Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.
We're literally discussing a mass surveillance dragnet throughout the country (not just at the border) here; the kind of stuff that is normally reserved for dystopias in fiction.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am not a small government person. Illogical arguments just bother me. I think small government is impossible for other reasons.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Small government without [big thing I happen to like] is [bad thing] therefore it's okay to make the government big in [the aspects I like] and I don't see any hipocrisy in that.
Its been proven many times over that the majority of "illegal" immigrants, whether they come US and either overstay their allowance, or manage to skirt by on refugee status, are all predominately doing it for financial reasons, willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.
This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans. Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
> willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.
Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.
> This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans.
There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
> Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
Conjecture. Trump was not in office in 2024. That bill may or may not have addressed some issues, while also creating new issues or making things worse.
“Still, the president conceded that "all indications are this bill won't even move forward to the Senate floor", despite the support of the Border Patrol Union.
"Why?" he asked. "A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it's bad for him politically."
Mr Biden said the former president had spent the past 24 hours lobbying Republicans in the House and Senate in an effort to torpedo the proposal.
He said Mr Trump had tried to intimidate Republican lawmakers, "and it looks like they're caving".
Mr Biden urged the lawmakers to "show some spine".
The Trump campaign blasted the Biden speech, calling it "an embarrassment to our Nation and a slap in the face to the American people".
Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called Mr Biden's criticism of Mr Trump "a brazen, pathetic lie and the American people know the truth".
Her statement also said Mr Trump's policies had "created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them".
On Monday, Mr Trump posted on social media that "only a fool, or a radical left Democrat" would vote for the bill. ”
>There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
The border bill that Trump killed would have increased funding to CBP to speed up the process of determining who is fit to stay and who isn't because so many people were entering that there wasn't enough staff to process cases quicker.
>Conjecture.
Nice try lol. I know yall LOVE to rewrite history, but that doesn't fly anymore. Everything is on record on why Republicans voted against it.
Illegal aliens operate outside of minimum wage laws obviously.
Yes that is one of the things that bill would have done, along with hundreds of other things which may or may not have been beneficial or detrimental.
And again, Trump didn't kill anything. He was not in office. There were many criticisms of that bill on its merits. The criticisms are on record as you said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
> In this video, several Republican Senators express their blunt dismissal of the so-called "bipartisan" border security bill, highlighting their reasons for opposition and their dissatisfaction with the negotiation process and their leadership.
Just in case it wasn't clear from my last comment, because you don't live the same reality as I do, we can't have a conversation. Trump did kill the bill, no matter what you believe, and you lack the critical thinking skills (or too blinded by ideology), to understand this.
Hopefully, once US economy tanks, and you lose years of your life due to stress and a good portion of your retirement funds, you will understand this because its impossible for you to learn this any other way.
And yet, while a visa overstay is a misdemeanor, assisting someone to stay or work while unauthorized is a felony, that does more damage to the economy, but this administration seems "remarkably" unwilling to prosecute that.
Undocumented Tyson Chicken employees handed over paperwork _from Tyson_ that was given to over 900 of them where the company told them how to fill out government/tax/payroll forms when undocumented so as to stay under the radar... and CBP said that wasn't part of the scope of their investigation into Tyson, and did precisely nothing about that.
Hormel, much the same.
The bitching and moaning about "the economy" by Republicans is so amazingly selective - it's funny how they focus on that, while ignoring how _awfully convenient_ it is to farm, livestock, food production and other employers and businesses it is to have access to that same labor pool.
Producers will either have to increase the price to keep or soften the blow to their margin or stop selling.
Either way, prices will increase - that's just the immediate corollary of having a higher production cost due to higher salaries. Hopefully the Maga distortion field still acknolwges that basic fact. Guess what happens when prices increase. People won't buy more out of patriotic feelings.
The problem you (and others) raise with this point is that Americans don’t want to do those jobs. But if they paid a lot more, they would want to. Okay now the problem on your end shifts. Ohhh but the prices would go up. Okay, and? Yes, the prices go up, and we can discuss whether that is a problem, but it isn’t your original problem, you have performed a squirm maneuver (probably unknowingly since you are probably just repeating essentially a propaganda script you have unknowingly ingested).
You take it as a foregone conclusion that the price increases would be prohibitive. You have provided no basis for this assumption, and nobody ever does because it isn’t obviously true. It depends on a) what percent of the consumer price can be attributed to the artificially low wages and b) the second and third etc order effects of increasing wages on affordability across society, including the domestic workers in these areas. When you dig into it (a) isn’t generally above a few years worth of target inflation, on very specific product categories, and you simultaneously increase wages for low skill domestic workers, which sounds like a win for the left but somehow it isn’t? Pay slightly higher prices to support American workers is a pretty easy slogan.
So the proposal is basically that we knowingly abandon the rule of law in the area of immigration in exchange for 6% cheaper vegetables. Uh, no thank you, I’ll pass on that one.
Immigrants do pay taxes, legal or not, because sales tax exists. Income tax doesn't really apply until you're richer.
The comparison to slavery is quite funny, because you're actually right. But probably not in the way you think - or even, the way most American politics talks about. For example, whenever a state gets a bug up their butt about illegal immigration and tries to actually enforce eVerify[0], the local agricultural sector collapses. Because American agriculture has always been addicted to slave labor, and always will be absent specific interventions to give agricultural workers negotiating power.
Of course, that's not the kind of intervention you're going to see out of Congress anytime soon. The arguments had in Congress, and with Trump, boil down to "how many indentured servants do we bring in, and for how long do they have to work before they get their rights back?" Illegal immigration is solely understood as a fault of the immigrant, not the companies who rely on them. Even the mass deportations are being carried out with the understanding that the slaves are the problem - not their masters.
And to be clear, the slave-like nature of immigration (illegal or otherwise) comes down to the fact that immigrants don't use the same job market Americans use. If I want to poach an H1-B, I have to go through hoops and pay an exorbitant sum to sponsor them. This means they can't demand equivalent salaries - even though the condition of their visa was that they'd be getting paid the same or better. It just doesn't pencil unless the immigrant works for peanuts and you're a huge organization that can swallow the compliance costs.
You can't get rid of slavery by whipping the slave harder. If you want to actually get rid of immigration-as-slavery, you need to hand out visas like candy, green cards to anyone who tells on their employer / trafficker / etc. for violating labor laws, and amnesty to people who have been here for a long time without a rap sheet.
[0] This is the US government service that actually tells you if you're hiring someone who has a legal right to work in the country or not.
If you can’t afford to pay enough, you don’t have a viable business. This is a standard argument for minimum wage, which is reasonable, and it applies here as well, no?
The point is that there isn't a large amount of Americans that are willing to work for minimum wage, because we got used to a standard of living. You aren't going to force people to go to work for minimum wage in positions that are usually taken up by immigrants, because those people already have higher paying jobs - the unemployment (at least pre 2025) was like at an all time low.
For economy to be healthy, money has to exchange hands. The more you do this, the better the economy gets. This is why US was so far ahead of other countries because we had way less restrictions on this.
And being welcoming to people at all income levels is necessarily a part of this, because at the end of the day, even the fanciest car requires low skilled labor to builds roads for.
