A bipartisan bill to address the surge of migrants at the southern border is sowing discord within the Senate GOP as Trump urges them to kill it.

Senate Republicans are in deep distress over whether to support a plan to fix the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border that includes key concessions they had demanded from Democrats months ago in exchange for approving new U.S. aid to Ukraine.

The bipartisan legislation is expected to be unveiled as early as Friday, giving senators time to review the text before a planned procedural vote next week. But with former President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and much of the right whipping opposition to the bill before it has even been unveiled, its future in the Senate appears to be in serious jeopardy.

Republicans have for years called on President Joe Biden to address the crisis on the border, insisting that the elevated flow of migrants is an urgent national security threat and calling for legislation to address it. But with an agreement in sight after four months of negotiations, many in the GOP now say that Congress doesn’t need to pass new legislation and that Biden ought to simply take executive action to fix it. Some have openly admitted they don’t want to give Biden a victory ahead of the November presidential election by letting him take off the table an issue on which he rates poorly among the electorate.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Substantiation, here ya go:

    https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters

    If we extrapolate the numbers from the current year-to-date, we’re looking at an additional 666,000+ migrants for 2024 vs. 2023 (3,141K vs. 2,475K). Also, note the Nov.-Dec. spike in the first graph.

    Our government, society and infrastructure is not geared to take that many people that fast. It’s already a humanitarian crisis and it’s getting worse by the minute. We cannot take a major American city worth of people every year, we just can’t. Hell are we to do with an extra 3M+ souls?!

    And keep in mind, we’re only looking at Southern border crossings. Plenty of immigrants coming from other quarters, including my wife, and hopefully soon, her son.

    I suspect everyone is hauling ass to American ahead of a possible Trump win. Wouldn’t you? I’d sure as hell get my family in as fast as I could.

    • admiralteal@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      I suspect everyone is hauling ass to American ahead of a possible Trump win. Wouldn’t you?

      I strongly suspect, and think any history would confirm, that most immigrants don’t think much at all about internal US politics/policies when making the decisions to abandon their entire lives and flee to this country.

      Maybe once faced with the brutality at the border they’ll start to get interested, but on the whole? No way, I just don’t buy it. We do not control the conditions that cause people to want to flee their homes, but they are not making that decision so lightly.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You honestly think they’re clueless about American politics on a macro level? Maybe they are, but how else would you explain the surge at the border? Perhaps there’s new/sudden unrest in our Southern neighbors I’m ignorant of?

        • admiralteal@kbin.social
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          5 months ago

          It doesn’t take that much to explain a 20% increase in numbers. I know you tried to frame it like it was some ABSURDLY huge increase, but I don’t consider an extra person for every five to be such a mind-blowing spike.

          The same economic stagflation/recession happening everywhere else, including here. The states being emigrated from are continuing to decline and populations continue to grow. There’s going to be YOY increases. Probably not 20% YOY increases, but there will definitely be increases.

          To be clear, I basically agree with you that it is more than we can handle. I’ve posted as much elsewhere in this thread. And I agree that we already are failing to take care of our own people, and having extra mouths is going to stretch our failing social welfare programs even more taught.

          To be clear though, even just regular birthrates in the US are around 12 per capita – that is 4M new people per year that we can “handle” already. And just as before, I don’t consider ~1 extra person for every 5 to be a mind-blowing figure.

          None of this is the reason we’re failing to get the “crisis” deflated. We’re not processing these immigrants because we both hate them and have weaponized our incompetence against them. Basically the same bad faith and weaponized incompetence that have brought us into our own domestic crises – housing, healthcare, labor rights, and all that.

        • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Maybe they are, but how else would you explain the surge at the border?

          Easy peasy! There isn’t. I don’t trust the CBP numbers in the slightest.

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            “I don’t believe in gOvERnMenT numbers I don’t like! I don’t believe the CDC! Masks and vaccines are boolshit!”

            Take that conservative thinking back to FB. Adults are talking.

    • jennwiththesea@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Do you have a source with numbers from before the pandemic? This site only includes numbers for the past four years, which have to have been increasing because immigration almost ground to a standstill in 2020-21. We need an accurate starting point in order to have this conversation.