There’s a difference between securing a border and intentionally making it lethally dangerous.
When people are being denied life-saving water or drowning because of concertina wire placed there specifically to make it difficult to get out of the water it’s no longer “securing the border.”
I can lock my house’s door. I can put in an alarm system and place a barbed wire or electric fence. I can even shoot a trespasser actively breaking into my house.
What I cannot do is set a trap.
People who are denied water when turned away at the border cannot safely make it back. People who swim up on razor wire at the shore cannot rest before turning around to swim back.
If people have no supplies when told to turn around, we need to give them enough to make it back across. If we’re going to build a razor wire fence, it needs to be far enough inland that swimmers can get out of the water long enough to rest so they don’t drown. Even better - we can ferry them back.
And even better than any of these: we need to actually give fair hearings for asylum seekers.
Let me put it this way: I don’t like kids running into my lawn to get their baseball. I ask them to stop, and I put up a fence. These are both fine.
What I cannot do is place landmines behind that fence and sit on my porch with a shotgun to kill survivors.
That’s actively what DeSantis and Abbott want to do : turn the entire border into a deathtrap where even attempting to cross is absolutely going to kill you, one way or another. I believe at least one of the candidates last cycle DID bring up mining the entirety of the border. They want to make the US border look more like No-Man’s-Land in the Somme rather than the Berlin Wall or the Korean DMZ.
If more humane border is feasible for preventing illegal crossing then that’s of course good. I wonder what would need to happen in the US to make the border effective, if it is even possible.
And even better than any of these: we need to actually give fair hearings for asylum seekers.
I think that’s often brought up in Europe how illegal crossers circumvent the system and “skip the line” for asylum seekers, also hardening the attitudes towards them. Better border control and more proper asylum seekers would be good.
I think the best course of action is helping Mexico with the cartel problem so people stop wanting or even needing to cross the border. Grain of salt though, the leaders of Mexico are in the pockets of the cartels.
Tackling the problem at the source is of course best overall, but it is also a lot slower and harder than tougher border control. But of course it’s not just one or the another
There’s a difference between securing a border and intentionally making it lethally dangerous.
When people are being denied life-saving water or drowning because of concertina wire placed there specifically to make it difficult to get out of the water it’s no longer “securing the border.”
I can lock my house’s door. I can put in an alarm system and place a barbed wire or electric fence. I can even shoot a trespasser actively breaking into my house.
What I cannot do is set a trap.
People who are denied water when turned away at the border cannot safely make it back. People who swim up on razor wire at the shore cannot rest before turning around to swim back.
If people have no supplies when told to turn around, we need to give them enough to make it back across. If we’re going to build a razor wire fence, it needs to be far enough inland that swimmers can get out of the water long enough to rest so they don’t drown. Even better - we can ferry them back.
And even better than any of these: we need to actually give fair hearings for asylum seekers.
Let me put it this way: I don’t like kids running into my lawn to get their baseball. I ask them to stop, and I put up a fence. These are both fine.
What I cannot do is place landmines behind that fence and sit on my porch with a shotgun to kill survivors.
That’s actively what DeSantis and Abbott want to do : turn the entire border into a deathtrap where even attempting to cross is absolutely going to kill you, one way or another. I believe at least one of the candidates last cycle DID bring up mining the entirety of the border. They want to make the US border look more like No-Man’s-Land in the Somme rather than the Berlin Wall or the Korean DMZ.
If more humane border is feasible for preventing illegal crossing then that’s of course good. I wonder what would need to happen in the US to make the border effective, if it is even possible.
I think that’s often brought up in Europe how illegal crossers circumvent the system and “skip the line” for asylum seekers, also hardening the attitudes towards them. Better border control and more proper asylum seekers would be good.
I think the best course of action is helping Mexico with the cartel problem so people stop wanting or even needing to cross the border. Grain of salt though, the leaders of Mexico are in the pockets of the cartels.
Tackling the problem at the source is of course best overall, but it is also a lot slower and harder than tougher border control. But of course it’s not just one or the another