Voters: DUI or Asleep??
As super Tuesday fades in the rear-view mirror and the two winners of their respective party’s nominations solidify their place in history as the oldest candidates to occupy the White House , Americans are faced with the task of deciding between two ideologies so diametrically opposed that there is literally no chance of cooperative governance. In fact, just the opposite.
Take for example the immigration situation. When the GOP controlled the White House AND both Chambers in the legislative branch, not a single immigration bill was passed except to build a wall. And despite Trump’s promises:
“I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively,” Trump said when he announced his run for president in 2015. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words…”
…the fact is that the wall is literally falling down in places because he ignored environmental bedrock regulations in his typical “I’m immune” philosophy (see image below from one of several sections in Arizona that collapsed just 2 yeas after construction); moreover, he claimed at his Super Tuesday Victory Speech that he built 571 miles of wall. In reality, his administration built 47 miles of wall where no barriers previously existed. Altogether, including over 400 miles of REPAIR work to existing walls that were their before Trump took office, his administration oversaw 458 miles of wall construction/repair. Oh yeah, and the wall was not cheap…this one in Arizona was $2.7 Billion. The one in Texas cost a little more and took out levies and put Texas residents at risk for flooding as a result. And no, Mexico did not pay for the wall.
During that same speech, Mr. Trump made several other claims. He spoke of 325,000 immigrants being secretly flown into the US and of the increase in violent crime directly due to illegal immigrants. Both of these claims are contrary to the statistics. For example, the actual number, 320,000 immigrants, had to use a phone app in a program instituted by Customs and Border Protection last year called CBP One in order for migrants seeking asylum or reunification with family to set up an appointment at a border office in order to submit their application. One of the other requirements is that they must use a commercial airline to fly to the border office location. There is nothing secretive about it. The program is publicly available and all immigrants in the program are already vetted before entrance into the U.S.
In regards to increases in violent crimes, this has been resoundingly unsubstantiated by the evidence. In NYC, where over 170,000 immigrants have been transferred by bus by disingenuous governors from Texas and Florida as political stunts, the crime rate has largely stayed flat and, in fact, several major crime indices have gone DOWN. On the national level, the Federal statistics actually show a DECREASE in violent crimes in 2022 (2023 data is not completed but is trending in that same direction), and the Council of Criminal Justice found a similar decrease in violent crime in 2023 in various cities that they track. And despite numerous studies, there has been no link to immigrants, whether legal or illegal, to violent crime increases. Yes, as Congresswoman Greene likes to shout disrespectively during the State of the Union about an isolated case which unfortunately involved murder and an illegal immigrant, there are hundreds of murders a year in major cities all around the U.S. perpetrated by our own homegrown criminals.
Biden ran on the premise that he would encourage bipartisanship, which he often accomplished in major items like the American Recovery Act, The Infrastructure Bill and the CHIPS bill. He also oversaw the bipartisan immigration bill that the GOP actually wrote with input from Democrats, but at the last minute, the GOP backed out of the deal, reportedly at the behest of Trump who told them not to pass it because it would make Biden look good in an election year. So much for the emergency and the need to protect Americans from his bogeymen dressed as immigrants crossing the border.
But immigration is just the tip of the iceberg and to be fair, Biden’s relaxation of the Trump era rules regarding Title 42 had more to do with court orders than an ideological pursuit, but the GOP likes to use it as a wedge with voters because, let’s face it, the average voter knows NOTHING or VERY LITTLE about the fact the US is an international player and as such, has entered into treaties and is required to abide by international law. One of those laws says that a country (not just America) cannot place asylum seekers and immigrants in harms way by shipping them back to a known hostile area. The fact that over 13,000 immigrants were raped, killed and/or tortured by US policies sending them back to the very areas they fled with their families puts the US in a position of being the very perpetrators of human rights abuses that we fight against for people all over the world. That is why an immigration policy is mandatory. It must have INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED appeal processes and protections incorporated. Playing politics with it just to get elected is ethically and morally wrong, but it is also placing us in a precarious position on the world stage.
So the question is, with fact-checking readily available, statistics and court decisions also publicly available, why does the mainstream media insist in amplifying the absurd and minimizing or simply not reporting the facts that stand in diametric opposition to those absurd statements? The simple is answer, in my opinion, is money. Tabloid news sells. Whether its left or right, liberal or conservative, it is the sensationalized news that get the “clicks” online…the more bizarre, the more clicks. It seems to be the sign of the times. Still, information is out there. Information from non-partisan groups or agencies is available for everyone to access… but it does require a commitment to seek the truth and not simply accept the spoon-fed information from those who engineer or foster the disinformation that has permeated our society.
