Just would like to see people be honest and admit that it was not only Trump that "put kids in cages" and there's entirely legitimate reasons to put kids in temporary holding while sorting out their immigration situation.
they don't have any power, only the current president. Claiming Obama did it, and Obama was Jesus, so it must have been good, sounds really strange coming from the group who claim Obama is the antichrist
The comment you replied to is asking “what happens to adopted children”. Strangely enough crossing the border legally doesn’t magically result in your adopted children getting new DNA. So claiming that “illegal immigrants” won’t put their children in that position is beyond stupid. The question is how does this impact legal immigrants.
This is sampling at actual border crossing. So all the actual families crossing are victimized in order to punish brown people. Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America
From the article: "DHS has repeatedly warned that children are being exploited by traffickers to skirt the nation's immigration laws."
So it seems to me that it has to do with people skirting the law and exploiting children, not to "punish brown people".
> Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America.
Have stats on the number of Candadian's crossing the border illegally each year? I'd bet its an order of magnitude less than our southern border.
> And then we get to the real crux: as numerous people have said, this incorrectly classifies normal families as not being families.
Which is a problem, but this should be used as a tool in conjunction with other records and interviews of the family crossing.
Think of it this way, if a family crosses with children, takes the DNA test and everything is confirmed then the process may go much faster as additional investigation would not be needed.
Those who do genetic testing in the clinic know that, far more frequently than expected, family relations do not line up exactly as the genetic inheritance happens. Clinicians go to great lengths to avoid damaging families with these revelations. I have a feeling that such ethics will not be brought to these situations by DHS.
People fleeing for their lives may not have access to paperwork. In fact, the authorities denying people access to paperwork- such as birth records and legal status- is almost certainly evidence for approving an asylum claim in the first place.
Do you think the instances “fleeing” is the bulk of the cases? Mostly it’s economic migrants. We know if they were fleeing they could just stay in Mexico or if not from The Americas, in a neighboring country.
Also, in many of those countries there isn’t a tradition of adoption, so that would be pretty rare.
> Many of the migrants are asylum seekers fleeing political violence in their countries of origin, especially Congo and Cameroon. Many of the Congolese lived for years in Angola, where they learned enough Portuguese to get by in Spanish. Angola last year expelled more than 300,000 Congolese refugees.
> The destruction in Kapende, where no house remains occupied or intact, marked the culmination of three days of violence in Lucapa, a sprawling mining town in the northeast surrounded by some of the world’s richest diamond fields.
> About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.
> Angola is one of the up and coming countries in Africa. That people are leaving it indicates it’s more an economic calculus than persecution
The US was the up-and-coming nation of the Western hemisphere for a long time while engaging in systematic persecution of blacks, Native Americans, and, at various times and places, other groups. Aggregate economic development and systematic persecution of selected groups which justifies flight in reasonable fear aren't mutually incompatible.
Requiring papers to prove one's own identity and familial relationships is anathema to the traditions of Common Law.
Of course, this tradition is being undermined left and right for the sake of the convenience, prejudices, and the power to control, of the ruling classes. And we go along with it, because there are some defensible reasons for doing so.
It's why I prefer online services that allow users to pick their own names. Here, I'm logfromblammo, and that's all anybody needs to know about me. In contrast, on Facebook, the terms of service require me to link my account to the identity I use for official interactions with the government, which is in turn linked to the name my parents gave me at birth.
Without descending into the identity derpfest propagated by some right-leaning libertarians, controlling my own identity means that it is more difficult to hurt me by hacking documents linked to my government identity. The more private businesses use the government identity exclusively, the more identity fraud and identity theft can become a problem.
This type of DNA-collecting dragnet reinforces the paradigm "you are who the government/company/computer says you are" over "you are who you claim to be". Getting sent to the vice principal's office to be disciplined for something that another person, enrolled at my high school with the same name as mine, had done is as close as I ever want to get to that. I got yelled at, for their mistake in identification. I am the only person who can really be sure that I am me, and I don't trust others not to screw that up--because they keep on screwing it up.
Asking for someone's "papers" to prove anything is never going to be something I could support unconditionally. Whenever you do that, you're taking away someone's agency to be in control of their own life.
Not all adoptions are "official" and "have papers," especially adoptions by people who are fleeing their country. I would argue that most adoptions in so-called "third world countries" are probably unofficial.
That’s possible but also adoptions aren’t as common as in the US. I’ve had conversations with people from some of these areas and adoption is hardly considered as an option to adding to a family.
Huh? You have an extremely narrow view of adoption, I would assume most "unofficial" adoptions are by circumstance, not a generic desire to add to the family.
Good to know that adoptions aren't "real." So if a kid's parent dies and they're living with an aunt, that's not "real" and the government is free to tear the child's remaining family away and replace it with rape and imprisonment.
so if a parent dies any rando in the caravan can claim the child and get all the attached benefits? gee, wonder if that kind of reward would have side effects on the safety of migrants with children.
I'd actually like to know if blended families occur more often than "child recycling". (Blended Families == adoption, divorce and remarriage, godfathering/godmothering, other culturally normatized familial-like relationships that aren't necessarily accepted as a "nuclear family"...)
(Disclaimer: I have no real opinions on this, but I'd like to get the facts.)
It would mitigate this issue to an extent, but also introduces new challenges (for instance and as pointed to elsewhere: dealing with officially/unofficially adopted children). I'm not sure if there are published numbers on what fraction of adult asylum seekers are attempting to use children in this way, but the preoccupation with "solving" this particular issue demonstrates that either (a) that fraction is disturbingly high or (b) we'd like to make the process even more complicated for no particularly good reason. The trend of every policy along the border seems to suggest that (b) is more likely, which is upsetting.
It's to prevent "Child Recycling" which is trafficking children across the border to claim asylum then trafficking them back to accompany a new group of migrants.
It's been my experience that anything that can be conceived of does or will actually happen but I'd be surprised if this were a common occurrence.
On the other hand, we are talking about desperate people frequently traveling under the guidance of notoriously callous border traffickers so what do I know...
I have no data, but I'd wager it's way more common to see any of the following: adoption, people raised by non-blood relatives, paternity not being what was thought -- all while being innocent, law abiding people.
> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units” to gain entry.
Of course, with DNA testing you could catch them the first time around, rather than have to wait for a biometric read on the second (or third) trafficking.
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and following them here? They include:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We're trying to avoid flamewars on Hacker News, because they're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Plus they bring out meanness and dumbness in people and get worse as they go along.
there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.
and if you did at a clinic or 23and me et al, be sure that your dna plus some metadata (if not from you, from your payment or from the lab, anything that goes around hippa is game) is already cataloged there.
couple months ago a newspaper shown how cheap private investigators paid for this data to narrow down location of people they were paid to locate.
Sometimes I feel like I'm too paranoid but then these things keep happening that seemed like they would happen years ago which uselessly vindicates my position. Is there some critical threshold where they have enough DNA data to track everyone not in the database? Maybe any amount is helpful since it narrows a pool down.
Why do people keep giving out their information so freely?
> Then the researchers built a model that predicted that a database needs to include only 2 percent of a population for 90 percent of the people to have a third-cousin match or closer in it. In other words, a database of just a few million people could be sufficient to track down nearly everyone in the United States....Another pattern jumped out in the MyHeritage data: People of primarily northern European ancestry were more likely to have matches than people of primarily sub-Saharan ancestry. This reflects the predominantly white customer base for MyHeritage and most other direct-to-consumer DNA tests. It also means that genetic-genealogy searches by law enforcement are, for now, more likely to succeed with people of European descent.
These sorts of identifications actually require a lot of manual work by genetic genealogists tracing ancestry after a potential relative is found in a DNA database. For example, Barbara Rae-Venter lead a team of five people to identify the Golden State Killer.
BTW, there's a handy Wikipedia page for a list of suspects identified using the GEDMatch database
> there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.
True,
But this has nothing to do with that (at least at this point). TFA specifically stated that no data would be retained, they are just looking for results in 90 minutes, evidently to verify if someone claims parenthood of a child, they really are the parent.
If it is actually used to make human trafficing more difficult, it is a good thing.
(Don't ask me whether I trust this administration to do anything good, for the right reasons, within reasonable bounds, with proper controls, or merely act with sanity and respect -- that is a whole other conversation likely unsuitable for this forum)
"If <policy> makes <bad thing> harder, it is a good thing" is the wax on the runners of the sled flying down the slippery slope.
It's fallacious to frame handing more power to centralizing entities solely in terms of the good they may (possibly) do. There are always downsides, even in addition to direct misuse - eg 1000 lifetimes lost every year to the TSA alone.
It's always a trade off, and politics (aka willful ignorance) practically guarantees it won't be made for the right reasons.
Which is why I put the disclaimers in the last two paragraphs ("If it is actually used" and "Don't ... trust this administration...")
The restricting scope, application purpose, and effective oversight are the anchor points and crampons that enable us to not slide down the slippery slope, but get to the top.
I don't think it will make enough of a difference to justify the totalitarian aspects. I imagine relatives are already complicit in a decent amount of human trafficking cases.
I can't trust a single thing DHS says any more. I can't take seriously "child recycling rings" when the Administration's supporters believe in pseudoscience, numerology, and "Q".
I would urge you to do your own research rather than dismissing everything they say out of hand. Not because what they're saying is true but rather because skepticism is not the same thing as wilful ignorance.
I once thought the same thing about building a wall but a friend of mine who worked extensively with CBP had talked to agents who are out of the political eye, and they had some convincing arguments for building one. For them it wasn't about keeping Mexicans out or whatever racist BS our president is agitating over. But it was more that there are small groups such as cartels in Mexico and Canada who want to come here for the express purpose of committing crimes, and they exploit the response times of CBP in remote areas to cross the border at will.
Aha - but the goal of the "Build the wall" slogan was to get elected. It wasn't a carefully crafted policy for border control. That slogan achieved it's primary goal
Democrats aren’t in favor of open borders, but evidence-based border security. The president’s platform is attacking anyone who doesn’t want his proposed “solution” as dismissing border control and immigration reforms.
It’s dishonest and in bad faith, but it works on lazy or decided individuals.
Does Keith Ellison not count? He famously wore a shirt that said "I don't believe in borders." He was a congressman from 2007 to 2019. What about Cortez who's slogan is "abolish ICE"? If there's a difference between open borders and completely defunding border enforcement, it's not a distinction that means anything to me.
Also, Castro is a 2020 primary contender. To count him out because he doesn't currently hold office is a bit silly. I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn't have counted in 2014 either?
There are a lot of different views on the left, but the view of the Democratic leadership is unambiguously for border security.
Abolishing ICE is different from wanting open borders. You can disagree with the methods and still believe in the mission - much of the current administration’s stance is an attempt to conflate the methods they have chosen with the concept of border security, as painfully evidenced by the 2018 shutdown meeting between Pelosi, Schumer and Trump.
ICE is a relatively new organization, that many believe does not have a great track record of either effectiveness or respect for human rights. There are many ideas of how we would accomplish border security more humanely.
https://pelosi.house.gov/issues/immigration
> I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have counted in 2014 either?
No, the clear forerunner and a senator would count. Herman Cain wouldn’t have spoken for the Republican Party though.
Organizations are historically composed of people, some of whom are more radical and some of whom are less radical than the overall organization. Claiming that Keith Ellison or Julian Castro are representative of the Democratic party or the left as a whole strikes me as very reductive. I'd like to live in a world where borders don't exist, but to claim that it's possible if we just stop enforcing our borders is pretty ludicrous.
How some CBP agents feel about the wall has no bearing on the actual realities of building a wall. People don’t dismiss the idea out of hand because of the people who hold the idea, but because _it’s an objectively bad idea_. And that’s after “doing my own research”. Did your friend ask those agents how we would pay for the wall? Or how we would maintain 2,000+ miles of wall? Or how we would handle the massive ecological damage caused to migratory species?
And do keep in mind that it’s possible to be a racist without explicitly saying it. This can of worms never opens well on HN, because 99.9% of the people here have always had pleasant interactions with the police (i.e. they’re white), but American law enforcement, especially CBP, tends to hold certain views about people who aren’t white, and that’s how you wind up with immigrants being denied basic things like water and medicine.
> HN, because 99.9% of the people here have always had pleasant interactions with the police (i.e. they’re white)
I'm white and as a teen growing up in Idaho I had many unpleasant interactions with police. Once two friends of mine and I were stopped at gun point just for walking home at 2am. The excuse was that there had been some thefts in the area. I guess we looked the part.
Granted, there are not a lot of black people in Idaho. I was actually quite surprised when I moved to NYC and realized that the cops weren't looking at me any more just because I was white.
Walls throughout history have overwhelmingly been fools errands. It's hard to maintain an exhaustive wall. They can work in the short term (the battle of sadr city) but they never hold out in the long term.
Walls are an effective strategy to control where the battle happens rather than an attempt to keep the battle from happening at all.
The point of the wall isn't to stop people from crossing the border. It's to slow them down enough to make the CBP response time smaller than the crossing time. Beyond the political aspects of this there are actually some thoughtful reasonable arguments for it. The people in CBP who want to build this thing know that people will break sections of it, but they can't break the entire thing down. So it concentrates the border crossings into smaller areas. The intent wasn't to build it and then not defend it.
OK. I'm 100% with you on this reasoning. I'd like to ask if the cost is worth it. I've seen speculation with 'build the wall' that it would be enormously expensive to build and then even more expensive to man and maintain. I've also seen speculation that migrants are actually good for USA (benefits the reduced birth rate, bigger tax base, migrant work willing to do labor americans wont do, the potential for children born to benefit the economy)...
A wall is less expensive to maintain than putting more people there.
Increasing the pool of unskilled labor is good for some parts of the economy. It's great for me because I'm wealthy. It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.
Physical barriers tend to funnel migrants to areas without barriers. This means you need fewer people where the barriers are.
Illegal immigration hurts the poor while generally helping the broader economy. Specifically, minorities and people without a high school education get their wages suppressed. Here's an article by a Harvard PhD economist.
Hadrian's Wall protected the Roman frontier in Britain for centuries.
Without the Walls of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire would have fallen in the 700's instead of lasting until the 1400's.
The Great Wall of China helped protect northern Chinese frontiers for centuries.
Are walls 100% effective. Of course not. Nothing is. But walls can be a useful part of a strategy for regulating/protecting your borders.
That is not to say that a wall along the Mexican border is advised. It is a very long border, and individuals and groups of smugglers are able to get around an unguarded wall. However, to absolutely dismiss the utility of walls on principle is incorrect.
In regard to planes, planes in general are a lot more expensive, fewer, and thus easier to track than are people on foot.
Regarding the Maginot line, it actually forced the Germans to use the Ardennes. This was a high risk move for the Germans and if the French had been doing what they were supposed to be doing, they could have destroyed the German Army in the Ardennes.
So, the Maginot line actually was useful, but the French failed to exploit what it was doing for them.
I was actually thinking about Hadrian's wall when I wrote the above! The building of the wall was a super expensive task for the time, and it usurped a ton of manpower (they also had the advantage of using slaves for a lot of it, and it still was expensive). Plus once Hadrian's wall was no longer well manned (once Hadrian died), it became a haven for the picts to launch their raids from and a border through which they couldn't be chased.
break through the wall, and you have even more time before CBP can respond.
comparing against alternative means, like having more drone coverage, and better CBP placement based on ML analysis of the drone input would be a far more cost effective mechanism for the same thing
> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units” to gain entry.
Gotta wonder what that comes out to as a percentage of all people trying to gain entry.
The statement also implies that DHS is already determining what is a "family unit" without DNA. Gotta wonder what their algorithm is there too...
What CNN conveniently didn't tell you was that this kind of screening was all planned under the Obama administration. It's so convenient to post a picture of Trump at the top of the article to suggest it was all his idea.
Fuck CNN, it is a shitty fake news site.
Why is this even news since it started under the Obama administration?
>The program's numerous conditions (DNA tests, background checks, medical clearance, etc.) dissuaded some from applying. More importantly, the majority of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants present in the U.S. are here illegally, which makes them ineligible to participate. This explains why, since the CAM program started almost three years ago, the U.S. received only 9,500 applications.
Reading your links, I couldn't find any numbers for how many children were DNA tested while Obama was in office? How many was it? or did this launch under the Trump administration?
I'm unclear about what's "fake news"
that dna testing children is bad? From your comment, it sounds like you think Obama is infallible, and so anything he did must have been the best, most moral option possible.
or that the blame should be on Obama? but that doesn't make sense, because Trump held all the branches of government for 2 years, and didn't rescind this, when most of his presidency has been about undoing everything Obama did.
119 comments
[ 139 ms ] story [ 928 ms ] threadthey don't have any power, only the current president. Claiming Obama did it, and Obama was Jesus, so it must have been good, sounds really strange coming from the group who claim Obama is the antichrist
This is sampling at actual border crossing. So all the actual families crossing are victimized in order to punish brown people. Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America
So it seems to me that it has to do with people skirting the law and exploiting children, not to "punish brown people".
> Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America.
Have stats on the number of Candadian's crossing the border illegally each year? I'd bet its an order of magnitude less than our southern border.
> And then we get to the real crux: as numerous people have said, this incorrectly classifies normal families as not being families.
Which is a problem, but this should be used as a tool in conjunction with other records and interviews of the family crossing.
Think of it this way, if a family crosses with children, takes the DNA test and everything is confirmed then the process may go much faster as additional investigation would not be needed.
At the border there are instances of individuals using children to get special preference. The proposed idea will mitigate this issue.
This just seems like a policy that can be used to discriminate against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family".
That's... still discriminating against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family"
They’re trying to filter against bogus claims.
Also, I’m sure they have rates of these things and if it starts getting higher than the norm it could prompt more scrutiny.
Also, in many of those countries there isn’t a tradition of adoption, so that would be pretty rare.
> Many of the migrants are asylum seekers fleeing political violence in their countries of origin, especially Congo and Cameroon. Many of the Congolese lived for years in Angola, where they learned enough Portuguese to get by in Spanish. Angola last year expelled more than 300,000 Congolese refugees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hundreds-o...
> About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-angola-drc-violence-insig...
The US was the up-and-coming nation of the Western hemisphere for a long time while engaging in systematic persecution of blacks, Native Americans, and, at various times and places, other groups. Aggregate economic development and systematic persecution of selected groups which justifies flight in reasonable fear aren't mutually incompatible.
By definition, it's 100% of the cases that would be legitimate before validating the family relationship.
Of course, this tradition is being undermined left and right for the sake of the convenience, prejudices, and the power to control, of the ruling classes. And we go along with it, because there are some defensible reasons for doing so.
It's why I prefer online services that allow users to pick their own names. Here, I'm logfromblammo, and that's all anybody needs to know about me. In contrast, on Facebook, the terms of service require me to link my account to the identity I use for official interactions with the government, which is in turn linked to the name my parents gave me at birth.
Without descending into the identity derpfest propagated by some right-leaning libertarians, controlling my own identity means that it is more difficult to hurt me by hacking documents linked to my government identity. The more private businesses use the government identity exclusively, the more identity fraud and identity theft can become a problem.
This type of DNA-collecting dragnet reinforces the paradigm "you are who the government/company/computer says you are" over "you are who you claim to be". Getting sent to the vice principal's office to be disciplined for something that another person, enrolled at my high school with the same name as mine, had done is as close as I ever want to get to that. I got yelled at, for their mistake in identification. I am the only person who can really be sure that I am me, and I don't trust others not to screw that up--because they keep on screwing it up.
Asking for someone's "papers" to prove anything is never going to be something I could support unconditionally. Whenever you do that, you're taking away someone's agency to be in control of their own life.
Way to mitigate the issue. Damn the consequences.
so if a parent dies any rando in the caravan can claim the child and get all the attached benefits? gee, wonder if that kind of reward would have side effects on the safety of migrants with children.
(Disclaimer: I have no real opinions on this, but I'd like to get the facts.)
hint: it won't be effective at that.
On the other hand, we are talking about desperate people frequently traveling under the guidance of notoriously callous border traffickers so what do I know...
This is going to cause harm, it will not accomplish its purpose, and the charlatans will be laughing all the way to the bank.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We're trying to avoid flamewars on Hacker News, because they're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Plus they bring out meanness and dumbness in people and get worse as they go along.
there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.
and if you did at a clinic or 23and me et al, be sure that your dna plus some metadata (if not from you, from your payment or from the lab, anything that goes around hippa is game) is already cataloged there.
couple months ago a newspaper shown how cheap private investigators paid for this data to narrow down location of people they were paid to locate.
Why do people keep giving out their information so freely?
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2167554-serial-killer-s...
[2]: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9kpnnz/linda-ann-okee...
[3]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/19/maine-man-accus...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/golden-s...
> Then the researchers built a model that predicted that a database needs to include only 2 percent of a population for 90 percent of the people to have a third-cousin match or closer in it. In other words, a database of just a few million people could be sufficient to track down nearly everyone in the United States....Another pattern jumped out in the MyHeritage data: People of primarily northern European ancestry were more likely to have matches than people of primarily sub-Saharan ancestry. This reflects the predominantly white customer base for MyHeritage and most other direct-to-consumer DNA tests. It also means that genetic-genealogy searches by law enforcement are, for now, more likely to succeed with people of European descent.
These sorts of identifications actually require a lot of manual work by genetic genealogists tracing ancestry after a potential relative is found in a DNA database. For example, Barbara Rae-Venter lead a team of five people to identify the Golden State Killer.
BTW, there's a handy Wikipedia page for a list of suspects identified using the GEDMatch database
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspected_perpetrators...
If it is actually used to make human trafficing more difficult, it is a good thing.
(Don't ask me whether I trust this administration to do anything good, for the right reasons, within reasonable bounds, with proper controls, or merely act with sanity and respect -- that is a whole other conversation likely unsuitable for this forum)
It's fallacious to frame handing more power to centralizing entities solely in terms of the good they may (possibly) do. There are always downsides, even in addition to direct misuse - eg 1000 lifetimes lost every year to the TSA alone.
It's always a trade off, and politics (aka willful ignorance) practically guarantees it won't be made for the right reasons.
Which is why I put the disclaimers in the last two paragraphs ("If it is actually used" and "Don't ... trust this administration...")
The restricting scope, application purpose, and effective oversight are the anchor points and crampons that enable us to not slide down the slippery slope, but get to the top.
I'm picturing the president hosting a daytime talk show "who's the father" episode.
Now, whether or not this is true...
#LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder
I once thought the same thing about building a wall but a friend of mine who worked extensively with CBP had talked to agents who are out of the political eye, and they had some convincing arguments for building one. For them it wasn't about keeping Mexicans out or whatever racist BS our president is agitating over. But it was more that there are small groups such as cartels in Mexico and Canada who want to come here for the express purpose of committing crimes, and they exploit the response times of CBP in remote areas to cross the border at will.
It’s dishonest and in bad faith, but it works on lazy or decided individuals.
For example: https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/immigration
Citation needed. Cutting the enforcement budget for border patrol to zero (as Julian Castro proposes) is open borders in all but name.
> It’s dishonest and in bad faith
... To pretend that some Democrats aren't for open borders.
Julian Castro isn’t even an elected official.
Also, Castro is a 2020 primary contender. To count him out because he doesn't currently hold office is a bit silly. I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn't have counted in 2014 either?
Abolishing ICE is different from wanting open borders. You can disagree with the methods and still believe in the mission - much of the current administration’s stance is an attempt to conflate the methods they have chosen with the concept of border security, as painfully evidenced by the 2018 shutdown meeting between Pelosi, Schumer and Trump.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/11/trump-meets-with-pelosi-and-...
ICE is a relatively new organization, that many believe does not have a great track record of either effectiveness or respect for human rights. There are many ideas of how we would accomplish border security more humanely. https://pelosi.house.gov/issues/immigration
> I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have counted in 2014 either?
No, the clear forerunner and a senator would count. Herman Cain wouldn’t have spoken for the Republican Party though.
Don't slide the goalposts. This is not a claim I've made. The exhaustive claim ("no Democrat with standing") came from the person I responded to.
I didn't know they hated wars and spying.
And do keep in mind that it’s possible to be a racist without explicitly saying it. This can of worms never opens well on HN, because 99.9% of the people here have always had pleasant interactions with the police (i.e. they’re white), but American law enforcement, especially CBP, tends to hold certain views about people who aren’t white, and that’s how you wind up with immigrants being denied basic things like water and medicine.
I'm white and as a teen growing up in Idaho I had many unpleasant interactions with police. Once two friends of mine and I were stopped at gun point just for walking home at 2am. The excuse was that there had been some thefts in the area. I guess we looked the part.
Granted, there are not a lot of black people in Idaho. I was actually quite surprised when I moved to NYC and realized that the cops weren't looking at me any more just because I was white.
The point of the wall isn't to stop people from crossing the border. It's to slow them down enough to make the CBP response time smaller than the crossing time. Beyond the political aspects of this there are actually some thoughtful reasonable arguments for it. The people in CBP who want to build this thing know that people will break sections of it, but they can't break the entire thing down. So it concentrates the border crossings into smaller areas. The intent wasn't to build it and then not defend it.
Increasing the pool of unskilled labor is good for some parts of the economy. It's great for me because I'm wealthy. It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.
Is this actually true, given that walls must also be manned, regularly maintained, repaired, etc?
> It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.
Is this actually true? I'm really not educated myself on the matter. Do you have sources, studies, etc?
Illegal immigration hurts the poor while generally helping the broader economy. Specifically, minorities and people without a high school education get their wages suppressed. Here's an article by a Harvard PhD economist.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
Without the Walls of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire would have fallen in the 700's instead of lasting until the 1400's.
The Great Wall of China helped protect northern Chinese frontiers for centuries.
Are walls 100% effective. Of course not. Nothing is. But walls can be a useful part of a strategy for regulating/protecting your borders.
That is not to say that a wall along the Mexican border is advised. It is a very long border, and individuals and groups of smugglers are able to get around an unguarded wall. However, to absolutely dismiss the utility of walls on principle is incorrect.
more recently, how'd the Maginot line go? what makes defence against warring enemies similar to preventing immigrants?
Regarding the Maginot line, it actually forced the Germans to use the Ardennes. This was a high risk move for the Germans and if the French had been doing what they were supposed to be doing, they could have destroyed the German Army in the Ardennes.
So, the Maginot line actually was useful, but the French failed to exploit what it was doing for them.
break through the wall, and you have even more time before CBP can respond.
comparing against alternative means, like having more drone coverage, and better CBP placement based on ML analysis of the drone input would be a far more cost effective mechanism for the same thing
Gotta wonder what that comes out to as a percentage of all people trying to gain entry.
The statement also implies that DHS is already determining what is a "family unit" without DNA. Gotta wonder what their algorithm is there too...
Fuck CNN, it is a shitty fake news site.
Why is this even news since it started under the Obama administration?
Center for Immigration Studies article below.
https://cis.org/Rush/Expanded-Central-American-Refugee-Progr...
>The program's numerous conditions (DNA tests, background checks, medical clearance, etc.) dissuaded some from applying. More importantly, the majority of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants present in the U.S. are here illegally, which makes them ineligible to participate. This explains why, since the CAM program started almost three years ago, the U.S. received only 9,500 applications.
Some more news with statistics.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
I'm unclear about what's "fake news"
that dna testing children is bad? From your comment, it sounds like you think Obama is infallible, and so anything he did must have been the best, most moral option possible.
or that the blame should be on Obama? but that doesn't make sense, because Trump held all the branches of government for 2 years, and didn't rescind this, when most of his presidency has been about undoing everything Obama did.