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Author Topic:   Immigrants good for me and you? Bad? How to make a good answer that is accurate?
LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 728 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 346 of 353 (849681)
03-17-2019 5:14 PM
Reply to: Message 345 by Phat
03-17-2019 8:26 AM


Re: Immigrants, Populists & Unionism
I want to thank you, Phat, for the open mind you constantly display on immigration issues.
I wish we could find some safeguards to put in place, to make higher immigration rates possible.
Democrats have yet to demonstrate any real efforts.
(There is a job training provision in place for an employee, who is part of a large group of workers, employed in a business, who loses his job due to trade deals. The bar is unfortunately set a bit too high, and I forget the exact details.)
I am glad that we have one union member here that is not anti-immigration. Democrats need to make the number much higher, and the lack of support for Open Borders, among Union folk, might actually be an issue where those at the top (Democrats in Congress, Senate, DNC etc.) are to blame.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 345 by Phat, posted 03-17-2019 8:26 AM Phat has seen this message but not replied

  
LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 728 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 347 of 353 (849682)
03-17-2019 5:20 PM


My 5% tax, on (future?) immigrants, was in addition to regular taxes.
My tax is not an idea which indicates a belief (on my part) that immigrants don't already cover their fair share of taxes.
It is just a necessary trade-off to enable higher immigration levels per year.
It is about political feasibility.
(And it would give the entire country a chance to look at the benefits of immigration with a renewed focus and clearer eye)

  
LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 728 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 348 of 353 (850224)
04-03-2019 10:44 PM


Here is a dramatic AP article. I feel it can be interpreted multiple ways.
First, people need to go to the link.
(click on the Patch website link, at bottom of my AP article paste, to see the graph showing border arrests per year from 2000 to 2018, which is impressive enough. But also see the graph showing the number of border patrol officers from the same years. This graph deserves its own topic. Wow.)
quote:
Politics & Government
'Catch And Release' Expands Amid Surge In Migrants
Since Dec. 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set free more than 125,000 people who came into the U.S. as families.
By Associated Press, News Partner | Apr 2, 2019 6:07 pm ET
EL PASO, TX ” The surge of migrant families arriving at the southern border has led the Trump administration to dramatically expand a practice President Donald Trump has long mocked as "catch and release."
With immigrant processing and holding centers overwhelmed, the administration is busing people hundreds of miles inland and releasing them at Greyhound stations and churches in cities like Albuquerque, San Antonio and Phoenix because towns close to the border already have more than they can handle.
Relief organizations in some cities are struggling to feed and house the migrants and warning that a public health crisis is taking shape.
"We're asking volunteer doctors and nurses and community members to step up and do what the government should be doing. If this was a hurricane, FEMA would be on the ground helping," said Jim Gannon, CEO and executive director of Catholic Charities in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
For many years, families arriving at the border were typically released from U.S. custody immediately and allowed to settle in this country with family or friends while their cases wound their way through the courts, a process that often takes years.
Trump has railed against the practice, tweeting in November that it was over: "Catch and Release is an obsolete term. It is now Catch and Detain. Illegal Immigrants trying to come into the U.S.A., often proudly flying the flag of their nation as they ask for U.S. Asylum, will be detained or turned away."
But in recent months, the number of families crossing into the U.S. has climbed to record highs, pushing the system to the breaking point. As a result, the government is releasing families faster, in greater numbers and at points farther removed from the border.
Since Dec. 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set free more than 125,000 people who came into the U.S. as families.
Customs and Border Protection is also overloaded, and instead of holding families for up to 72 hours before turning them over to ICE, it has started releasing them directly into the U.S.
"The numbers are overwhelming right now," said Gregory Archambault, ICE director of enforcement and removal operations in San Diego. "Everybody is stressed. The agency is stressed, the (local governments) are stressed, the law enforcement agencies. Everybody is stressed because there are these mass numbers of people."
ICE has been releasing asylum-seeking families so quickly that they don't even have time to make travel arrangements. Families are given court dates, a head of household is often fitted with an ankle monitor, and they are dropped off at a charity-run shelter or bus station.
San Antonio received part of that surge in recent days, forcing the city to open a help center with food for migrants.
In El Paso, where shelters and churches are at capacity and seats on buses headed out of the city are getting harder to find, authorities briefly resorted to holding migrants in a pen lined with concertina wire under the shade of a bridge that connects the American city to Juarez, Mexico.
They closed the makeshift holding area over the weekend and moved the migrants to a place with more shelter.
"We spent four days under the bridge, sleeping on the rocks," said Eliseo Santiago, 37, who is from Guatemala.
"They treated us like animals," said Herling Jerlyn, a teenager from Guatemala.
In Albuquerque, nearly 280 miles from the border, faith-based organizations have helped roughly 1,000 migrants since mid-February. The groups were small at first, but they have been growing and the arrivals have become more frequent.
San Diego County recently opened a shuttered downtown courthouse slated for demolition to house up to 150 asylum seekers. A coalition of religious and civic groups that manages the shelter said it has helped more than 11,000 members of asylum-seeking families since authorities began large-scale releases in late October.
About 22,000 immigrants have been released in Arizona in the past three months. In the Phoenix area, the nonprofit organizations and churches taking them in have a capacity of only 700 a week, said Connie Phillips, president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services in the Southwest.
That means immigration authorities have to drop off families by the busload at places not designed to take them in, like the Greyhound station in Phoenix.
The bus company is no longer allowing anyone without a ticket to wait inside, so immigrant families, including little children, stand outside until a volunteer can get them in touch with a relative to buy them a ticket. That sometimes takes hours.
"The federal government is saying, 'This is not our responsibility,'" Phillips said. "And the cities and states have not stepped up to provide any kind of emergency funding."
She added: "This is going to be a public health disaster. These are small children, these are families, these are babies, and we cannot have people just out in the heat."
Authorities said family arrivals along the U.S.-Mexico border reached an all-time high in February of 45,827 arrests or denials of entry.
"We didn't have family groups for years and years, like we have now," ICE's Archambault said. "Our facilities are not made for this. We have diapers and baby formula and all this stuff, like a nursery."
In another sign of how U.S. authorities are being tested as rarely before, figures released Tuesday show a significant drop in prosecutions for illegal entry, even as arrests have climbed sharply. The numbers are at odds with Trump's vow to prosecute everyone who enters the country illegally.
In February, Customs and Border Protection referred 8,998 illegal-entry cases to prosecutors along the border, a drop of 12% from January and 23% from October, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Border Patrol arrests of single adults are moving in the opposite direction: 23,451 in February, up 26% from January and 7% from October.
By Cedar Attanasio and Astrid Galvin, Associated Press; Galvan reported from Phoenix; AP writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego; Nomaan Merchant in Houston; Colleen Long in Washington; and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this story.
'Catch And Release' Expands Amid Surge In Migrants | White House, US Patch
I would see this as chaos caused by artificial borders, which are a man-made strangulation that causes unexpected surges at times. The pressure has been caused by a choking border.
Opponents of open borders will say that an actual open border would have surges as well (only more often and worse).
I would respond that shelters would not cost too much (for this number of people especially), and much (if not all) of the "crisis" is simply from hatred of "welfare".

  
LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 728 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 349 of 353 (850225)
04-03-2019 11:00 PM


"Catch and Release" gets to the issue of refugees.
See this long article showing the complications with Trump's idea from the get-go.
Catch and release, explained: Trump’s new border agenda is about tightening the screws on immigrants entering the US - Vox

  
Chiroptera
Inactive Member


(1)
Message 350 of 353 (854549)
06-10-2019 11:54 AM


Reprehensible treatment of immigrants needing medical care
From the New York Times:
Migrants in Custody at Hospitals Are Treated Like Felons, Doctors Say
Border control policy is interfering with the medical care that immigrants are receiving.
As apprehensions of migrants climb at the southwest border, and dozens a day are taken to community hospitals, medical providers are challenging practices ” by both government agencies and their own hospitals ” that they say are endangering patients and undermining recent pledges to improve health care for migrants.
The problems range from shackling patients to beds and not permitting them to use restrooms to pressuring doctors to discharge patients quickly and certify that they can be held in crowded detention facilities that immigration officials themselves say are unsafe. Physicians say that needed follow-up care for long-term detainees is often neglected, and that they have been prevented from informing family members about the status of critically ill patients. Agency vehicles parked conspicuously near hospital entrances, health providers say, are also stoking fear and interfering with broader immigrant care.
Whether these people are refugees legally entitled to be in the country to seek asylum, or whether they entered the US illegally, everyone is entitled to decent medical care.
I also feel that every person who is in custody should be treated respectfully and with dignity, I suppose some people may make an exception to those guilty of heinous crimes, but surely simply entering into the country illegally doesn't rise to that level of "heinous"?

It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn’t know what he was talking about. -- Paul Krugman

Replies to this message:
 Message 353 by dwise1, posted 08-18-2019 1:33 AM Chiroptera has seen this message but not replied

  
LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 728 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 351 of 353 (861143)
08-18-2019 12:42 AM


A suppressed report showing refugees brought financial benefits to the USA?
quote:
In effect, he is advancing the bogus premise that immigrants are freeloaders and connecting people of color to welfare. Actually, the libertarian Cato Institute found last year that immigrants are less likely to consume welfare benefits and, when they do, they consume a lower dollar value of benefits than native-born Americans.
But that won’t register with a president who recently suppressed a report which found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in revenue over the past decade than they cost.
In Trump’s world, their fate will now rest with a DHS bureaucrat who weighs the totality of the alien’s circumstances, with greater emphasis on that individual’s financial security. The rule itself notes that this assessment is inherently subjective and discretionary in nature. No kidding.
Trump declares war on Emma Lazarus | Editorial - nj.com
A September 18 2017 New York Times article was hyperlinked.
$63 billion more,not less, it seems.
So much for the big refugee cost.

Replies to this message:
 Message 352 by dwise1, posted 08-18-2019 1:14 AM LamarkNewAge has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 352 of 353 (861144)
08-18-2019 1:14 AM
Reply to: Message 351 by LamarkNewAge
08-18-2019 12:42 AM


Re: A suppressed report showing refugees brought financial benefits to the USA?
That immigrants, especially the undocumented ones, pay more into the system than they take out is old news.
We started discussing the actual financial impact of immigrants on the US in The Right Side of the News at the end of January 2019 starting around Message 721 -- you came into that topic much later on, like just a month ago.
Here's part of what I wrote in that message; follow the topic thread from there and also a bit of what had preceded it:
DWise1 writes:
quote:
We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392.
One of the several schemes for how the Wall will be paid for is the claim that by eliminating illegal immigration we can take the money that illegal immigration is costing us and put that to building the Wall, make the Wall almost self-funding.
That ignores the tax revenues we get from illegal immigrants, from the taxes that they pay. While "independent contractor" illegals (eg, day laborers, home cleaners, gardeners) can operate on a cash only basis being paid directly by their customers, illegals who work for a company and receive a paycheck need to go through the motions, usually with fake IDs (like the ones that Trump's resorts got for their own illegals). Those illegals get payroll taxes (eg, FICA for Social Security and Medicare) and income tax withholding taken out of their pay. And since they don't have valid IDs, they cannot receive any Social Security nor Medicare benefits, nor (to my knowledge) can they file income taxes to get any refund. Plus all illegal immigrants pay the same day-to-day taxes that we all pay (eg, sales tax, gas tax, property taxes through their rent payments). It turns out that illegal workers pay more in taxes than they receive as benefits. The "cost of illegal immigration" turns out to be a net gain, not a liability -- http://www.ncsl.org/...te-reports-on-fiscal-immigration.aspx.
So even if we were to completely eliminate illegal immigration, we would end up losing money instead of gaining. And that's not even including the adverse effects of stores losing customers, landlords losing renters, and businesses losing employees.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 351 by LamarkNewAge, posted 08-18-2019 12:42 AM LamarkNewAge has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 353 of 353 (861145)
08-18-2019 1:33 AM
Reply to: Message 350 by Chiroptera
06-10-2019 11:54 AM


Re: Reprehensible treatment of immigrants needing medical care
I'll use your message to springboard off of to talk about the British concentration camps in the Boer War (c. 1900) which resulted in the deaths of 26,000 women and children.
I first heard about them in the recent British future-history mini-series on HBO, Years and Years. In that series ("20 minutes into the future", though more like up to 2030), the UK gets a Trumpian PM (though far more intelligent and eloquent) who implements a system of "erstwhiles"; ie, erstwhile facilities like military bases, hospitals, etc, that are converted into concentration camps for refugees.
In that show, the UK government's plan was to crowd as many refugees as possible into these camps, including those sick with yet another new bird flu, with no medical care, practically no sanitation, and meager food, and let nature take its course. In the show, PM Vivian Fox brought up the Boer War concentration camps as an example of how effectively such camps can eliminate undesirables, which as I said is the first that I had ever heard of those camps.
Now, aren't those the kinds of conditions that the US government is now creating in its own concentration camps?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 350 by Chiroptera, posted 06-10-2019 11:54 AM Chiroptera has seen this message but not replied

  
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