Chinese are crossing at southern border

Yep, Fox News has been telling viewers this for a few weeks. Also adding that most are males, traveling alone. So "they" can be manipulated by the Chinese gov't to do their bidding. That the families left behind are sort of collateral to keep the single guys in step. 

I don't doubt we have some nefarious people getting over the border. That can happen no matter who is in charge. But have any of these people looked at China? Realized the oppression there? The need to leave?

And it isn't like the only nefarious people are immigrants. Some pretty terrible people are born and bred Americans.

It is not surprising to me that there are more people trying to escape (legally or illegally ) from places of extreme poverty, political unrest, persecution, etc.  some Central and South American countries seem to be moving towards these living/social conditions, as are many other places.

 - So I understand we cannot just let people in.  
 - I also do not believe it is a new issue but has become a bigger issue as the world has changed, not necessarily that our border protocol has changed.  
 - We have needed border reform and people have been talking about it, singing about it, writing about it for decades. The problem is it is getting so much worse for so many others outside the US. These people are truly trying to save their lives and/or that of their family.
 - I can’t say I wouldn’t try the same thing if I was in their situation.
 - IMO,  It almost seems that the ones that have the opportunity to try and navigate the legal channels/process are then those that might not be the people that need the most help.  So you have a big catch 22 and how do deal with it. 

ETA- I am in a Northern border state and we have certainly had an increase of people trying illegally cross the border, so it is not just a Southern Border issue.
 

Wasn't someone tasked with straightening out problems on the southern border? It seems to have gotten infinitely worse. 🤔 I'm trying to imagine what happens to someone who sneaks into China. They don't play around.

It's hard for any one country to "straighten out" the economic and political woes of the countries from which most of our immigrants come. We can't prevent them from showing up - unless you want to be North Korea and start shooting people at the border on sight? What we should have done is to pass the bipartisan border legislation that would have allocated more funding to speed up the apprehension, processing and oversight of the legal process of asylum hearings. But that would require the cooperation of both parties - it's not something the executive can do unilaterally. 

Please stop using that term. It’s dehumanizing. 

Read about Leonard Chapman Jr. He was a retired Marine General who became commissioner of the INS in the early 70's. He set about locking up the southern border, which had been more fluid up to that time. Many seasonal workers were coming across to pick crops, etc. They were here for the seasons of work, and then returned to their families.
Once the border became more of an issue to cross and they could not return and come back easily, or were blocked from seeing their families. So they began to cross and not return and also bring families with them.

In my area, rural Iowa, there are many seasonal workers who work on farms around us. They usually come in the spring and stay until harvest is done in the fall, then return to their families. The farmers here have to provide them with housing and maybe transportation. Quite a few farms here employ them. Also some seasonal business such as tiling (drainage tiling).
It is almost impossible to hire a farm hand anymore, so most are turning to migrant type employees who have work visa's to stay a certain amount of months, and then they hope like heck they come back to them in the spring. I am not sure what they are paid, but we are willing to pay $20 to $25 an hour for help (more sometimes) and it's pretty hard to find anyone local that either shows up or we even want on the farm, that isn't going to turn around and steal us blind. We have a high school boy that helps us when he is free and we pay him about $20/hour and he is fantastic, but soon off to college. We find around here no one wants to work. I don't know how they are surviving!

And at least one of them is running for President.

The president only protects us from "others" but not despicable Americans? I guess the protection is just from those people from shithole countries? That's quite a racist way to think of it. 

I live in a sanctuary city five hours from the border. We have lots of undocumented immigrants here. They’re among my students every year. Generally speaking, I feel much safer with them than I do in deep red Texas where every bubba has a gun and an itchy trigger finger.

I do think something needs to happen at the federal level. The way that Abbott in Texas is handling immigration and this bill in Arizona is not going to end well.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/13/immigration-economy-jobs-cbo-report/

The surge in immigration is a $7 trillion gift to the economy
Catherine Rampell
February 13, 2024

As the economy has improved and consumers have begun recognizing that improvement, Republicans have pivoted to attacking President Biden on a different policy weakness: immigration. After all, virtually everyone — Democrats included — seems to agree the issue is a serious problem.

But what if that premise is wrong? Voters and political strategists have treated our country’s ability to draw immigrants from around the world as a curse; it could be a blessing, if only we could get out of our own way.

Consider a few numbers: Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released updated 10-year economic and budget forecasts. The numbers look significantly better than they did a year earlier, and immigration is a key reason.

The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population.

This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

None of this is to diminish the near-term stresses on the U.S. economy that come from poorly managed flows of immigration. These challenges clearly exist, both at the southwest border and in cities such as New York and Chicago, where busloads of asylum seekers are ending up (by choice or otherwise). Absent more resources to manage these inflows and expedite processing either to authorize migrants to work in the United States or to return them to their home countries, this strain will continue.

Instead, GOP lawmakers scaremonger about the foreign-born, characterizing immigration as an invasion. As Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) dog-whistled last week, “Import the 3rd world. Become the 3rd world.”
Alas, the faction working to turn the United States into a developing country is not immigrants but Collins’s own party. It’s Republicans, after all, who have supported the degradation of the rule of law; the return of a would-be dictator; the gutting of public education and health-care systems; the rollback of clean-water standards and other environmental rules; and the relaxation of child labor laws (in lieu of letting immigrants fill open jobs, of course).

America has historically drawn hard-working immigrants from around the world precisely because its people and economy have more often been shielded from such “Third World”-like instability, which Republican politicians now invite in.
Ronald Reagan, the erstwhile leader of the conservative movement, often spoke poignantly of this phenomenon. In one of his last speeches as president, he described the riches that draw immigrants to our shores and how immigrants in turn redouble those riches:

Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
— www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presentation-ceremony-presidential-medal-freedom-5

Reagan’s words reflected the poetry of immigration. Since then, the prose — as we’ve seen in the economic numbers, among other metrics — has been pretty compelling, too.

YOU ask me a question. 
YOU answer it for me.
Then YOU call me a racist, BASED on YOUR answer. 
Since YOU answered the question, based on your standard, that makes YOU the RACIST.

What kind of ice cream did he get today?