Ellis Island handled over a million immigrants a year during it’s heyday (divided by 365 (and I’m sure some days weren’t open, that’s almost 3k/day):
This. And yeah, I’m sure it’s more difficult today, but really, what’s 5k next to tens of millions.
Related, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this the other day.
Ugh, I made the mistake of looking at the replies to her tweet. What a cesspool.
In other, somewhat immigration related news, the Trump Admin and Kris Kobach appear to be getting their arses handed to them in court regarding the Census citizenship question:
Andy Grove’s widow wrote a good op ed in the SJ Mercury news latest week.
I wrote a similar essay before Trump took office, how Andy Grove never would have allowed into the country.
In writing my essay, I did a bit of research into the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956.
In all the US took in 38,000 out 200,000 Hungarian refugees and process almost all of them in three month. Andy arrived at US consulate in late Nov. and was on a ship to New York in early Jan, visa in hand.
It was worth remember that any of these Hungarian refugees could have been Russian commie spies and probably some were.
3,000 is hardly a logistical challenge. The initial interview to determine if somebody has credible claim for Asylum status takes about a 30 minutes. If you figure an custom agent should be able to do 12 interviews a day, then a group of 50 agents should be able to process 600 folks a day and the whole caravan could be processed in a week.
This has nothing to do with logistics or being overwhelm and everything to do with will.
Nobody cares about hard-working families. They only care about poisoned Skittles.
Faced with months-long wait in Mexico, some caravan migrants decide to go home
Interesting article. There still aren’t many people giving up and going back to their country of origin, but as it says that number is slowly growing. Which is probably exactly what our government was hoping would happen with all the “we don’t want you” rhetoric and delays.
If people can actually find safer places to return to, like the lady in this article mentioned, then I don’t think this is a bad outcome. But I suspect the majority who are staying put don’t have that option.
Which is sad, but I guess the best we can hope for is that this entire administration is gone in 2020, and we can have a serious conversation about immigration and reform. It blows my mind that I hear some republican coworkers saying we need more stringent immigration reform, and I’m like, WHAT IMMIGRATION?!? Literally it seems our entire policy is: NO.
I was in a group conversation just last night with an American citizen who is about to marry someone from Columbia, in Columbia. He was under the impression (stupidly?) that meant she would be able to return with him. Two people sitting next to him said, “you know you’ll have about a 2 and 1/2 year time period before she will be allowed to come to the U.S.?” And he just about lost his shit. I’m not sure if he just had not done his homework or just didn’t understand our current policies. It takes about 9-12 months normally, but with the backlog currently due to resources used elsewhere, it’s over 2 years.
Imagine if or when our administration says, “no you can’t marry a non-citizen and them get citizenship.”
Why in the world do you think we’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation in 2020? Did we have one between 2008-2016? Even when we had a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House, nobody cared.
No Republican will ever support any sort of immigration policy that appears to be more lenient than “NO.”
Also, this is not immigration, it is asylum.
To Republicans it’s all “cultural suicide.” Until Swedes and Germans are lining up at our border to apply for Asylum there will be no conversation.
Also, they’re brown, must be that racial conservationism at work too.
The Republicans can’t cave. They need their targets to blame for, well everything and anything their voters are unhappy about, so there is not going to be meaningful conversation until having one benefits them, at the polls, more than not having a meaningful one. W’ere not there yet.
A point that should be pounded over and over again, but isn’t because to one side it doesn’t matter.
^^^^^^^^^
It’s also asylum from problems which we have helped to create.
So now ICE is allegedly paying/incenting Sheriff’s to deport actual citizens:
Brown’s ordeal began April 5 when he gave his fingerprints as part of a routine book-in procedure. The submissions were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to verify his criminal record. They also reached Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The next day, an ICE officer sent the jail a form requesting that Brown be held for removal from the country, he alleges. The sheriff’s office gave him a copy of the ICE detainer, as the form is known. Checked boxes indicated that he was to be deported because of unspecified “biometric information.”
The document frightened him, but even more so, it surprised him. He didn’t even know what ICE was at the time.
Brown was born in Philadelphia in 1968. He grew up in New Jersey, where he worked in restaurants and hotels for much of his 20s, and moved to Florida about a decade ago. He had a Florida driver’s license, which can be obtained only by citizens of the United States or noncitizens with legal authorization to be in the country.
“I am, and have always been, a citizen of the United States,” Brown said in a video produced by the American Civil Liberties Union and published Monday.
That is a travesty of justice. Seems like a story often repeated. Law enforcement occasionally arrests innocents, and they don’t listen to them. Occasionally we get these stories in national press. How many more times does it happen for people that get no attention, perhaps people who may have done a little something, with a less palatable story?
Or is this specific to ICE?
ICE has no real oversight, which is a huge problem, especially since just about everything they are doing is under the excuse of National Security.
It’s only partially ICE. The article makes it sound like the problem was actually the local group which has too much incentive to do whatever ICE says but ultimately when ICE got directly involved they released him. The local jail there needs to fire some people. I’m sure they won’t.
I’m shocked, absolutely stunned, imagine a Trump organization hired an illegal immigrant, and management helped her evade the law and then is mistreated.