Americans separating children and parents at the border and within

48 thoughts on “Americans separating children and parents at the border and within”

1. Does this support for not separating children extend to local level in your virtuous neighborhood?
   For example, if a person accompanied by a child enters a house without invitation, and plans to stay there, then the owners cannot call the police because that may lead to separation of the child?
   Does the uninvited person then become undocumented homeowner (one who doesn’t have the title/documents for house etc., but otherwise has rights to live there)?

2. I’ve noticed that none of the people who are suddenly so concerned about kidnapping children ever have anything to say about the various state “Child Protective Services” organizations.

3. > How about this last comment? Is it correct that families are kept together if they show up at a standard border crossing and say “We are applying for asylum”? (But then we are back to the question of why these folks, if not Mexican, didn’t apply for asylum when they arrived in Mexico?)

   That’s what they say, but the ACLU has a lawsuit where they say they have one case, presumably representative of others) where a woman showed up with her child to an entry point and was separated for months, until her case became public knowledge and then she was reunited by ICE, at which point they asked the judge to drop the case since it had become moot.

   —

   Re, noting how there are many parents with zero time or low time with their kids given to them in a divorce decree by people who are not full time advocating for shared parenting, hey, that’s what I’ve been saying!

   Similarly, we have judges who can never bring themselves to effectively punish a parent who consistently makes “visitation” difficult or impossible. “Don’t do that Ms. Fubar, and let’s schedule a hearing in six months. Now everyone pay the system.”

   That said, the immigration separation is horrible, inhumane, and completely unnecessary, and while I mostly condemn Trump as bearing the most responsibility, apparently Schumer is currently refusing to support a bill to stop this demonstrating both sides are will to hold the kids hostage for politics.

4. The “problem” for the U.S. appears to be that a non-Mexican who manages to enter the U.S. (legally or illegally) from Mexico with a bona-fide claim of asylum can’t be returned to their country of origin (because, asylum), but Mexico isn’t obligated to take them back either so the U.S. is “stuck” with them.

   One solution would be to reimburse Mexico for some fraction (high enough to make it worth Mexico’s while but low enough to ensure Mexico is incentivized to accept only bona-fide claims) of their costs for processing asylum claims and helping anyone with bona-fide claims (in Mexico where it is cheaper) in return for accepting anyone who enters the U.S. from Mexico and subsequently files an asylum claim with the U.S.

   This would be cheaper than border security + processing claims in the U.S. plus both Mexico and U.S. get to uphold their responsibilities to asylum seekers under international law.

5. > Re, noting how there are many parents with zero time or low time with their kids given to them in a divorce decree by people who are not full time advocating for shared parenting, hey, that’s what I’ve been saying!

   Well, that sentence makes no sense, so restating it, a lot of good parents are totally screwed out of their kids lives, and the kids from their lives, and few of the folks totally incensed with child separation at the border will lift a finger. In the meantime, almost everyone has a friend or two who has been separated from their kids (and vice versa) like this.

6. The inconsistency of liberals is striking:

   If a redneck family insisted on crossing a dangerous dessert with minor children, they (through their child protective services ilk) would insist on separating the children from the parents, and jailing the parents. Why the slack for illegal border crossers?

7. We are so much less virtuous than our neighbors in the Great White North. They aren’t even separating children from the third parent!

   https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/06/14/polyamorous-parents-canada_a_23459218/

8. What happened in the Vietnamese Boat People case? The initial influx was about 1 million. However this was split across a number of countries in the West.

   When a few years later, Boat People II was tried, however, everyone including the UN worked to shut down the refugee flow (according to Wikipedia at least).

9. In the last week the media has gone full-retard on this. Separating facts from hysteria: picture of kids in a cage was a staged photo-op, and 83% of child “asylum seekers” were accompanied by someone other than their parents (ie: human traffickers).

10. Yes indeed…it was staged so brilliantly the fool we call “president” just signed an order stopping this “staged” activity. Or did he really…since you trumpanzees insist it was all fake?

11. I suppose that Ben Sasse claiming our immigration problems stem from some defect in Obama era administration of the bureaucracy can be dismissed as an example of the typical partisan confabulation which both Republicans and Democrats engage in. The reality is that six Presidents (four Republican, two Democrat) have taken a shot at implementing the current incarnation of our immigration laws and none of them have been able to make them work very well. Obama was actually fairly diligent about border enforcement. However, claiming that the current family separation policy is about saving children from trafficking strikes me as beyond ridiculous. The burden of proof is on him. I would need to see the studies definitively showing that this is the best way to address that issue, and I want to see the reams of memos demonstrating that this concern was a primary motivation of the people to chose to implement it, before giving anything he says another thought.

12. Oops, posted a broken link. Here’s the photo of kids in a cage that outraged the media, but was clearly cropped and staged by activists:
    https://i.redd.it/a8ruxlxlt4511.png

13. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/trump-executive-order-border-separations/563303/

    raises the same question that I raised. It is illegal to put children in jail. Therefore if we don’t separate families we have to allow anyone who shows up with a child to go free. So we are running a border-free country for anyone who can get hold of a young or young-looking person.

    (Unless we were to build a wall or some other physical structure to prevent migrants from showing up.)

14. “(Unless we were to build a wall or some other physical structure to prevent migrants from showing up.)”

    Walls or physical structures don’t prevent migrants from showing up. They just slow them down a bit reducing the number of agents needed for a given length of border.

15. The real issue here is not zero-tolerance law enforcement, not iron-curtain borders, not even family values. It is all about getting right wing voters to the polls in November. If 200,000 Cuban boat people showed up on the shores of Florida tomorrow and said they were fleeing communism and would vote Republican, not even one single Cuban child would be separated from a parent. Those same ole crocodiles!

16. zzazz wrote:
    > It is all about getting right wing voters to the polls in November.
    > If 200,000 Cuban boat people showed up on the shores of Florida
    > tomorrow and said they were fleeing communism and would vote
    > Republican, not even one single Cuban child would be separated
    > from a parent.

    At the risk of taking a sarcastic comment seriously: Are you sure it is the right that is trying to drive people to the polls? This looks like the media making Trump a villain no matter what he does, just in time for an election.

    If he stands his ground, they will drive the left to the polls by saying the president is racist, heartless, and ignores the law.

    If he caves to the mob, they will say he is soft on illegal immigration, hoping his base stays home.

    The media is setting up a no-win situation for Republicans.

17. “The media is setting up a no-win situation for Republicans.”

    One can dream, but I’ll believe it when Democrats actually show up and vote.

18. If forcibly separating parents form children has become such an urgent issue, maybe President Trump will fix the 10s of millions of fathers

19. … who have been separated from their children bad u fair divorce settlements?

20. “The media is setting up a no-win situation for Republicans.”

    I’d be interested to know how one arrives at this conclusion since the whole series of events was devised and executed by the republicans and the president….deemed totally unchangeable by the president alone…then reluctantly changed by the president all by himself.

21. Phil do you remember what you have to do crossing the border in your small airplane. You have to first register with a special website IACRA. Then you have to file a special ICAO flight plan. You also must also coordinate with air traffic control and get a squawk code for crossing the border. If you do not complete all of the necessary steps and you land 10 minutes before or after your scheduled arrival you get a 10,000 dollar fine! You also need 5 or 6 different documents to show authorities. If we open our borders it would be nice to allow pilots of small aircraft to simply skip all of this nonsense and fly straight home!

22. By the way, to respond to the other post that reached the 50 comment max….

    Technically, it is a crime to cross the border illegally, but it is only a misdemeanor. So be prepared to hand over your children when you get your next parking ticket.

23. “So we are running a border-free country for anyone who can get hold of a young or young-looking person.”

    It isn’t nearly a “border-free country”, but our borders certainly are very permeable to illegal migration. The best evidence for this is not some clever analysis of obscure laws but the 12 million people living in the country illegally.

24. There seems to be a lot of support for open borders. For those to be truly open, should also remove immigration controls at airports and other ports of entry.
    And think about benefits in terms of diversity! *Really* poor people from other continents (and there are hundreds of millions of people living in abject poverty) who cannot easily access our southern border will be able to get here easily, without passports, visas and such trouble (maybe with help from people like philg who can offer one way tickets)

25. Neal: I think that there is a difference between admitting people via incompetence and having rules set up such that, even if we were perfectly competent at enforcement, we would never be able to detain an illegal immigrant so long as he or she could get hold of a child.

26. philg: I agree there is a difference, but I doubt that either issue identified in #25 is a particularly significant factor for our border control system. Plus, I suggested a solution in #4 (currently uncriticized in the thread) which would largely address the loophole by reducing the need to detain families.

    spl: Since some in the “other” thread mischaracterized my position as “open borders” I will reply by explicitly stating that is not what I suggested. I would expect everyone crossing the U.S./Mexico border to do so through a government controlled point of entry/exit. Our fairly open border with Canada (which I understand is now a part of history) seemed to work pretty well. If we wanted to experiment with open borders that is where I would start.

27. What gets me is 0% tolerance with draconian (even sadistic) enforcement for asylum seekers whilst simultaneously there is 100% tolerance for Trump and his cronies using their offices to enrich themselves. Not as bad as Nazis yet, but it hasn’t even been two years yet.

28. The very basic issue here is people wanting to exist at a higher consumption level. US is a high energy consumption and high resource consumption society. All the migrants are from countries that have a lower per capita energy and resource consumption. They look at the energy and resource consumption and they also want to live at the US level.

    The migrants are also not all from Mexico, most of them are from all over South America. An additional factor of Mexican immigrants is their fertility rate of 3.5 kids per women, much higher than the US. Most of them are also unskilled.

    So you have a bunch of unskilled immigrants that breed like rabbits all trying to enter the US. What will happen to the average low skilled worker in the US? They are probably looking at loosing their job to an immigrant. If the immigrants cannot increase the available resources or energy of the US they will not be of any help, the US (and Canada) already have enough of unproductive people.

    Everybody wants to live at a higher consumption level, the Earth cannot support everybody on this planet living at the level of US, Canada and other high consumption countries. The amount of immigrants from low energy countries to high energy countries will keep on increasing, especially from places of high fertility, until the high energy countries are overwhelmed. The first ones to feel the effects in the high consumption countries will be the poor (the people living at a lower consumption level in a high consumption level country).

    The liberals live in an utopia of infinite green growth, the conservatives live in a dystopian world of growth (burn the planet down to the ground, exponential economic growth), both of them have no idea of physics (especially the Second Law of Thermodynamics), and limit of the carrying capacity of this planet. The new sources of energy (i.e. fusion) and resources have to be available first, right now we are increasing population and consumption hoping the productive part of society will magically come up with solutions. This is madness.

    As for the wall? Once climate change starts to reduces food production, the first crop failures will most likely be near the equator. Better get that wall built, before you have waves of hungry people trying to migrate North.

29. avel: We are discussing the fate of people, not rabbits. Without an explicit recognition of their humanity at the top of your next comment I won’t bother to read it much less reply to it. Your analysis contains many correct elements, but it misses a few points and reaches a conclusion that is contradicted by historical evidence. The less important point is that immigrants (legal and illegal) don’t just take, they also contribute. More importantly, most Americans want personal freedom and secure borders. A significant minority of Americans want to add small government and low migration from Mexico, but it is impossible to have all four under existing economic and geographic conditions. I have presented my evidence for that statement many times over the years in this forum and so far no one has ever even bothered to try and refute it. We therefore have a third fantasy in addition to the two you identified, and it turns out that the small government/low migration fantasy is the important one at this moment in history. To understand why this is one needs to go back to the creation of the current immigration milieu by Saint Reagan. His immigration reform relied on the triad of Amnesty for people already here, strong border controls, and a work authorization system to turn off the magnet drawing people from Latin America to the U.S. For a number of reasons, an effective work authorization system never happened leaving us with an ineffective and dysfunctional immigration and border control system. Since then, the minority enthralled by the small government/low migration fantasy have acted as a spoiler, blocking all attempts to reform the dysfunctional system.

    We have, however, learned something important from this accidental experiment. While our dysfunctional immigration and border control system has created many problems for us, the U.S. has not been completely overrun and brought down by hordes as your analysis suggests would happen. It turns out that labor demand acts as a fairly effective control on migration. Who knew that markets could work so well?

    I propose we create a system which produces effective border control by making it easier for people to go through the legal channels than illegal ones. That would not be difficult, the desert is a real bitch. We can largely (but not entirely) rely on the mechanism of labor demand to moderate the rate of migration which history demonstrates works. Yes, we need to tread very carefully when it comes to giving these newly “legal” people access to our welfare state. We want to be fair to them, but we don’t want to turn on a different migration magnet. This should be possible, especially if we are creative and work with Mexico to provide some services for people who have contributed their labor to the U.S. economy in Mexico where providing the services would be cheaper. However, I will readily concede this is an area of risk with my suggestion since I can’t point to any examples where this has previously been done successfully.

    I am not advocating for high migration from Latin America. I am suggesting a response to our existing high migration which might work as opposed to (for example) President Trump’s border wall fantasy. The only realistic alternative I see would be to compromise on small government and personal freedom and institute an effective work authorization system.

30. The solution is obvious if you think about it. Forget separating California into 3 parts and just annex Mexico. No more illegal immigrants, just legal new citizens.

    Build a wall between it and Guatemala/Belize (much shorter distance). Use the new citizens to do the work.

    Clean it up, build new resorts, fix infrastructure and call it a day.

31. Neal: I should apologizes about my rabbit comment, I should have said that the human species is a virus (we are just recombining DNA, nothing more, nothing less) and just like a virus we multiply in our environment on this planet until we overwhelm the carrying capacity of the planet and then die out.

    I really wish that I could see the humanity, but I mostly see the race to get ahead at any cost. Our economic system is not based on humanity but on profit, unless this is changed, nothing else will. I have traveled many places around world on business, in China business and life is a blood sport, survival of the fittest, economic growth is more important breathing. It is an example of the population overwhelming the carrying capacity of the country as it moves to a higher energy and resource consumption level.

    In Mexico, my business interactions were with the educated middle and upper middle class, they look at the people running across the boarder as crazy. Life in Mexico is generally easier (just as long as you can avoid the drug cartels), because food is much cheaper and shelter is also available outside the major cities and tourist areas at a low cost. The people that you want coming from Mexico, the educated, higher skilled, will apply through legal channels and not run across the boarder.

    Examples of what I consider good countries, where the economy works for most people, would be Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and of course, Canada. All of the above countries, especially Canada, are high resources and energy available per capita countries making democracy possible. When you have a surplus of energy and resources per capita, democracy works, because there is stuff to divide. A stable culture also makes a difference, but available energy and resources are more important. On the other side, in a country over a billion people, straining the environment and resources to the maximum, there is not much to divide so democracy and freedom will not work.

    I would argue that the ability of a country to absorb immigrants does not depend on the economy, but more on the available surplus resources and energy and carrying capacity of the environment.

    Ideally if the population of the planet was more inline with our available long term energy, resources, and carrying capacity, we would not need boarders. The economy would be based on available energy, resources and carrying capacity of the planet. People everywhere would be free to go were they could help society the most, everybody would be guaranteed basic food and shelter. Governments would be more local and of a size that the local society could sustain from an available energy and resource view. There would be differences, more productive people would get more energy and resources, but the differences would be much smaller between the top and bottom, the consumption levels of today’s 1% would no longer exist.

    Of course the utopia above will never happen, we will continue using up all the available energy and resources and destroying the carrying capacity of this planet until there is no more society left, all the humanity in the world will not help, in a society based on infinite economic growth at any cost. Climate change will also reduce the carrying capacity of the planet putting even more pressure on society. We live in exciting times.

32. “The people that you want coming from Mexico, the educated, higher skilled, will apply through legal channels and not run across the boarder.”

    Americans do want the Mexicans who are crossing illegally to come as evidenced by the fact that we keep giving them jobs.

33. why the 50 comment limit?

34. Neal: Only some Americans want Mexicans crossing illegally. The low skilled Americans do not want any Mexicans crossing because they will be competing for jobs with them. This is why they support Trump. Capitalists really like the Mexicans because they reduce the salaries they have to pay, which increases profits for their business. The US keeps giving the Mexicans jobs because they are cheaper. For jobs like farming, that cannot be outsourced to Asia, Mexicans are very important for profit margins. You have to really feel sorry for the capitalist that would not have money for the big house, expensive car, mistress, divorce payments and possibly the use of an executive jet, if they could not hire cheap Mexican workers for their business. The US could just eliminated minimum wage and watch the salaries go to level of Mexico for low skilled labor, then there would be almost nobody running across.

35. Pavel: In fact, only about 1/3 of Americans want less immigration than we have now. It is true that under some economic conditions low skilled immigrants may compete with and depress the wages of low wage Americans. However, this is not the case under all conditions because (among other things) immigrants also buy things which increases the velocity of money and demand for labor. Other factors like increased employer monopsony are more likely to be cause of stagnant wages in today’s America than immigration.

36. Neal: Immigrants also buy things? This argument will be one of the reasons that society will go extinct, it is based on exponential growth. From today’s global economy they do not need to be in the US, can’t they just live in Mexico and buy goods made in the US?

    The only thing that matters when evaluating immigrants for long term survival of the US is how much energy and resources will they consume and how much energy and resources can they contribute or how much more energy and resource efficient can they be. Can they increase the carrying capacity of the US because of their efficiencies? This will also limit the family size to accept as immigrants, if the parents can only generate enough energy and resource surplus for two kids, then they cannot be accepted with five kids. The US can do a long term energy and resource availability and environmental capacity, the immigration numbers can be based on these results. The numbers can be adjusted if new innovations increase efficiencies and energy availability, for example getting controlled nuclear fusion for power generation working, would greatly increase the availability of energy with minimal environmental damage.

    You can be nice and except everybody, hoping that your existing society can innovate and keep up with the demand, but what happens if they can’t? And you find yourself without energy and resources for the population, and suddenly you have a massive crop failure due to climate change. How high is the mountain of decomposing bodies going to be?

37. toucan: Why the 50-comment limit? It has to do with Harvard’s installation of WordPress and/or this style sheet. It is supposed to paginate to 50 comments per page but instead it just fails. I have no admin authority so I have to live with it.

    Neal: Only 1/3 of Americans want less immigration? What if it is the working poor (see https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216 for how this is the group that pays, in reduced wages, for the benefits of cheap labor enjoyed by wealthy employers)? Are you happy to see a policy favored by and benefitting the richest Americans imposed on the poorest, who will be harmed by that policy?

    (Separately, http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/372152-new-polling-proves-president-trump-is-right-americans-are-dreamers-too suggests that a majority of Americans want to see immigration reduced and/or adjusted to favor higher-skill immigrants.)

38. Pavel: If one is interested in sustainability then the absolutely first order of business is to stabilize the already substantial human population. This requires reducing birthrate, and the only proven way to decrease human birthrate on a large scale is for that population to obtain some baseline level of affluence. The stunning reduction in poverty which has occurred in the last few decades even as the world’s population has increased suggests that contrary to your assertion, the primary cause of poverty remains political instability and lack of economic development not resource constraints. I find the connection between sustainability and immigration rather tenuous, but if anything, immigration contributes to the sustainability goal. Remittances from immigrants to their home country typically fuels economic development there, and that economic development reduces the birthrate.

    philg: The 1/3 number came from a source which had been doing the same simple survey for a long period time. I posted the link in this forum fairly recently so I won’t bother to find the it again. It is not difficult to stuff a survey with a few hot button words and produce a “stunning” result. For the record, I think a somewhat lower level of immigration would probably be good for the country. We’ve gone through a fairly extended period of high immigration and probably need a breather. That said, I doubt that the friction introduced by an effective work authorization system would be worth it and am skeptical that Americans would tolerate one for very long. My main concern isn’t really with the level of immigration but that immigrants legal and illegal already in the country be treated fairly and (especially for legal immigrants) their reasonable interests accommodated during any transition. On that score I have -460F trust in the current administration. These are people who thought it was a good idea to set up “tender age” facilities.

    The impact of immigration on low wage American workers is unclear. Here is a paper from a well known liberal think tank called Cato Institute which begins “A large body of academic economic research has found that immigration has a relatively small effect on U.S-born American wages and their employment prospects. For wages impact, the estimates are that immigrants either lower the wages of some American workers by about 2 percent or raise them by about 2 percent in a dynamic economy. The employment effects vary little but, like wages, the effects are small and clustered around zero. ”

    https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrations-real-impact-wages-employment

39. Neal: Yes, population sustainability is extremely important. A population decrease could be even better, especially if we do not have any major break through in energy and resource efficiency, as it would enable better living conditions for everybody on the planet.

    Your argument of reduction in poverty due to political stability and economic development is totally incorrect. The main reason that poverty has been reduced is due to the greater availability of energy and resources (more oil resources like offshore oil and more efficient farming methods. You can make the argument that political stability enabled the development of more efficient farming and development of energy resources, but it is the availability of food and resources that enable people to get out of poverty. Look at the graph of oil production and population, it is obvious that available energy and resources
    enable your population to grow and if the energy and resources per capita increase

40. Pressed the post comment too soon 🙂

    Compare the Global fossil fuel consumption graph with population growth
    https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

    Empowering women and given them control over reproduction, also decreases the birth rate and helps them get out of poverty. This requires not only political changes, but also giving women more energy and resources.

    Increasing the affluence of the population should work in stabilizing the population. The problems are with the implementation. First there is the question of the carrying capacity of the planet, there may not be enough resources and energy available to raise the level of those in poverty and have the 1st world keep its high energy consumption life style. Imagine running for president of the US on the platform that you will make the world a more stable and livable place for everybody and the first step will be for the 1% to cut their energy and resource consumption by say 90%, for the top 10% to cut by 70% and the rest to cut their energy and resource consumption by 50%. No more monster houses, no more two car families, air travel cut by 50% or more, bikes and public transit for everybody, just like Denmark, and even Denmark maybe at too high energy consumption, for the entire world to live at that level 🙂 All of this extra resources and energy will be passed on to those in poverty around the world to raise them to a higher energy and resource existence. You would be drawn and quartered at the first town hall anywhere in the US 🙂

    China is probably the most successful at moving the most people out of poverty. It is ruled by a one party technocratic government run by mostly members with an engineering background. They implemented such measures as the one child policy, which did have a significant effect, but also unintended consequences. To buy the resources and energy from outside the country to raise the standard of living for its population it became the number one manufacturing country in the world. What did it mostly buy? Resources and energy that it requires to raise its population to a high energy and resource existence for its population. The main purpose of the “One Belt One Road Initiative”? is to funnel all the resources from the surrounding countries and beyond to China. What happens to those countries after they run out of resources? China is also pushing its environment carrying capacity to the limit, breathing clean air is less important than growth. Now imagine India growing its energy and resource consumption the same as China, which it is also trying to do. Where are the resources going to come from? Will there be a conflict over resources between India and China?

    Increasing the affluence of people in poverty to stabilize population growth requires both energy and resources. Is there enough energy and resources to do this without overwhelming the carrying capacity of the planet? You are talking raising the affluence of about 3 billion people on this planet to the energy and consumption level of the lower middle class living in Europe.

41. If you really don´t care about possible human rights violation the usual policy when you have jailed parents is to offer up the children for adoption. In this case I would suggest Spain.

42. If we really are willing to abandon morality, we could just follow Johnathan Swift’s advice and just eat the children.

43. I just learned something funny.
    The little crying girl at the border — the one on the time magazine cover — was never separated from her mom.
    The father stayed in Honduras and did not agree with the mom spending $6k for a coyote and taking their daughter on the dangerous trip.
    The mom separated the family against the father’s wishes.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5869829/Father-two-year-old-face-child-separation-crisis-speaks-out.html

    ‘I didn’t support it. I asked her, why? Why would she want to put our little girl through that? But it was her decision at the end of the day.’

    He said that Sandra had always wanted to experience ‘the American dream’ and hoped to find a good job in the States.

    Denis, who works as a captain at a port on the coast of Puerto Cortes, explained that things back home were fine but not great, and that his wife was seeking political asylum.

    He said that Sandra set out on the 1,800-mile journey with the baby girl on June 3, at 6am, and he has not heard from her since.

    ‘I never got the chance to say goodbye to my daughter and now all I can do is wait’, he said, adding that he hopes they are either granted political asylum or are sent back home.

44. Thanks for that link. I wonder what kind of political activities a mother of four in Honduras could be engaging in that would pit her on the wrong side of the government. And if she does win asylum, how long before she can bring in the rest of her children under chain migration rules?

45. philg: philg: During the last few decades, the minimum wage has gone down substantially (10% – 25% depending on how you bookend it), private sector unions have collapsed, private sector pensions have disappeared, healthcare (and higher education) has gotten relatively more expensive (a lot), international trade and supply chains have exploded, the number of manufacturing jobs per unit output has declined significantly, many fields have become much more complex and technical (think about how much cars have changed since we were kids changing our spark plugs in the driveway), employer market power has increased, and about half of all growth was captured by the people at the very top of the income scale (with about half of what was left going to increased healthcare costs). Whatever the impact of immigration on low wage Americans, it is very likely to have been relatively small. The outsized focus on immigration as the source of low wage Americans woes can most politely be described as scapegoating.

46. “And if she does win asylum, how long before she can bring in the rest of her children under chain migration rules?”

    My understanding is that in most cases, spouses and children under 21 will be issued a greencard simultaneously with the primary applicant. If a successful refugee status means receiving a green card, then most likely there is no wait to bring rest of family. If somehow children and spouse do not receive instant derivative permanent residency, then the minimum waiting period is 5 years, after 5 years as a permanent resident, one is eligible for citizenship. You probably know that citizens can sponsor direct descendants and spouses without quotas or waiting time.

47. Here in Europe we have been told that you are the most powerful nation in the world. It must be terrifying for you to be overrun by single mothers and children.
    Countries with the strongest borders in recent memory include North Korea and East Germany. Why don´t you source some of their communist know-how and build your wall?

48. “Build that wall”!

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