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Well I asked about this and now you're saying "It was actually worse" and invoking cope. If I promise to have zero follow up questions can you tell me why you t

by jonway 11mo ago

Well I asked about this and now you're saying "It was actually worse" and invoking cope. If I promise to have zero follow up questions can you tell me why you think this? I do live in a northern municipality and we have a number of Venezuelan people here, which is why I mentioned the TPS Act. I became more closely aware of the TPS when I talked to one of the guys about his country. This was a couple of years ago, but I still see his car (he has a Toyota with a "Venezuela" badge on the rear over the "TOYOTA" he ripped off of it, which is how I figured he was Venezuelan) But I was wrong about the time frame of the bill which apparently did come into effect during Biden admin, giving them rights to work. Sorry about that inaccuracy, it never mattered to me who did it since it seemed like we were helping these people out quite a lot, and I liked him.

tptacek 11mo ago
At no point did mismanaged immigration during the Obama administration cause a crisis in my local municipality or force us to reallocate funds or scramble to find housing for over 100 people that were otherwise living in makeshift tents outside a police station. I think you'll find it pretty easy to pull up news stories; October 2023 was the peak of it in Chicagoland but you'll see stories running all the way into the middle of the next year. (I liked Biden too and am directionally supportive of TPS; especially for Haitians, but broadly for everyone. My belief in the fundamental moral rightness of that program makes me less tolerant of the ineptitude with which the programs were managed, not more so: Biden's mishandling of this will probably set similar efforts back for the next 20 years.)
- jonway 11mo ago
  Thanks, I was editing the comment but I will stop to prevent any wiggle over here. We have some number of immigrants where I am in a rather conservative small town in a large greater metro area. We have a local history of missionary and aid work, sponsoring people from terrible places like Sudan during the Save Darfur movement, and even farther back to bring Christian european people into the country. I sometimes see people in my daily life like (as you mentioned) a Haitian man who works in an industrial facility, people from Guatemala and Honduras live very close to me, some have bought into businesses and such. From my perspective its the working rights that do the most to help people out, since amnesty applicants are prohibited from working for a waiting period and have to rely on whatever charities or aid is available, which varies.
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis. We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light. It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff. I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.
    - keeda 11mo ago
      Oh as someone going through my own personal (legal) immigration-related crisis in the '21 - '24 timeframe, I totally don't think any party on any side of aisle was or is doing immigration right :-) "Look at what you're going through doing it the legal way while illegals are getting put up in 5-star hotels on your tax dollars" was a line I heard a few times. I was very aware of the havoc due to immigrants being bussed across states. At the time I chalked it up to increased border crossings like everybody else. But also for this reason I had looked into it and realized that the Biden admin's hands were tied by the laws as they existed. And when both parties finally managed to reach an agreement to fix some of the laws, it was torpedoed by a specific party to support a "campaign premise." I realize I implied upthread that it was "only perceptions", which was incorrect. But if the immigration data does not support the events that transpired, something somewhere is screwy. And its not a stretch to imagine, given the torpedoing above, that it was deliberately managed.

by jonway 11mo ago

tptacek 11mo ago

At no point did mismanaged immigration during the Obama administration cause a crisis in my local municipality or force us to reallocate funds or scramble to find housing for over 100 people that were otherwise living in makeshift tents outside a police station. I think you'll find it pretty easy to pull up news stories; October 2023 was the peak of it in Chicagoland but you'll see stories running all the way into the middle of the next year. (I liked Biden too and am directionally supportive of TPS; especially for Haitians, but broadly for everyone. My belief in the fundamental moral rightness of that program makes me less tolerant of the ineptitude with which the programs were managed, not more so: Biden's mishandling of this will probably set similar efforts back for the next 20 years.)

jonway 11mo ago
Thanks, I was editing the comment but I will stop to prevent any wiggle over here. We have some number of immigrants where I am in a rather conservative small town in a large greater metro area. We have a local history of missionary and aid work, sponsoring people from terrible places like Sudan during the Save Darfur movement, and even farther back to bring Christian european people into the country. I sometimes see people in my daily life like (as you mentioned) a Haitian man who works in an industrial facility, people from Guatemala and Honduras live very close to me, some have bought into businesses and such. From my perspective its the working rights that do the most to help people out, since amnesty applicants are prohibited from working for a waiting period and have to rely on whatever charities or aid is available, which varies.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis. We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light. It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff. I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.
  - keeda 11mo ago
    Oh as someone going through my own personal (legal) immigration-related crisis in the '21 - '24 timeframe, I totally don't think any party on any side of aisle was or is doing immigration right :-) "Look at what you're going through doing it the legal way while illegals are getting put up in 5-star hotels on your tax dollars" was a line I heard a few times. I was very aware of the havoc due to immigrants being bussed across states. At the time I chalked it up to increased border crossings like everybody else. But also for this reason I had looked into it and realized that the Biden admin's hands were tied by the laws as they existed. And when both parties finally managed to reach an agreement to fix some of the laws, it was torpedoed by a specific party to support a "campaign premise." I realize I implied upthread that it was "only perceptions", which was incorrect. But if the immigration data does not support the events that transpired, something somewhere is screwy. And its not a stretch to imagine, given the torpedoing above, that it was deliberately managed.