That's quite an unfair and one-sided point of view, so I'll provide the other end of it.
It's beyond unfair and one-sided because it's hardly even an argument. It's about as convincing as hearing Hitler denounce his opponents along his own race lines of convenience, because that's never a foundation a sane human being takes to explain anything, let alone contemporary sociopolitical matters of all things.
So, here's a suggestion, how about instead of wasting money on a border wall that won't actually do jack shit, the government improves and streamlines the immigration process so there's less need for people to enter the country illegally to escape danger.
If the problem is with the illegality, not with people who happen to be born outside the US, then fix your broken immigration system so entering illegally stops being a necessity to get out of danger.
Immigrants aren't running from mortal danger, on the whole. Those people seek asylum, not stolen social security numbers, because they have better chances if they have a reason for asylum anyway. And unlike undocumented illegals, they're tracked and provide statistics. It's a very big problem with illegal immigration that we don't actually know anything on what they're doing, how they got here or anything besides, because they're undocumented. Open borders only exacerbates this issue, but sane immigration policies could fix it and give us all insight for improvements. The original problem here is that immigration pathways in the US are non-functional.
The cost of living isn't magically cheaper for immigrants. Unemployment is a an all-time low and there are more vacancies than people looking for a job (!) so it's not like companies can afford to mistreat workers that way, or else they can just pack up and leave. And anyway, most immigrants end up doing jobs that most natives won't do- agricultural labour, cleaning, taking care of old people, etc. The actual effect of immigrants in the average wage (let alone that of a white-collar manual worker in the Rust Belt) is minimal, if it even exists. And if it does, it's smaller compared to the Republican Party's refusal to increase the minimum wage or to defend Obama's rule forcing companies to pay overtime to workers who made between $25k and $45k. It's just that immigrants are easier to scapegoat.
Do you have sources for any of these things? Honestly, an empirical baseline of what immigrants are doing is p. much the holy grail of the immigration debate, because we are inexplicably unable to know about undocumented immigrants due to how they arrive and stay here. Undocumented = unknown. What do we know?
Also, immigrants pay a ton of net taxes as the companies withold payroll tax but they don't get any benefits in turn. So they are a money-making machine for the Government and anyone with a pension should be happy about it.
Immigrants pay the same amount of taxes anyone else would for their annual income as prescribed by the IRS. This is the "money-making machine for the government" and it operates with no discrimination on a basis of immigration because it can't. They can't tell apart citizens from undocumented immigrants in the first place and legal immigrants don't have wildly different tax codes either. The government isn't exploiting immigrants through taxation any more than they exploit the general population through taxation.
Furthermore, the number of mexican immigrants apprehended in the border
has collapsed by over 90% since the 2000, from 1.6 million a year to 130k. Building a wall now is not going to do much.
Border apprehension of Mexicans could mean that the number of Mexicans attempting to cross has plummeted, it could mean far more Mexicans are crossing undetected, or it could mean both somewhere in between. We have no idea what to make of such a statistic in the context of immigrants because it doesn't speak of anyone who makes it into the US, so it speaks nothing about even a hypothetical effectiveness of the wall.
...not to mention that, if Trump's idea of how the metal slabs will work is in scale
(notice the car), the separation between the slats is wide enough to allow for bags of drugs and/or thin people (say, children, starving people) to go through. Genius!
So, rather than take the obvious solution of modifying the design to fix this vulnerability, we should cancel building it entirely?
And finally, polls show that a majority of Americans don't want a wall. And that includes the last poll, the one held in November, which was won by democrats by 9 percentage points, or 10 million votes, accross enough states to equal over 300 electoral votes come 2020. So they have no reason whatsoever to fund the wall unless Trump stars giving democrats a laundry list of policy concessions.
Polls closed in 2016 and they won't be reopening until 2020. Opinion polls are nice to gauge how certain political sects of the country feel about a topic, but they're not running a referendum and it holds no policy weight likewise. A large part of Trump's campaign platform involved the building of this wall, and when he was elected he was done so with the expectation of following through with his promises, including this. My advice for Democrats is to actually try and win 300 electoral votes on this issue come 2020 if they want to tear down the wall and have things their way.
tbh I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the 3 weeks Trump just goes and declares a national emergency
The Dems are not likely to give him the wall, and he won't back down on it either, and idk if he'd be willing to go back to a shutdown again, so....
Certainly. There's a cacophony aplenty about how terrible the shutdown is, but the simple truth is most people don't have a reason to care. The main victims are government employees, and the press hasn't even done a good job of propping them up as poster children for their part in this mess. Do they know how laughable it is to hear a furloughed TSA agent complain that they can't pay their mortgage and
two car notes because that implies they have that lavish standard of living running paycheck to paycheck? That's their idea of what's worthy of sympathy? When do you get life savings making that kind of money? The main drawback for the general public is a delay of income tax refunds, honestly. Everything else is business as usual because the private sector is more than happy to pick up the slack.
if most folks have a reason to disapprove of the shutdown, it's not for the wall, it's for the squabbling and the hold-up. Trump postponed his state of the union address because he knows he'll just stake out the dems and before too long they'll be holding the short end of the stick, and will cave from the pressure. And he'll strut on stage proud as always, loud and brash, as he's played them yet again like a fiddle. Given how insignificant the cost of this wall is in the grand scheme of the federal budget, sensible lefties would have conceded this a long time ago and moved onto better things, if it weren't for a few very bitter, angry and revenge-ridden people holding it up.
