Biden breaks the law to build more wall

[brenthutch 388]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration-border-wall/index.html

“President Joe Biden said Thursday that he doesn’t believe border walls work, even as his administration said it will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley amid heightened political pressure over migration.”

I guess even Biden believes in the border crisis now.

[SkyDekker 1,153]

1 minute ago, brenthutch said:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration-border-wall/index.html

“President Joe Biden said Thursday that he doesn’t believe border walls work, even as his administration said it will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley amid heightened political pressure over migration.”

I guess even Biden believes in the border crisis now.

Nah, he just understood that this particular funding was appropriated in 2019 specifically for a border wall, and would fall off if not committed. He did try to get these funds reappropriated. His only other option was not spending it at all, which would have been a larger political hit. He made the smart decision.

[brenthutch 388]

15 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

Nah, he just understood that this particular funding was appropriated in 2019 specifically for a border wall, and would fall off if not committed. He did try to get these funds reappropriated. His only other option was not spending it at all, which would have been a larger political hit. He made the smart decision.

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”

Joe Biden 

[SkyDekker 1,153]

1 minute ago, brenthutch said:

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”

Joe Biden 

Yup, guess he should have said there will not be any more money appropriated for, but that wouldn't give the same sound bite. Liek I said, he tried to get the money reappropriated so it could be spent on more impactful illegal immigration prevention, but was unable to do so.

[SkyDekker 1,153]

6 minutes ago, Slim King said:

The Democrat concept is to Bankrupt America...Biden lies every day so no one even blinks at another Democrat lie... So spend spend spend ... The goal is to bankrupt us all....

Biden has actually decreased debt-to-GDP after the previous administration massively increased it. Generally debt-to-GDP does better under Democrat presidents. Specially in modern history.

 

Edited to add: again the money Biden is "spending" here was allocated and "spent" in 2019 under the previous administration. He could have chosen to do nothing with it, but don't you want a wall along the border?

Edited October 5, 2023 by SkyDekker

[billvon 2,473]

Seeing conservatives whine and moan about building a wall is . . . . awesome.

[brenthutch 388]

4 hours ago, SkyDekker said:

Biden has actually decreased debt-to-GDP after the previous administration massively increased it. Generally debt-to-GDP does better under Democrat presidents. Specially in modern history.

 

Edited to add: again the money Biden is "spending" here was allocated and "spent" in 2019 under the previous administration. He could have chosen to do nothing with it, but don't you want a wall along the border?

“Not one foot”

don’t you want a president who doesn’t lie?

[lippy 789]

44 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

“Not one foot”

don’t you want a president who doesn’t lie?

You don’t understand the difference between blatant lies vs changing one’s stance based on new information?….of course you don’t, forgot who I was talking to for a minute. 
 

 

Read my lips: no new taxes. 

[billvon 2,473]

3 hours ago, brenthutch said:

don’t you want a president who doesn’t lie?

I want one who is more honest - which is what we have now.  Trump lied 30,573 times while he was in office.  Biden has a LONG way to go to break that record.

[JoeWeber 2,348]

9 hours ago, brenthutch said:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration-border-wall/index.html

“President Joe Biden said Thursday that he doesn’t believe border walls work, even as his administration said it will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley amid heightened political pressure over migration.”

I guess even Biden believes in the border crisis now.

The border crisis spans the globe, we're rather fortunate in comparison to many poorer nations. 

[jakee 1,279]

5 hours ago, brenthutch said:

“Not one foot”

don’t you want a president who doesn’t lie?

We know you don't, because everything you say is aimed at getting Trump reelected.

[brenthutch 388]

14 hours ago, SkyDekker said:

Nah, he just understood that this particular funding was appropriated in 2019 specifically for a border wall, and would fall off if not committed. He did try to get these funds reappropriated. His only other option was not spending it at all, which would have been a larger political hit. He made the smart decision.

Ok KJP

[jakee 1,279]

1 hour ago, Slim King said:

TDS does not stop Biden from being a liar. Logic 101

True or not, that doesn’t stop Trump from being the stunningly corrupt liar you both want to see back in the White House.

[wolfriverjoe 1,368]

8 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

The border crisis spans the globe, we're rather fortunate in comparison to many poorer nations. 

Kind of long, but an interesting opinion piece on the 'border crisis', Trump's lies and the reality of the R 'hate mongering'.

 

Quote

Some straight talk on the “immigration crisis” which Republicans love to flog on the campaign trail but do nothing to solve in Congress. It’s from Paul Waldman, a senior writer for The American Prospect, contributor to The Week and blogger for the Washington Post's Plum Line blog.

Here’s what he wrote about the issue today, including some info you may not have heard about what criminal defendant Donald Trump is now saying about his mostly imaginary “border wall.”

By Paul Waldman:

“When he ran for president in 2016, few of Donald Trump’s promises thrilled his supporters more than his pledge not just to build a wall on the southern border, but to force Mexico to pick up the tab. ‘And who’s going to pay for it?’ he’d say at his rallies. The crowd would shout back joyfully, ‘Mexico!’ It wasn’t about the money; the point was to conjure a fantasy of America standing tall and dominating our neighbor; their humiliation would be our glory.

A fantasy is just what it was, as Trump now admits. At a speech in Iowa on Sunday, he blurted out the truth. ‘When you hear these lunatics back there,’ he said, pointing at the news media, ‘say, Trump didn’t get anything from Mexico, well, you know, there was no legal mechanism. I said they’re going to help fund this wall, but there was no legal mechanism. How do you go to a country, you say, by the way I’m building a wall, hand us a lot of money.’

While Republicans have been talking about this problem for a long time, they haven’t done anything to solve it. This admission — and vindication of Trump’s opponents — will not produce a wave of reflection and reassessment among his supporters. But Trump’s confession comes at the same time that his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are trying to one-up him with their most preposterous proposals. In short, when it comes to immigration, the whole Republican Party has nothing to offer on what they claim is their single most important priority.

In fact, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Republicans are actually quite happy with the immigration system just the way it is. They love giving speeches about it, making campaign ads about it, shouting about it in Congress, shaking their fists about it on television, and organizing photo-ops at the Rio Grande. They repeat the words ‘open borders’ like a mantra, threaten to impeach the secretary of homeland security, and tell everyone who’ll listen that America is being invaded by criminals and terrorists.

But while they’ve been talking about this problem for a long time, they haven’t done anything to solve it.

Look at what’s happening now. In Washington, immigration serves as an excuse for Republicans’ destructive attempts to shut down the government: They say they’ll pull back from their shutdown threats, but only if Democrats agree to a draconian immigration crackdown, which everyone knows will never happen. Meanwhile on the campaign trail, GOP presidential candidates offer only the loudest and dumbest ideas: Mass deportations of millions of immigrants! Amend the Constitution to end birthright citizenship! Invade Mexico!

Meanwhile, they’ve spurned any meaningful progress toward a long-term solution that would reform the immigration system. Everyone on both sides of the issue knows what such a deal would look like: Democrats would get protection for ‘Dreamers’ who grew up in the United States and a path to citizenship for other undocumented residents, while Republicans would get more spending on border enforcement. There likely would also be stricter requirements that employers use the E-Verify system, to ensure that their workers are here legally, and an expanded guest worker program. And there would have to be expanded legal immigration; people go around the system because going through it is next to impossible.

All that means compromise (and even under that basic framework, there would be lots of details to negotiate). But the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are dead-set against compromise. They remember what happened in 2013, when the bipartisan ‘Gang of Eight’ came up with a comprehensive reform package that passed the Senate 68-32. The bill died in the House after right-wing media stoked a wave of opposition. One of the eight, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., until then a tea party hero, found himself branded a traitor.

When Rubio ran for president in the 2016 election, he awkwardly tried to disavow his own bill. That was because he was running against Donald Trump, who realized that what the Republican base wanted on immigration was not a solution but rage. That’s what he gave them, and they ate it up. It’s what Republicans have been giving the base ever since. Whenever a Republican or two works with Democrats on a compromise bill, other Republicans show no interest in it.

Perhaps those Republicans know what they would never say out loud: Immigration is a complex policy problem, not a five-alarm crisis. Some might claim that America is being ‘overrun’ with undocumented immigrants. (In its worst form, these claims take the form of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory touted by Tucker Carlson and others.) In fact, the undocumented population has been stable at around 11 million for the last 15 years, as the flow of people coming in has been largely matched by an equal flow of immigrants returning to their home countries.

The truth is that lots of people benefit from keeping the immigration system just as it is now. Corporations get the benefit of a large pool of undocumented labor that’s easy to exploit. The conservative media gets a ‘crisis’ they can use to scare their audience. And Republican politicians have the raw material to bash Democrats and gin up anger and xenophobia.

A few years back, Goldman Sachs put out a report on the biotech industry that asked, ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ Their worry was that cures would compromise the industry’s ability to keep milking patients for money over the long term. All the evidence of recent years suggests that the GOP’s position on immigration is the same. Fixing the problem would be an unsustainable political model. The current system, on the other hand, suits them just fine.”

 

Source:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-immigration-mexico-republicans-2024-rcna118785

[Phil1111 943]

I have to give this one to Brent and US conservatives. President Biden and some liberals have flipped on the wall. Most people here know that a wall, fence, call it what you will is not a solution. Gridlock on immigration has been the fixture in the US for decades. President Biden had and has the opportunity to seize the issue and define the debate. Just as trump did.

No wall will keep a prospective Venezuelan who has crossed the Darien Gap to get to the border. From getting into the US even if he is deported back the first time.

[JoeWeber 2,348]

1 minute ago, Phil1111 said:

I have to give this one to Brent and US conservatives. President Biden and some liberals have flipped on the wall. Most people here know that a wall, fence, call it what you will is not a solution. Gridlock on immigration has been the fixture in the US for decades. President Biden had and has the opportunity to seize the issue and define the debate. Just as trump did.

No wall will keep a prospective Venezuelan who has crossed the Darien Gap to get to the border. From getting into the US even if he is deported back the first time.

A secure southern border simply means controlled entry. I am in favor of controlled entry and I also believe a wall is dumb. I also recognize that shooting them on arrival is only regionally popular in the US. So what do we do to keep Central Americans from flooding through Mexico? Impoverishing them through sanctions hasn't worked. Saying pretty please to Mexico to get them to control their southern border hasn't worked. I suppose we could build a big canal through the isthmus of Panama and stop them there, or something, but we'd just give it away so that wouldn't work. Short of establishing a large military presence and a huge humanitarian zone either along our southern border or Mexico's and being willing to inflict summary justice, what to do? Maybe giving a Trillion a year to Guatemala and Belize to flourish their economies in exchange for them accepting them all would work, but probably not. So, what to do?

[Phil1111 943]

5 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

... Maybe giving a Trillion a year to Guatemala and Belize to flourish their economies in exchange for them accepting them all would work, but probably not. So, what to do?

A guest on CNBC this morning suggested that many US companies are moving to "nearshore" production from China. In other words move production to the Americas. It creates spin off jobs and aids those economies, shortens supply lines, etc. It was also suggested that Mexican auto production is of very high quality.

Perhaps favorable tax and import protections to central and south America can be a part of the answer.

[JoeWeber 2,348]

3 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

A guest on CNBC this morning suggested that many US companies are moving to "nearshore" production from China. In other words move production to the Americas. It creates spin off jobs and aids those economies, shortens supply lines, etc. It was also suggested that Mexican auto production is of very high quality.

Perhaps favorable tax and import protections to central and south America can be a part of the answer.

Excellent, corporations to the rescue again.

[SkyDekker 1,153]

14 hours ago, brenthutch said:

“Not one foot”

don’t you want a president who doesn’t lie?

A lie means he would have known at the time it was false. I would expect a President to adapt to a changing environment and circumstances and then make the best decision based on the then present fact set.

I do understand some people prefer a mindset where you stubbornly adhere to a dogma and never ever give in.

[gowlerk 1,956]

12 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

A secure southern border simply means controlled entry. I am in favor of controlled entry and I also believe a wall is dumb. I also recognize that shooting them on arrival is only regionally popular in the US. So what do we do to keep Central Americans from flooding through Mexico?

Finally I understand the real purpose of the USA. It provides a huge buffer zone between the Canadian border and the hordes of desperate non English speaking people trying to escape the reality they were born into. Seriously though, once America is filled up our border is pretty much indefensible. Is it too soon for me to panic?

[JoeWeber 2,348]

1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

Finally I understand the real purpose of the USA. It provides a huge buffer zone between the Canadian border and the hordes of desperate non English speaking people trying to escape the reality they were born into. Seriously though, once America is filled up our border is pretty much indefensible. Is it too soon for me to panic?

Possibly. But it's definitely not too soon to learn Spanish.

[JerryBaumchen 1,081]

3 hours ago, Phil1111 said:

A guest on CNBC this morning suggested that many US companies are moving to "nearshore" production from China. In other words move production to the Americas. It creates spin off jobs and aids those economies, shortens supply lines, etc. It was also suggested that Mexican auto production is of very high quality.

Perhaps favorable tax and import protections to central and south America can be a part of the answer.

Hi Phil,

Back in the early 2000's, I worked as a consultant for this company:  SAE Towers - FROM DESIGN TO EXECUTION, MUCH MORE THAN ENERGY, TRANSMITTING LIFE.

I worked for the plant in Monterrey, MX.  I have made many trips to that facility.  Also, in the 70's, I was at their original plant in northern Italy; now closed.  I've also been to their facilities in Brazil a number of times.

A German engineer*, who I have known/worked with since the early 80's, worked for them as a designer/salesman.  He once told me that no mfg plant in Mexico can be successful unless the management was American, Canadian or European.  I now agree with him.

The more automated a plant in Mexico is, the greater chance of it being a successful facility.

In my experience, most Mexican workers are so afraid of losing their jobs that they keep their heads down & do just what they have been told to do; absolutely nothing more.  I found virtually no incentive in any them.

Jerry Baumchen

*  He was born in Berlin in 1944, trained there & immigrated to the US in the late 60's.  He is now a US citizen & resides in Houston.

Edited October 6, 2023 by JerryBaumchen

[JerryBaumchen 1,081]

3 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

A secure southern border simply means controlled entry. I am in favor of controlled entry and I also believe a wall is dumb. I also recognize that shooting them on arrival is only regionally popular in the US. So what do we do to keep Central Americans from flooding through Mexico? Impoverishing them through sanctions hasn't worked. Saying pretty please to Mexico to get them to control their southern border hasn't worked. I suppose we could build a big canal through the isthmus of Panama and stop them there, or something, but we'd just give it away so that wouldn't work. Short of establishing a large military presence and a huge humanitarian zone either along our southern border or Mexico's and being willing to inflict summary justice, what to do? Maybe giving a Trillion a year to Guatemala and Belize to flourish their economies in exchange for them accepting them all would work, but probably not. So, what to do?

Hi Joe,

Agree 100%. 

What needs to change is the true desire to keep the illegals out.  We do not have that now.

Also, IMO if we really want secure borders, then we need to staff, equip & fund the Border Patrol to the level of what they need to do the job.  We are not doing that now.

Hey, who doesn't like cheap labor?

Jerry Baumchen

[billvon 2,473]

3 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

So, what to do?

Allow everyone who wants to work in the US to work in the US.  They pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.  To get any of those taxes back, they have to appear IN PERSON at the embassy of their country with the forms filled out.

Everyone who wants to work gets a work visa and a biometric scan.  If they commit significant crimes, their record is marked and they can't get in again legally.

[wolfriverjoe 1,368]

6 hours ago, billvon said:

Allow everyone who wants to work in the US to work in the US.  They pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.  To get any of those taxes back, they have to appear IN PERSON at the embassy of their country with the forms filled out.

Everyone who wants to work gets a work visa and a biometric scan.  If they commit significant crimes, their record is marked and they can't get in again legally.

You're going to have to add on serious penalties for hiring illegals.


Instead of civil fines, make it a criminal act, put the supervisors, HR (hiring) and executives of the companies in jail (or prison).