identify as, but looking at the data, people who identify as Dems actually care more than Republicans and Independents.

    I do not want to say that I am happy with the Dems accepting Republican-backed immigration policy positions but I do acknowledge just how unpopular immigration has become within Democratic circles let alone Republicans (and Independents who as a whole are historically more conservative than Democrats).

    Curious what would you suggest as a tenable immigration solution in 2024 that you think would likely get backing from Republicans and Democrats?

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Is the migrant caravan in the room with you right now?


      But seriously, this is the damage we’ve done to ourselves. We’re one of the main countries that poisoned our planet with CO2, the main country that got all the benefits of the Industrial Revolution without being bombed back to the fucking stone age like half of Europe in WWII.

      With climate change spinning out of control, people want somewhere more secure, more safe, and studies show areas like Michigan will be a lot less effected by climate change than, say, Mexico city.

      Can you stop climate change? Oh, no you can’t?

      Then the migrants won’t stop coming. Maybe we need to address the bigger social issues internationally that bring people here to begin with instead of blaming it on the immigrants. Like maybe accepting that the US has a history of fucking over the global south, for one thing.

      (We also bombed the living fuck out of the middle east for a decade, and Europe has been dealing with refugees from our fucking illegal war for over a decade now. Maybe we’re not the ones to talk about not knowing how to deal with immigrants when we made the EU deal with the aftermath of our dumbfuck wars.)

      Further, the main thing you could do to curb immigration is jailing people who hire immigrants who don’t have legal paperwork. If there aren’t fucking jobs waiting for them, fewer of them will show up.

      And finally, the girl I recently met who ran from Venezuela to get here has better education credentials than me, and everyone acts like she doesn’t know shit because she went to universities in Venezuela and took classes in Spanish instead of in the US in English. There is materially no difference! The person panhandling might have a fucking degree but our country doesn’t give a fuck because they don’t speak English well enough. It’s a joke and not their fault we act like their education is worthless because they speak a different fucking language. We have people with high level degrees driving Uber for fucks sake because no one cares because their education wasn’t in English.

      Give me a break with this shit.

      • macattack@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        I just want to point out that, reading between the lines, the solutions that would make a difference to change immigration are:

        • Solve climate change
        • Undo the compounding effects of a war that destroyed a country
        • Jail people who hire undocumented immigrants

        Your first solution requires Republicans to believe in climate change (and Independents like Joe Manchin not to get in the way and water down the bill that passed). Your second solution requires investing billions in developing countries to right our wrongs and your third sounds like a Republican talking point.

        This is why I push back on the narrative that oversimplifies immigrataion as Republicans and Dems equally don’t care about immigration.