If Trump only hires people best for the job, why am I only seeing old white men next to him 99% of the time? Are they the best of the best?
eg:
> People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else.
And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records.
Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry.
His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
The Biden administration did neither. They took active measures to strip the Customs and Border Protection Agency of its scope and authority through executive order from their first day in office. Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
This wasn’t policy they campaigned on or announced. It wasn’t something the American people wanted, and it polled terribly even among Democrats. But they did it anyway.
Conversely, Trump had the voter’s mandate to secure the border when he entered office, but he’s managed it so poorly, created terrible optics, and has Democrats marching in the streets in every major U.S. city in support of illegal immigration. The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.
> The Biden administration did neither.
This appears to be a partisan statement subject to data source and bias. eg:
The Biden administration took office amid heightened debate in some circles over the merits and tactics of deportations, yet it is on track to carry out as many removals and returns as the Trump administration did.
The 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of fiscal year (FY) 2021 through February 2024 (the most recent data available) are on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations carried out during the four years President Donald Trump was in office. These deportations are in addition to the 3 million expulsions of migrants crossing the border irregularly that occurred under the pandemic-era Title 42 order between March 2020 and May 2023—the vast majority of which occurred under the Biden administration.
Combining deportations with expulsions and other actions to block migrants without permission to enter the United States, the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration (5 million in its second term).
> Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
Their policies or global events? Either way the sheer number of recorded border ecounters speaks to them being out and about and actively encountering people on the border ... when thought about, that's hardly a bad thing - it sounds more as if they were getting the job done.
To be clear, I have zero interest in debating this aside from noting it's hardly clearcut.
> The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.
They are indeed superlative propagandadists, on this we can agree ...
they are, however, in a view from afar, falling well short of actually making middle North America great again, gutting essential infrastructure maintainance, etc. etc.
But few will ever know given they've also gutted many of the means of tracking the state of the country, the state of the environment, the activities of their administration.
People that, for the most part, committed no crime, made no attempt to hide, paid taxes, ran businesses, and employed others.
eg: https://www.wpbf.com/article/florida-vigil-conducted-for-det...
Your complaint is about an unsourced alleged increase on the order of 3.5 million taxpayers.
Again, this is about messaging, perception and propaganda.
Obama began an unprecedented increase in deportations (guess who gave the CURRENT director of ICE his first job?).
Biden continued this.
Maybe what you mean is that they didn’t call immigrants by names on TV?
The very fact that Obama deported more immigrants, and Trump is deporting fewer but with riots in the streets should clue you in to the effect that media has over you.
Whoa. To refresh my memory, how many American citizens were shot by ICE under Obama? How many cities were threatened with Insurrection Act occupations? Maybe deporting people doesn't require such actions, and "the effect that the media has" is highlighting how ridiculous these behaviors are.
(Just so we leave the realm of ad hominem and return to data, these figures are a helpful baseline: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table3... )
edit: more data https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re... . I sincerely hope you will re-adjust your priors based on actual data (some of it from the current administration!) as opposed to what you hear on the radio or television.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with your data. The first doesn’t even cover Biden’s term, which again, is what I’m talking about. The second is extremely disingenuous because doesn’t take net illegal immigration into account. Even if Biden deported a similar number of people as Trump, he let far more people in: the net number of illegal immigrants in the country during Biden’s term is estimated to have risen by 3.5 million people.
When is the last time you questioned your priors?
Every day, friend.
> During Obama’s presidency ICE wasn’t dealing with protestors actively interfering with day-to-day operations
What do you think the difference is? What do you think your most reasonable opponent might say? In a dispassionate analysis, who do you think is correct?
I do this all the time as a researcher.
> net number of illegal immigrants
Absolute non sequitur.