EPA to reject Obama fuel efficiency standards early next week

[freebeard]

There is a northern flow of people?

Not US citizens, they're just passing through.

[oil pan 4]

Obama tried the virtual boarder wall starting back around 2009 and was supposed to be finished 2012. It didn't work.
Guns and money were flowing south, drugs flowing north at levels never before seen. I say build the virtual wall then back it up with a real wall, use the cameras and what not to monitor it.

Originally Posted by freebeard

Not US citizens, they're just passing through.

Even better.

[redpoint5]

Well, I'm less directly impacted by illegal border crossing, so I'm a bit ignorant in that area. My guess is most of the drug problem in Oregon is homegrown. By the time people get that far north, they are probably either here legally, or working in the fields.

I imagine being in close proximity to a country with more overt corruption, those "values" impact the border areas to a greater extent.

That said, I don't care where someone is from; I want to treat them as decently as they allow.

Being a free-trader, I don't care where drugs originate. The problem is that we create the demand in the first place. Don't know how to solve that one, but simply locking people up with others who have drug addictions is not a good solution. A good solution would be something like instilling a sense of community and meaning in the lives of individuals.

[freebeard]

Perforated fence (triple concertina works just fine) for visibility; right-of-way for pave two-lane down to unpaved one-lane roadway; then The Wall proper. Which should have a mono-rail track on top for mobile watchtowers that can be repositioned as needed.

A knock-on effect would be Mexico enforcing their own Southern border.

[oil pan 4]

If it's home grown it's a drug solution.
The government tried the war on drugs thing for over 40 years now, it didn't work. Time to try something else.
There are people who just want to spend their whole lives messed up on something. Let them.

[niky]

Agreed. De=militarization of the war allows you to focus resources on something else. Like killing the industry at the demand level by weaning junkies off the bad stuff with 'legal' alternatives.

[redpoint5]

I can be persuaded that the war on drugs should end, perhaps by legalizing them, but I absolutely refuse to subsidize an addict for their entire (probably short) life. There are people with real (physical) problems like starvation and malaria that my attention is better spent on. That's not to say that feelings of hopelessness or meaninglessness aren't a serious problem, it's just that drug problems are created by people a: trying them in the first place and b: perpetuated by not taking ownership of the problem. A person that is not interested in saving themselves cannot be saved.

The problem isn't that there is a supply of drugs, it's that there is a demand to abuse them. The color of the skin from which the supply comes from is irrelevant.

[Xist]

Originally Posted by freebeard

A knock-on effect would be Mexico enforcing their own Southern border.

Hello great and wonderful moderators! I hope you are having a great day! Please do not censure me, I am not trying to start an argument! Thanks!

But in 2015 alone, 93,000 Canadians whose time was up failed to go home, the Homeland Security report said.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/...gal-immigrants

I had read there were many illegal, but skilled, Canadians taking good jobs. Aww! I can't stay angry with them! They are so friendly!

China is one of 23 countries that do not cooperate with deportations.

The Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 820,000 of the 11 million unauthorized have been convicted of a crime. About 300,000, or less than 3 percent of the 11 million undocumented, have committed felonies. (The proportion of felons in the overall population was an estimated 6 percent in 2010, according to a paper presented to the Population Association of America.)

The Social Security Administration estimated that in 2010, 1.8 million undocumented immigrants worked under a number that did not match their name.

In the 2015 fiscal year alone, 15,715 were convicted [of illegally re-entering the country after being previously deported], according to the United States Sentencing Commission, [but] the number of people convicted of illegal re-entry has declined by more than a quarter over the last five years.

That article also shows there are 268,000 illegal immigrants from China and 267,000 illegal immigrants from India. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...mmigrants.html

In the 2016 fiscal year, which ended in September, nearly 409,000 migrants were caught trying to cross the southwestern border of the United States illegally. [...] About 91 percent of all those migrants were from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/w...toward-us.html

In 2016, according to the Mexican civil rights organization Meso-American Migration Movement (Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano), over 400,000 migrants crossed Mexico's southern border

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala–Mexico_border

In short, some illegal immigrants commit crimes, sometimes horrible ones, but half as many are convicted of felons compared to the rest of the population. There is a significant number of illegal Canadians, but far more people come from Central America than Mexico, and there is a significant number from China, India, and plenty of places that aren't the Americas.

When people talk about immigration policy I always bring up Mexico's policies, which is never appreciated. Mexico is doing well enough that there are far fewer people trying to come here, but they do not want people crossing their country. Mexico's southern border is 541 miles, compared to the U.S.'s southern border, which is 1,954 miles long.

Mexico seems to feel that walling them off is insulting, but their southern border is less than 28% as long, and they already have sections of walls and efforts at border control.

The problem is that life is significantly worse in Central America than in Mexico. Putting a wall, even if it is 72% shorter, between people fleeing for their lives, and the "safety" of Mexico doesn't do them any good.

I put safety in quotes because of the complete quote:

In 2016, [...] over 400,000 migrants crossed Mexico's southern border with 20,000 of them dying or disappearing in Mexico due to criminal gangs, trafficking, or exposure to the elements.

[redpoint5]

If a country is such a bleep-hole that people are fleeing it for their safety, then accepting the refugees isn't the humane thing to do because it leaves behind everyone else not able to flee. The humane thing then is to crush the leadership and assert law, order, and safety.

That's the insane world we live in, where people think the symptoms of a problem (refugees) are the problem themselves. I've got no interest in perpetually tending to symptoms.

[Xist]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

The humane thing then is to crush the leadership and assert law, order, and safety.

How many times has the U.S. attempted that? How well did it ever work long-term?