Border walls are no longer racist

superrific said:
1. There is no border crisis. That's just fearmongering. I'm sorry that you have fallen so hard for it.
2. There has been plenty of action from Biden. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. You might have noticed that the administration announced a rule from DHS about limiting access to ports of entry by migrants. That rule has been in the making for two years. That's how long it takes for rulemaking in this country. If you don't know why or how, read about the Administrative Procedure Act. When your eyeballs glaze over and comprehension is not forthcoming (since the APA is a full semester class in the second or third year of law school and that only covers the basic), maybe you can trust the lawyers and/or legal scholars who tell you that's how rulemaking works.

In addition, the rule explicitly relies on the availability of a phone app that allows people to make appointments in advance from hundreds of miles away. Well, that had to be developed. It's not conceptually difficult to do, but the enormous scope, the security concerns, the need for intuitive user interfaces for people who aren't necessarily used to apps -- it takes time. This has been happening behind the scenes.

In addition, the administration has created "rest stops" in Latin America where people can "check in" before arriving at the border. That's where credible fear interviews are taking place, and that reduces the administrative burdens at the border. I'm not sure whether these rest stops are yet functional or in planning, but again these things take time. It's still a positive step.

3. What's really bizarre is that you swallow BS from the liar-in-chief so readily that you're willing to believe that the "border crisis" could be solved in a year or two or three. Trump seems to think he can close the border with a phone call. He can't. For some reason, you believe him.

Why don't you try to educate yourself? You're too young to be set in your ways forever. There's no need to wallow in your current state of "complaining for lack of understanding."
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"1. There is no border crisis. That's just fearmongering. I'm sorry that you have fallen so hard for it."

Of course there was, on multiple levels. One being the humanitarian crises involving people having to stand in line for dangerously long periods of time, exposed to heat, not having food and water, Mexico not being able to house/care for the high volume of people who traveled to the border, the CBP staff being overwhelmed by the high numbers of asylum seekers and the fact that people who are supposed to be patrolling the border not being able to patrol the border because they're helping process asylum seekers.
 
ZenMode said:
Sure. Compromise is how things get done BUT if a border wall is truly racist, unamerican, inhumane, etc, should there be compromise?

Again, reasonable people know that a border wall isn't racist or unamerican, inhumane, etc and calling it such is just part of the toxicity of politics.
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Well first of all as people have already explained in this thread multiple times, it's not that the wall itself is racist or inhumane. No one here is arguing or contending that the very idea of wanting some sort of physical barrier at the border is racist or inhumane; if you think someone somewhere else has made that argument and want to post for reference, we can discuss it. What people have said is racist and inhumane, among other things, is running a campaign based on fearmongering about non-white immigrants and using "build the wall" as shorthand for "keep non-white immigrants out of the country."

Second of all, I would reject from a moral and philosophical principle the idea that if the wall is problematic in some way there cannot possibly be any compromise that allows even its existence to be condoned (such as the most recent bipartisan immigration bill, which included no new money towards building barriers but did allow for the spending of existing funding on barriers). if a particular piece of legislation is a net good then disagreement on moral grounds with a particular part of it shouldn't mean not passing the legislation - or at least it is not unreasonable to believe you can pass the legislation anyway.

Some of the Founding Fathers were morally opposed to slavery and thought it was wrong and should be abolished, but still agreed to sign a Constitution that allowed it to continue and gave it the imprimatur of legality through the 3/5 compromise and other provisions. Why? Because the alternative was no Constitution being passed and also slavery still being legal where it was. Perhaps you would suggest that these Founding Fathers were too pliable in their morals, but the reality is that being unwilling to compromise often hurts far more than it helps.
 
ZenMode said:
"1. There is no border crisis. That's just fearmongering. I'm sorry that you have fallen so hard for it."

Of course there was, on multiple levels. One being the humanitarian crises involving people having to stand in line for dangerously long periods of time, exposed to heat, not having food and water, Mexico not being able to house/care for the high volume of people who traveled to the border, the CBP staff being overwhelmed by the high numbers of asylum seekers and the fact that people who are supposed to be patrolling the border not being able to patrol the border because they're helping process asylum seekers.
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Gee if only someone would propose legislation that would address some of these things
 
Enigma94 said:
Again link to Harris saying it was racist? Also you are toeing the line of trolling by comparing a few throwaway dollars towards a meaningless wall with repeal of the 15th amendment.
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I didn't say she specifically called it racist. She called it unamerican. Desiring a secure border, which can include walls in specific areas, is clearly not unamerican.
 
ZenMode said:
I didn't say she specifically called it racist. She called it unamerican. Desiring a secure border, which can include walls in specific areas, is clearly not unamerican.
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Kamala didn't say it was "unamerican" to desire a secure border, or to ever build any sort of physical barrier at the border, she called Trump's proposed $25 billion border wall specifically "unamerican."
 
There is a massive difference between actively pushing to secure funds for a project you support and allowing funds already allocated from a previous administration to be used for that project as part of a compromise.
 
CRHeel94 said:
The wall is largely a boondoggle. A ten foot wall only brings a ladder that is eleven feet. In the process, its made human smuggling a lucrative business, making it an interesting revenue stream for the cartels.

Want to really crack down on illegal immigration? Crack down on employers. Why doesn't that happen? Because the dirty little secret is that the US badly needs that cheap source of labor, of persons willing to do jobs that others won't do. Plus its more appealing to go after the brown people instead of the Americans.
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Walls work. It's not that you can't find a way over/through a wall, but it takes time to get over/through and in that time, border patrol can get there and apprehend them. The border wall between El Paso and Juarez has portions where it's basically wire mesh, almost like chain link fence. It's not that people don't try, and sometimes succeed, in cutting through it. It's that, in the time needed, border patrol can converge on them and stop them or detain them.
 
ZenMode said:
Again, reasonable people know that a border wall isn't racist or unamerican, inhumane, etc and calling it such is just part of the toxicity of politics.
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I'm a reasonable person. So let me give you a clue as to what reasoned people think:

1. The country had no immigration restrictions at all for the first century of its existence. Then in the late 19th century, Congress created some mild restrictions basically designed to filter out criminals, but Ellis Island (among other places) was open to business for everyone. The current set of immigration restrictions were created in the 1960s and then in the 1990s.

In addition, the southern border has been "porous" for two hundred years, by design. The government used to encourage Mexicans to come here to do agricultural labor, in the bracero program that lasted until 1964. But there were still various guest worker programs into the 1980s. You know those old stories about fugitives making a run for the border (e.g. Jimi Hendrix' friend Joe)? That was because the border was unregulated, and nobody cared because they recognized it as a good thing.

The conservative objections to the Mexican border didn't happen until after the Civil Rights Act. I will leave you to assess the significance of that. Note that the original champion of "the wall" was admitted racist Pat Buchanan (who thought his racism was good).

Thus, the border wall is in fact inconsistent with the historical tradition of the United States in the first 200 and change years of existence. One word for that might be "unamerican." I agree that the moniker isn't precise, but it's more accurate than not.

2. The racism part of the border wall is easy to establish. It's been done many times on the board, and on this thread. Immigration policy in the U.S. was racist by design, and it always has been. The first immigration restrictions were targeted specifically at Chinese people. Then in the 1920s, the first (and short-lived) immigration act denied entry to any Asian person on the grounds that they were ineligible for citizenship (for unknown reasons). That law also aimed to slow migration from Southern Europe -- you know, before people thought of Italians as white. This racist system was renewed in the 1960s and then again in 1990. The government even designed a "diversity" visa lottery to combat the perception of our immigration laws as racist.

In addition, the bulk of the people today who are supportive of a border wall are people with strong racial resentment.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121992600 [this is long and a bit technical, but included here to give a sense of the literature]
Professor: Racial resentment is key to Trump's election appeal [this is shorter and I will excerpt]

"Researchers showed that the second-strongest determinant of individuals’ vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020 – first, of course, was the voter’s party identification – wasn’t people’s economic fears or their commitment to individual freedom. It was respondents’ racial resentment, measured by agree-disagree questions such as, “Whites in the U.S. are more discriminated against than Blacks,” and “Blacks are getting advantages from elites that Blacks have not earned.

ubstantial numbers of Americans, including one-third of white respondents, claim that white Americans face either a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of discrimination in the U.S. Among Republicans, well over half claim that white people are discriminated against, a larger percentage than acknowledges discrimination against Blacks, Latinos or Asians.

White Americans’ racial resentment increased substantially during the Barack Obama presidency. Even many 2008 Obama voters soon found that the media focus on Obama becoming the nation’s first Black president, at first so exciting, was hard to swallow on a day-to-day basis.

The U.S. is not now “post racial,” free from racial prejudices or discrimination, nor has it ever been."

*******
Care to answer any of this, you know, being so reasonable and all.
 
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rodoheel said:
Kamala didn't say it was "unamerican" to desire a secure border, or to ever build any sort of physical barrier at the border, she called Trump's proposed $25 billion border wall specifically "unamerican."
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$25 billion in new funds and $500 million already appropriated but not spent is a distinction with no difference, apparently.
 
ZenMode said:
Walls work. It's not that you can't find a way over/through a wall, but it takes time to get over/through and in that time, border patrol can get there and apprehend them. The border wall between El Paso and Juarez has portions where it's basically wire mesh, almost like chain link fence. It's not that people don't try, and sometimes succeed, in cutting through it. It's that, in the time needed, border patrol can converge on them and stop them or detain them.
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You have no idea how border patrol works. You really think that the border patrol has people watching every inch of the border like a hawk, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice? Do you think the border patrol is like Batman (who would certainly decline this assignment as too big). What do you think happens? Something like this?

Supervisor: "Oh, look, there's four guys with a ladder in sector 7G. It's 15 miles away, so we've got to get in the Bordermobile right now and get over there immediately."
Trainee: "What happens if, when we are driving, some other guys show up with a ladder over here."
Supervisor: "That can't happen. There's only one group with a ladder at any time. Fortunately the wall will slow them down enough for us to get over there."
Trainee: "But we're 15 miles away, and it only takes a minute to scale a wall with a ladder. By the time we get there, they will be long gone."
Supervisor: "We will find them, don't worry."
Trainee: "If we can find them in the brush, then why did we need a wall in the first place?"
Supervisor: "You're fired"

BTW, how well did Israel's wall work on October 7? That's a tiny fraction of the length of the proposed border wall, and it is monitored by an army that has no shortage of personnel because military service is mandatory in Israel. It hasn't even been up for 15 years it already failed catastrophically.

How about the Berlin Wall? That was a handful of miles wide. People tunneled underneath it, in the middle of freaking Berlin.

If walls worked, we'd see more of them. They don't. See also Maginot Line.
 
rodoheel said:
I'm mostly on your side here super, but just a gentle suggestion: this particular sentence makes you sound a little crazy.
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I disagree but I edited it per your suggestion. You know, the sort of thing that reasonable people do when presented with an objection to something that was posted.
 
Croatoan said:
I make no contention about Lankford other than he wasted a lot of time on a bill that was not supported by the majority of his constituents.
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I will bet you $100K that a majority of his constituents don't have a clue about one single thing in the bill. In fact, probably only a scant handful do.

And not supporting it because their messiah cult leader told them not to or that it was a bad bill, does not count.
 
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superrific said:
If walls worked, we'd see more of them. They don't. See also Maginot Line.
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To be fair the main problem with the Maginot Line as a defensive structure was that there wasn't more of it. The Maginot Line was a great defensive fortification and the Germans only defeated it by going around it. If the Maginot Line had covered the border with Belgium as well they would have had a much harder time getting through it.
 
ZenMode said:
For example, if Republicans tried to include nullification of the 15th Amendment as part of a border deal, which would actually be unamerican and racist, there would be no compromise on the part of Democrats, right?
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Do you understand the constitution at all? Congress cannot "nullify" a constitutional amendment with legislation. The constitution can only be amended by a process that requires the agreement of 2/3 of each house of Congress and 3/4 of the states. So if the GOP was willing to include nullification of the 15th as part of its demands, I'd gladly give in on that point, just as I would agree to enact policies prohibiting the government from spying on Americans with black helicopters and laws that criminalize human trafficking (which already exist, of course).
 
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