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https://lemmy.world/post/16146433
Here's actual context for anyone who wants it.
The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.
But sure, both sides the same, if this time we let fascism win it will totally make us into a left-wing paradise, etc etc etc.
I'm voting Biden out of harm reduction because I don't have the stones to walk away and be complicit in additional short term suffering/scapegoating/cruelty, but Biden just like Trump ultimately serves our owner class, and we need to collapse to have any hope of anything but living in this dystopic oligarchy.
The neoliberals and the fascists alike work to maintain the power of our owner class. We're only permitted a vote on how to address the social issue symptoms of our rigged economic system. I'd rather we not address those symptoms with scapegoating and fear, so Biden it is.
Don't mistake that vote for even beginning to solve anything though. This country is died under Reagan. Something new will eventually have to take its place for any gains to be made at this point, this corpse is too far captured, it has been reformed to maintain class occupation and maximum exploitation under both (D) and (R) representatives, both legally bribed and fully owned when it comes to legislating and protecting the long con that is our market capitalist economic system.
When capitalist induced, reckless growth/metastasis caused climate change is thinning our numbers due to hunger/thirst/deadly weather, maybe then, far too late, we will finally unite against our common enemy in their towers, golf clubs, and guard gated communities.
Don’t mistake that vote for even beginning to solve anything though. This country is died under Reagan. Something new will eventually have to take its place for any gains to be made at this point, this corpse is too far captured, it has been reformed to maintain class occupation and maximum exploitation under both (D) and ® representatives, both legally bribed and owned.
I agree that voting is the minimum and will not solve any issues on its own, but we've been in worse spots regarding corruption, and still came out capable of reform. The fight isn't over, and there's more than a corpse left to fight over. The country hasn't died under Reagan unless we're willing to let it die.
Campaign finance reform has been a rallying cry of the progressive wing of the Dem Party as soon as Citizens United happened. We, as a society, must relearn the value of strikes and disruptive protests to succeed, but I believe do have a future still.
Aww yes, I remember having hope.
Vote Biden so elections keep happening and make change at your local level. Voting in the interest of the people in local races where your vote really makes a difference. That's the only peaceful way to improve I know of.
Giving up hope is what the owner class wants.
I remember having hope, then being pessimistic, then learning to have hope again because there is no action without hope, and no progress without action.
Gotta hold onto something. Some of it is just a desire to believe in a better future, but some of it is rooted in a fascination with history. Everyone always thinks they're living in the last days - if not in religious terms, in political ones. Every polity is on the cusp of dissolution in every era - but actual dissolution is comparatively rare.
We survived the early crises of 1790s, the oligarchic 1800s and 1810s, the struggle for democracy* (BIG asterisk) and against regionalism in the 1820s and 1830s, the anti-immigrant fevers of the 1840s and 1850s, the literal civil war and a Southern sympathizer in the role as president during the 1860s, the corruption and heightened partisan activity of the 1870s, the robber barons of the 1880s and 1890s, the labor upheavals of the 1900s, the free market fetishism of the 1920s, the depression and rise of fascism in the 1930s, WW2 in the 40s, the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s, the Christofascist threat starting in the 80s, the militia movements of the 90s, the creeping security state of the 2000s and 2010s...
All great upheavals with the potential to tear the country apart, for better or worse (most of them with considerable overlap). All of them we've survived. And many countries alive today have similar stories.
It's up to us, the Americans of our age, to ensure that the 2020s are remembered as a time of struggle against entrenched elites and the pushback inherent to that.
Well said. I hope time proves you correct, and will be there to support such efforts in the event they address the root problem: greed elevated to and conflated with virtue.
What is the progressive policy on immigration? I've heard all the reasons why Republican plans are racist and xenophobic and all that but not much substance on what should be in place instead. It seems to me to be the left's version of a GOP Healthcare plan. "We have one and it's totally great but it won't be ready until next week."
Does someone want to enlighten me?
The progressive policy on immigration has been repeated for about a decade and a half now - path to citizenship for those who've grown up in the US, looser immigration restrictions, higher quotas, more judges to address backlog, etc. There have been a few attempts at implementation but all of them were ultimately shut down by Republican intransigence.
Today's executive order doesn't conflict with any of those things.
In fact, all it does it put a temporary limit on extralegal border-crossing asylum claims to 2,500 people per day. So it does not, in fact, "shut down" asylum claims, nor does it increase deportations of people who have been living here.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry
Is the United States supposed to take in an unlimited number of unauthorized border-crossers every day?
Is that the way it's going to go down? The right falsely accuses the left of being for "open borders", and the left's response is to actually just take the bait and make that their stance?
Because if that's the new progressive litmus test (it's hard to keep up since there seems to be a new one every day) then we have well and truly jumped the shark. Even progressive hero FDR turned away tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees:
In 1933, and again in 1937, the Roosevelt administration modified the “likely to become a public charge” restriction, but kept it in place. German Jews attempting to immigrate to the United States in the 1930s were still often rejected for economic reasons.
As a result of these legal and administrative obstacles to immigration, less than 20% of the German quota was filled during FDR’s first term. The Roosevelt administration focused on domestic problems, chiefly combatting the Great Depression. Though Americans certainly had information about the threat Nazism posed to German Jews, few could have imagined the persecution would escalate to mass murder. FDR did not take significant action to aid German Jews, either by ordering a diplomatic protest or by publicly supporting increased immigration.
Some people on this website who claim to be "on the left" are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don't give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.
Some people on this website who claim to be “on the left” are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don’t give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.
The last one. Many are under the delusion that if fascism wins, it'll make the left suddenly REALLY popular.
So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:
Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.
I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just fix the backlog without congress" or just making wild assertions like "oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to" or similar things that aren't how the federal government works?
I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help." But if it's just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he's a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that's all his fault, I'm not into that conversation.
Well, ultimately I want a utopian Star Trek universe with no borders but that's kind of a pipe dream right now, so I'm just throwing my arms into the air in the interim.
Luckily the ACLU is already taking up the fight...
Buts it's disgusting watching so many people defend it because he has a D by his name, thats what republicans did, and it didn't take long to get to trump.
Throwing all your standards away is never a good thing.
Also remember that the GoP, if they get in, will dismantle the system entirely and probably allow public executions of LGBTQ
It's not that people like Joe
It's that they want a democracy to remain
Hell, a lot are probably hoping Joe drops dead of old age shortly into a second term
Hell, a lot are probably hoping Joe drops dead of old age shortly into a second term
I'm not.
Harris is worse.
2028 primary can't come soon enough.
Absolutely agree.
If you're upset about this election, Vote In The Primary's!
Vote in your local elections!
Make the change happen for next time.
I feel like he’s making these moves to try to bring in right-wing voters who say they care about immigration, but literally none of them will give a shit and they’ll still accuse him of being soft on immigration. All he’s doing is just pissing off people in his own party for no actual political gain.
It won't be literally none. You're used to the online bubble where everyone's either rabidly for or rabidly against Trump, but in the actual real world there are still some people who are somewhere in the middle.
Here's the thing, this uses the same legal framework that Trump tried to use when his border crossing ban was struck down in court. Most likely this will be challenged immediately and struck down. This feels like a desperate bid to please moderates and republicans IMO. Not like this will actually survive to be enforced. Still horribly irresponsible and pussy-footing though.
Asylum seekers are the ones turning themselves in... and it is well known closing off asylum seekers and increasing deportations directly leads to more border crossings.
What is the gameplan here with this order? Surely commit extensive resources to the bottlenecked bureacracy to help with processing and screening asylum seekers? Right?
Again it's Biden way of trying to gain the Republican vote (which the Democrats know they can't win) rather than try gain progressive vote.
I think he doesn't want to be president and he's throwing the election
This is what I don't get about conservatives. They will bitch about immigration and say the border is wide open. Like no my guy it's so much worse than before. If you are a single issue voter 𝘑𝘰𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘨𝘶𝘺
It was never about the border.
“The white conservatives aren't friends of the Negro either, but they at least don't try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the "smiling" fox.” - Malcom X
Remember, folks... friends don't let friends remain liberals.
Ah, liberal harm reduction. "Biden can't change this, its all up to congress. BTW Biden had to personally close the border without congress."
Jesus Christ, just keeps shooting the chance of not having Trump in the foot, and Trump's brain melts down on Fox News. Our options are a brain that's able to work but chooses not to, and a puddle of gray matter with orange spray paint.
Democracy!