Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
Why is it on me, with nearly zero knowledge of immigration and refugee policy, to come up for a solution to someone's problem they created when they decided they were going to warehouse children in pretty questionable living conditions?
I watched people who are supposed to be good at this stuff promise that if people voted for them, they'd fix it "Day 1".
Why is it my problem they lied?
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It's your problem if you actually think "day 1" literally means day 1. I'm also getting a sense that you're not fully aware of what's going on.
Here's three things I think you should consider before calling them liars:
1) Due to failures in immigration policy dating back to at least Clinton era, tens of thousands of children have been crossing the border unaccompanied each year.
March 2021 saw a new record of 18,500 unaccompanied children cross the border. That's 600+ new kids every single day. This is the vast majority of children in custody, they're not being separated from their parents like under Trump.
(This is because immigrant parents believe that unaccompanied children will be housed and fed by US government and more importantly will not be returned across the border, and thus they see it as the best chance the children will have at a better life.)
Especially given the covid-situation, it's kind of a logistical nightmare that needs a lot of fairly expensive infrastructure to properly fix. That infrastructure does not spring up in a day no matter how much good will is involved. This stuff also needs funds to solve, which has to be found in some budget somewhere, and that's never really a 1 day issue.
Of course this IS in large part a Biden failure too, as the administration once again set up a policy to expel families at the border. (The exact policy which has long been known to create a stream of unaccompanied children.)
2) There were thousands of children in the system when the Biden administration came to power, and it takes time to fix something like that. The number of children in custody has however dropped
45% by April 12th, which is not bad considering the record number of children coming in. Clearly the specific part of the system you're talking about (children being held in detention) is at the very least improving.
3) Various state and local officials actively oppose Biden's policies, which makes it a lot harder to get things done.
There's also an unknown but definitively very significant portion of people in ICE that are either literally nazi's or just generally white supremacists. There is supposedly some kind of a probe going on to try and root out the worst, but who knows how effective that will be.
I would however add a more general point here:
The failures of US immigration policy date back decades. Children in detention centers are ultimately a symptom of deep systematic problems which have for a long time been considered fairly unsolvable, and it's not just an American issue, and it's even further from just a Biden issue.
For comparison, we Europeans also mostly keep our unwanted immigrants in camps, they're just outside European borders, for example in Turkey, so we can sort of pretend it's not us doing it. (Even though Turkey is holding immigrants in those camps in because the EU is paying them to do so.) We also just murder immigrants to stop them from coming here, either by getting border patrols of our neighboring countries to do it, or we force them unto leaky boats that are then dragged to the middle of Mediterranean and drive away. Out of sight and out of mind etc.
My point is, there's a lot of people in the western world who see death and suffering as the best solution to keeping unwanted people out. Those people also make up a significant portion of the US voters, and a significant portion of US politicians, officials and law enforcement.
That's ultimately the reason why the situation is like it is. It's not Biden, and when Trump was solving the situation his way, it had very little effect on his popularity one way or the other, showing that helping immigrant children at the border is not REALLY an issue people care about.
What the US as a country (and Europe as a continent) wants is to make this go away just enough so that they don't have to think about it, and when that's really the only thing there's significant support for, it might be impossible to do much more.