The Biden Presidency is underway.

[Menzo]

@scottagibson

Well, the simple solution is to raise the debt ceiling, or eliminate it, in the budget reconciliation bill. Probably the former, but the latter would certainly be better long-term.

Sure, yeah, if Manchin can actually be convinced to vote for it.

[scottagibson]

@Menzo

Sure, yeah, if Manchin can actually be convinced to vote for it.

I guess it depends on what else is in the bill, but I doubt Manchin would vote to destroy the full faith and credit of the government.

[Menzo]

Maybe that’s what Pelosi and Schumer are counting on to carry the bill over the finish line. Wait until the last minute and tell Manchin it’s either this or the government shuts down tomorrow.

[Papageno]

Maybe he’s so in love with staying in the Senate despite being well into retirement age that he’ll say “screw the full faith and credit of the US government, cuz Big Gubmint Bad+‘Clean Coal’.”

[triggercut]

Frank Thorp V

While it stinks that this won’t be included and we do need some sort of legislative solution here…it also neatly excises a particularly politically difficult piece of that bill for moderate Democratic senators.

[Rock8man]

I can’t believe Biden is doing this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/19/haiti-deportee-flight-port-au-prince/

[138]

This is certainly a horrible situation. I’ve read a few different articles and they all seem to have a variation on this:

She said she and her family decided to travel from Chile to Texas because they’d heard that “President Biden was letting people in.”

Where is this coming from?

[Menzo]

@138

Where is this coming from?

From Republicans who see this sort of thing as an added bonus to them politically. They don’t actually care about the migrants, their issues, or whether they end up in the US or kicked back to their home country. They see it as great political fodder, and it’s hard to argue when every major media organization carried video and photos of that huge crowd assembled at the border.

The reality is that we can’t let everyone in. If we did that nearly the entire populations of many countries would try. We need to set limits, and we need to have exceptions when people’s lives are in danger, but economic migration is a real problem.

[charmtrap]

@138

I’ve read a few different articles and they all seem to have a variation on this:

Yeah. These aren’t people fleeing from chaos in Haiti. These are longtime ex-pat Haitians coming from other countries hoping to get in to the US. I feel less bad for those people.

[scottagibson]

@Menzo

The reality is that we can’t let everyone in. If we did that nearly the entire populations of many countries would try. We need to set limits, and we need to have exceptions when people’s lives are in danger, but economic migration is a real problem.

Certainly one feels that we can’t let everyone in. On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear to me that we can’t, as a practical matter, let everyone in who actually wants to come and makes the effort. Economic migration is what we encourage citizens to do, to overcome the economic problems in their dying town / county / state. I’m not sure we shouldn’t expect it, and support it, when non-citizens want to do it, too.

[138]

No, my question referred to where the migrants are getting the idea that Biden is just letting people in.

EDIT: Nevermind, I guess I’m being naive. Rumors spread.

[CraigM]

Fox talking points leaking out into the real world.

Fox, to present their opponent as ‘weak’ and ‘destroying our country’ frames him as opening the border to all comers. Context gets lost, and people in other countries hear this as ‘US opening borders to all comers’ as a sincere thing, and not political grandstanding.

[rowe33]

I don’t understand how Fox possibly has time to spread rumors right now WHEN THERE IS A WHITE WOMAN MISSING AND IT WAS PROBABLY THE FIANCE’!

[RichVR]

@rowe33

A WHITE WOMAN MISSING

This is key.

[Strollen]

@scottagibson

Certainly one feels that we can’t let everyone in. On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear to me that we can’t, as a practical matter, let everyone in who actually wants to come and makes the effort. Economic migration is what we encourage citizens to do, to overcome the economic problems in their dying town / county / state. I’m not sure we shouldn’t expect it, and support it, when non-citizens want to do it, too.

Another rare moment of total agreement with Scott. All I know is that anti-immigration folks have a ton of arguments, why it would be bad. They outnumber us open the border folks by a considerable margin, so I understand the politics, but not the economics.

[Alstein]

My believe is immigration should serve the national interest, with exceptions such as refugees due to our policies (like Afghans who worked with it- I believe in the French concept of citizenship by blood)

I’m open to arguments over what serves the national interest.

[Mark_Asher]

I think political asylum is a real thing. I wouldn’t want to turn away any Afghanis who don’t want to live under Taliban rule.

[inactive_user]

I will say that the Minneapolis area is very, very much the stronger for the big immigrant influxes from SE Asia and east Africa here. Our problems now are not immigrant community problems at all.

[ArmandoPenblade]

Yeah, I’m very much in the camp of open the spigot and break off the handle. I understand on an intellectual level the political calculus at play, but the end result of the tightrope walk that Biden is doing is callous, at best.

[Timex]

You’d think that the people claiming that the US is a Christian nation would be arguing in favor of welcoming the stranger.