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Tag: open borders
Border Wall

How Trump Turned Republicans Into The 'Open Borders' Party

Donald Trump has called on Republicans to kill a bipartisan deal that would give the president emergency powers to shut down the border when illegal crossings get out of hand. He's thus helped President Joe Biden turn one of his political liabilities into a strength.

"If given that authority," Biden said without hesitation, "I would use it the day I sign the bill into law."

The bill has teeth. The border could be closed if illegal entries exceed 5,000 over a five-day average. Over the last four months, that number has been breached on all but seven days.

There's a lot more in this serious plan for ending the chaos at the border. Trump wants that chaos to continue as a campaign issue.

And the emasculated Republican-run House seems poised to obey Trump's command that the broken border stay broken.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah correctly labeled Trump's attempt to sabotage the bill as "appalling." Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, another Republican who supports the deal, would agree.

"This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day," Lankford said on Fox News. "There's no amnesty. It increases the number of Border Patrol agents, increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals." The legislation also raises the number of deportation flights and makes asylum claims harder to get.

Republicans have for months refused to grant funding for Ukraine and Israel until security at the southern border was tightened. The negotiated package would include military aid for those two countries and Taiwan, plus humanitarian assistance for Palestinians.

Trump wants the border mess to continue so he can campaign on it. But while some brave Republicans are defying the ex-president for the good of the country, Trump continues to emasculate less courageous members of his party.

House Speaker Mike Johnson jumped at his orders, saying the proposal is "dead on arrival," though the bill was yet to be released. He also wrote in a letter to House Republicans that "public opinion polls show the country has overwhelmingly sided with us on this issue."

Well, that may have been true until last week, when Republicans seemed interested in restoring stability at the border. How things have changed.

If Republican lawmakers do kill the deal, the slim Republican House majority could soon turn into a Democratic majority. Trump has a proven record of helping Republicans lose elections.

No amount of demagoguery can cover what they're doing. The public is too highly engaged on this issue to not see the extraordinary game Trump is playing and the weakness of the Republican lawmakers. And, as it happens, Biden is better at politics than he is.

It looks as though Trump has three wishes come November. The first, already stated, is that the U.S. economy collapses. That's quite unlikely at this time of cooled inflation, full employment, and record stock prices.

The second wish, obviously, is for massive disorder at the border. That he would so openly call for developments that would hurt America is a wonder to behold. What Trump's third demonic wish will be remains to be revealed — perhaps the collapse of Ukraine as a carefully wrapped gift to Vladimir Putin.

As for immigration, America ultimately needs a fine-tuned program that recognizes the need for new workers — how many and with what skills — all the while protecting the pay and benefits of the native-born and immigrants here legally. But first the border must be secured.

Biden vows to do that if the political opposition doesn't stop him. The political opposition is throwing away one of its most potent issues. Republicans have turned themselves into the party of open borders.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Greg Abbott's 'Open Borders' Lie Dishonors Migrant Deaths

Greg Abbott's 'Open Borders' Lie Dishonors Migrant Deaths

After at least 50 migrants were found dead from heat exposure after they were left trapped in an abandoned truck in San Antonio, Texas, this week, some mainstream media outlets became vehicles for right-wing politicians to exploit the horrific event by printing their outlandish comments without sufficient pushback.

On Monday night, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted, “These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”

It ought to be obvious that “open border policies” are not responsible for this horrifying tragedy; people would not resort to sneaking across the border, the victims of human smugglers, if the border were in fact “open” and easy to cross.

As University of Texas Rio Grande Valley political science professor Terence Garrett told PolitiFact while responding to Abbott’s previous lies about Biden’s immigration policies, “There's no such thing as an open border.” According to Garrett, current border security measures include nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents, aerial surveillance systems, and hundreds of miles of fencing. “We don’t have an open border,” Garrett said. “That’s absurd.”

Though this week’s horror was perhaps the deadliest human smuggling event in modern American history, these types of tragedies are not a new phenomenon and neither is the predictable right-wing response. After the deaths of 10 migrants in Texas in July 2017 — when Donald Trump was president and Abbott was also the governor of Texas — right-wing media voices called for more border wall construction and the defunding of so-called “sanctuary cities.”

However, recent history shows that more fencing and Border Patrol resources do not actually deter migration. Instead, such policies simply divert migrants into more dangerous routes, while the core issues that lead them to flee their homelands remain unaddressed. In fact, the increasingly intense security along the southern border is in part responsible for greater suffering and death among migrants. Migrants have been killed or injured from falls when attempting to scale the barriers, while others are driven deeper into inhospitable desert regions as they search for accessible crossings.

Mainstream Media Privilege Abbott’s Lies

In a tweet, The New York Times simply publicized Abbott’s smear of Biden without adding any explanation. The linked article from the Times’ live page included Abbott’s full quote, without any direct pushback or inclusion of data about the Biden administration’s continued enforcement efforts or any clear demonstration that the Times realized Abbott’s claim was false.

Other news outlets carried the basic facts that the Biden administration is indeed fully enforcing border security. But they also created a false political balance by still repeating Abbott’s outrageous accusation and not specifically debunking his false claim. The Washington Post, for example, pointed out that Customs and Border Patrol had made 239,416 arrests in May, further commenting: “The agency is on pace to surpass the record 1.73 million border arrests tallied in 2021 — presenting an ongoing logistical and political challenge for the Biden administration.” Immediately following that sentence, the Post still ran Abbott’s baseless accusation that the deaths were purportedly the result of Biden’s “refusal to enforce the law.”

Similarly, The Associated Press quoted immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, who pointed out, “With the border shut as tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into more and more dangerous routes.”

But then the AP immediately quoted not only Abbott, but also former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a notorious white nationalist who sought to push asylum entries down to zero during the Trump administration.

The AP did not provide any of this context to readers, instead simply serving as a stenographer for an anti-immigrant zealot: “Stephen Miller, a chief architect of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said, ‘Human smugglers and traffickers are wicked and evil’ and that the administration’s approach to border security rewards their actions.” (As documented above, tough border policies do “reward” human smugglers by fostering the economic and logistical incentives for them to prey on migrants — though Miller would insist upon even tougher crackdowns and more exclusionary policies.)

Following the article’s citation of Miller, the AP then quoted Abbott: “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican running for reelection, was blunt in a tweet about the Democratic president: ‘These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies.’”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Migrant Crisis? What’s Really Happening At Mexican Border

Migrant Crisis? What’s Really Happening At Mexican Border

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In right-wing media, one often hears the bogus claim that President Joe Biden, like former President Barack Obama before him, favors an open-borders policy to immigration. But proponents of comprehensive immigration reform are quick to respond that Biden doesn't favor opens borders any more than Obama did when he was president. And MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, speaking to activists on the Mexican side of the U.S./Mexico border, found that none of the people he interviewed believed that Biden had adopted an ultra-liberal immigration policy.

Soboroff, reporting for MSNBC, entered Tijuana, Mexico from California and found an abundance of "refugees from all over the world" who were hoping to enter the U.S. and finding it to be a major uphill climb. The reporter explained that that they were "trying to find out how, if at all, the policies under the Biden administration are different than under the Trump administration."

Some of the refugees Soboroff encountered were Haitians who were still in dire straights because of a massive earthquake that hit the country in 2010. Others were refugees from countries in Central America who have been facing harsh economic circumstances because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Erika Pinheiro, an immigration activist with the group Al Otro Lado (which means "To the Other Side" in Spanish), told Soboroff that in terms of immigration policies, "Not much has changed since Trump. They've only processed a handful of people each day."

Pinheiro said of the refugees, "The vast majority of people have been in Tijuana for at least a year, sometimes two."

Why Are Democrats Promoting Ideas Most Voters Reject?

Why Are Democrats Promoting Ideas Most Voters Reject?

Seeking a ratings extravaganza, the same cable news networks that televised Donald Trump’s airport arrivals during the 2016 campaign as if he were the Pope or the Rolling Stones are currently presenting another kind of “reality TV”: the 2020 Democratic presidential debates.

That is, if your idea of “reality” is watching 20 politicians—at least 15 of whom have no more chance of winning than my cat Albert—prodded by CNN personalities to bicker and insult each other to entertain millions of goobers out in TV-land with nothing better to do. Sheer infotainment!

Me, I recorded the proceedings and watched after the Red Sox game. It’s my job. Frankly, I find the mute button and 30-second advance helpful. CNN’s rules make real debate impossible. Say you’re a candidate and some TV faith healer or Russian-backed stalking horse trashes your character and reputation. You get 15 seconds to respond before Dana Bash shuts you down.

Q.: Who would voluntarily participate in such a spectacle?

A.: Only somebody literally crazed with ambition.

Q.: Is this any way to choose what we once called (pre-Trump) “The Leader of the Free World?”

A.: It’s sheer folly; also the only method we’ve got.

Many pundits, such as Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, judged Sen. Elizabeth Warren the big winner, largely because of a “zinger” she got off at the expense of Rep. John Delaney, an obscure former Maryland congressman trailing my aforementioned orange tabby in the polls.

Delaney had compared Warren to Democratic losers Walter Mondale and George McGovern (who won two states and the District of Columbia between them.) “Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises,” Delaney said regarding Warren’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) “Medicare-for-All” scheme.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren responded. “I don’t get it.”

Cheers erupted in faculty lounges all over New England. A more perfect combination of feckless idealism and snide put-down is hard to imagine. I’ve seen it referenced like Holy Writ by passionate progressives.

Tumulty opined that “no one did a better job than the Massachusetts senator in laying out a purpose for seeking the presidency and offering a clear picture of what she will do with it if she wins.”

Yeah, she’ll spend four years scolding everybody for falling short of her lofty standards. A vast improvement over Trump no doubt. Nevertheless, to me, it was pure Alice in Wonderland.

Although it’s impossible, I must have gone to high school with Elizabeth Warren. She told me I lacked school spirit.

And I like Sen. Warren. Really, I do. She’s honest, hard-working, and extremely smart. I even think she has a lovely smile. (Not as radiant as Joe Biden’s maybe, but he’s got a world-class politician’s mug.) During this election cycle, she’s doing Democrats a great service by shunting Shouting Bernie aside.

However, she’s also Michael Dukakis in a pantsuit. (Dukakis won 10 states, plus D.C.) You read it here first: No Ivy League professor of any gender will be elected president barring unforeseen cataclysmic events: an economic collapse, a mad war with Iran, or both. Even then probably not.

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything. Except, that is, a plan for getting her brilliant schemes through any imaginable Congress and past the US Supreme Court. Whether proposed by her, Bernie, Sen. Kamala Harris, or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Medicare-for-All is a dead bang loser.

Polls show strong majorities even of Democratic voters are resistant.  Anybody who’s ever run afoul of the Social Security Administration or the V.A. understands why. People just don’t trust government to get it right—certainly not on the first try—and will need to be brought around by degrees.

Colorado put a Bernie-backed single payer proposal on the ballot in 2016. It was rejected 80 to 20 percent.

After watching the first Democratic debate last week, Vox’s Ezra Klein expressed dismay on Twitter, “So far,” he wrote” the big picture on the debate is the leading Democrats will criminalize private health insurance and decriminalize unauthorized border crossing. It’s a very different theory of the electorate than Democrats deployed in 08 or 12 or 18.”

Free college, student debt forgiveness, and slavery reparations are similarly unpopular. Washington Monthly’‘s Martin Longman put it best: “What really makes no sense is to propose things that are incredibly unpopular with the key groups the Democrats need to win that have no prospect of being enacted….I don’t expect the candidates to spend all their time talking about what cannot be done. But I wish they would please stop proposing things that people hate. It’s not smart politics.”

One thing I’ve learned from baseball? There’s no such thing as a six-run home run. The important thing is not to give away outs.