If the goal was to entice undeserving applicants, you couldn’t design a worse combination of policy and resources. In comparison, the bipartisan proposal is designed to deny more cases at the initial stage and get final decisions on all cases in a matter of months.

For immigration hardliners, the moment of leverage had finally arrived: More enforcement without amnesty. However, instead of seizing this likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, House Republicans and former President Trump argued that the bill was not the hardliner wish list they preferred and successfully convinced most Senate Republicans to block the bill.

This one-sided deal that favors Republican enforcement policy is unlikely to ever reappear. There has never been another moment this century when Democrats agreed to enforcement legislation without meaningful legalization provisions. Nor have they ever agreed to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to anywhere near the level needed to locate and deport millions of individuals already in the country illegally.

  • @LEDZeppelin
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    13410 months ago

    Republicans would NEVER want to fix immigration and secure the border. They want those issues to get as messy as possible so that they can run election on those issues.

    Same for healthcare - anyone even cares or can remember “repeal and replace Obamacare” anymore?

    • @[email protected]
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      4610 months ago

      This is exactly what I thought about abortion rights but they really went and plowed ahead on that.

      Now they’ve shifted the culture wars over to trans rights and whatever other kinds of bigotry they can muster up. There’s really no bottom to the depths of horribleness that they’re willing to plumb.

      • @TheDoozer
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        2910 months ago

        And the abortion rights thing bit them in the ass, because it galvanized a lot of voters.

        I think that dog catching the car moment hit home, and they won’t let it happen again.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          Part of the problem was it was unexpected, and it shows. If Republicans could have decided, they definitely wouldn’t have had it passed for the reasons that you have indicated.

      • @[email protected]
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        1210 months ago

        important distinction that it wasn’t the legislature that repealed abortion rights. it was a couple of true believers, unconcerned about reelection, that the party cheated the system to get them onto the supreme court. if they’d known their nominees were lying about their stances on roe, i doubt they’d have been confirmed.

    • @SlopppyEngineer
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      1610 months ago

      And a secure border means higher cost for farmers who employ a lot of immigrant labor. They don’t want to hurt farmers who mostly vote republican. The end result is always demanding to close the border but never really doing this.

    • roguetrick
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      10 months ago

      That honestly doesn’t matter. You can’t fix it by their metrics as long as minorities exist. They don’t NEED it to be an actual problem. The fact that currently the federal government is in actuality failing to handle refugees is just a bonus.