The bipartisan border deal appears on the verge of combustion, and President Joe Biden on Tuesday placed the blame for that squarely on Donald Trump.
“All indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor. Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically,” Biden said in remarks from the State Dining Room.
“He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it. So for the last 24 hours, he’s done nothing, I’m told, but reach out to Republicans in the House and the Senate and threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal,” the president said. “And looks like they’re caving.”
Once again pleading with Congress to pass the bill, the president touted the deal’s strict border and immigration policies, including the emergency authority it would grant him to “shut down” the border when it becomes overwhelmed. He described it as the “toughest” and “fairest” law that has ever been proposed, and urged both parties to move beyond “toxic politics.”
So, a migrant family might have a perfect case for asylum, but if they happen to show up on a day when the border patrol has decided it’s “overwhelmed,” they get thrown out to the wolves anyway
How is that fair?
Life isn’t fair, as evidenced by the fact that this hypothetical migrant family has reason to migrate in the first place. Your question presupposes that fairness is the default state of things and it simply isn’t.
Worsening climate change is going to make this whole situation even more unfair going forward. The longer we wait to set up a better system the more inhumane the eventual solution is going to be and I don’t think anyone wants to find out how much worse it can get.
No, it supposes that fairness should be a goal. Saying “life isn’t fair” is at best a cop out and at worst it’s an endorsement of deliberately treating people unfairly.
I think there are many many people who would disagree with your assertion that fairness should be the goal. That’s not to say they’re correct but if you take that implicit assumption for granted then you have no hope of understanding their position and therefore little hope of addressing the problem in any meaningful sense.
Oh yeah, if people think there’s a migrant crisis now, wait until places start running out of fresh water.
Exactly, and if we don’t have a functional “fence”, so to speak, at that point then we’ll end up using guns to stem the tide. We might end up doing that anyway but the system we have now doesn’t even work under current conditions, which are about as good as any of us are likely to see again in our lifetimes. There’s no way it’s sustainable if the number of people attempting to claim asylum continues to increase and that appears unavoidable.
That leaves us with the uncomfortable question of what do we actually do with these people? Republican solutions aren’t particularly good, and their basis for having the discussion seems more racist than humanitarian, but at least you can say they’re not afraid of talking about it. Democrats seem content to pretend it’s not going to be an issue because there’s brown people in the crowd at the border and saying anything that could be perceived as less than perfectly inclusive about them is not pc.
