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[Starver]

I understand the Australian method justified as tough-love to hyper-discourage "rafts of immigrants". Making it known that there's no chance of legitimisation if you use the more perilous method of landing (that also can't be channelled through official checks), and making examples of those who tried, thus to collapse the demand for the associated person-smuggling industry.

Not sure I agree with it (or the simmering background of "but is there a real reason for it?"), but I can't entirely dismiss the possible efficacy.

[Reelya]

BTW a big part of our problem is in fact that Indonesia isn't a signatory to the UN Treaty on the Status of Refugees. e.g. the treaty allows nations with excess refugees to try and rehouse them, but you also have to be open to accepting other refugees. Many refugees a while back claimed that they were actually ordered onto the boats at gunpoint by Indonesian soldiers. And this is backed up by the UN, as the UN said they'd already processed about 90% of the applicants we get, in Indonesian camps. e.g. you have countries which have refused to sign the treaty actively herding refugees off to other nations. The question then becomes, show we be using the navy to actually shoot at these boats full of people, to keep our giant empty rich nation nice and giant and empty and rich?

EDIT: this was quite a while back so I don't know that it's current, but it was widely published at the time.

[Shazbot]

Maybe that's because a boat can carry a literal ton of cocaine right onto an empty beach and into a pickup truck or move any sort of person without any screening whatsoever, while an airplane passenger has been screened by the airline company for security and has their baggage run past drug sniffing dogs at airports? If Australia didn't make a loud example of boat-based smuggling nobody would bother. And if you've intercepted a boat do the passengers even count as having entered the country?

Human trafficking and exploitation on the border is a tremendous problem that cannot be ignored. Latin America less than a tenth of the world's population and more than a third of the world's homicides. Leaving the border wide open out of compassion for those seeking life in a rule-of-law society will also allow the very criminal elements they are fleeing to follow them, and the truely shameless lack of effort put into removing those criminal elements out of a misdirected idea of fairness has only gotten more asylum-seekers killed by murderers transplanted from El Salvador looking for fatter sheep to slaughter.

By the way, is it socially acceptable to cut the hearts out of people while they're still alive, or have the slogan "Steal, Rape, Control"? I'm kind of against the murder-rape-torture cultures of the world. Again, its this slightly under-evolved lizard brain of mine but words like "barbarian" start welling up from the genetic memories of an English nobleman who protected his God-and-King entrusted vassals in a tall, encircling fence-like structure that served as a defensible obstacle to axe-wielding Danes and Northmen bent on rape and slaughter.

As much as people think a wall is meaningless, all walls are meaningless. Defensive military engineering has long understood that the ditch around the Roman camp or the barbed wire in No Man's Land is only an obstacle to delay the enemy under fire or canalize him into fire. That "fire" is detection, observation, pursuit and interception by ICE. Turning the border from a line in the sand to a fifteen or thirty minute obstacle is enough to allow electronic means to detect crossing attempts and observe them for data. While previously only tire tracks and a fleeting glimpse might be seen, now there may be several minutes of video tape to determine how many, how organized, how equipped; these things determine the likelihood of genuine refugees versus cartel mules.

And all that "political posturing" has sent a strong signal. Border crossings have dropped dramatically since Trump took the bully pulpit to Twitter. Human behavior is changed by push-pull, risk-reward actions, not dry legislation. That he is screaming, "Don't bother crossing, we will arrest and deport you" is tremendously influential in lieu of any new legislation. It seems just enforcing what is already law is sufficient in most cases.

I mean, if the difference between building the wall and not building the wall but screaming about it is saving a few billion dollars and the crossing rate drops to record lows just the same... good enough for me.

I also have a sinking feeling than the emigration of those with the bravery and will to improve their life to emigrate illegally to America has been devastating to Latin America as a whole. These countries are slowly losing their best citizens or their leadership is free to slough off responsibility to the average citizen by pushing the poor off to America. Either leaves an increasingly dysfunctional nation behind. An open border does not do our neighbors any favors.

[PTTG??]

Nobody's asking for an open border, they're saying that Trump's been casting Mexicans as a whole as an invading boogyman, has stoked racism and ignorant hatred as a political tool, and has used his wall talk as a dog whistle -- when he hasn't simply been flatly stating his desires.

If Trump or his ilk wanted to help Mexico, creating an internal civil crisis and abetting domestic terrorism wouldn't be his primary approach.

The wall is irrelevant next to that. An extravagant act of police theater.

[wierd]

If he wanted to help Mexico, he would do the following (and in this order)

1) Axe the war on drugs, legalize and tax domestic pot production. (this does fuck-all for cocaine, but it helps.)
2) Stop sending weapons to central and south america. Like, AT ALL.
3) Offer logistical and manpower support free of charge to Mexico to help them oust the cartels and their cronies from northern and southern mexico. (no, not in exchange for deals, favorable relations, or some other horse shit. I mean free of charge.)

[Reelya]

Just the pot thing would sever > 50% of all cartel income. And the thing is, economies of scale work for crime as well as business. with a 50% loss of revenue, many of the drug conduits that also carry other illegal drugs won't be viable. e.g. if there's some basic overhead to a supply route then with a reduction in capacity, the remaining drugs need to bear more of that each. So #1 the pot thing is the most critical, since it makes all the other things relatively easier to deal with, from both ends.

EDIT: also the "trump stopped the illegals" argument seems to be based on very limited data.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/border-crossings-arrests-trump-historic-low-data-charts-2018-4



There's no real evidence that Trump made a huge dent here. It fell a lot in Obama's first term but it's hovered around a similar band ever since. e.g. Obama had 4 years out of 8 in office seeing similar drops to the drop between 2016-2017: 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011, and 2014-2015 all had drops roughly equal to or greater in size than the 2016-2017 drop.

Trump's taken credit for the 2016-2017 drop, but half Obama's years in office saw drops of the same or greater size. So it's a 50/50 chance whether you'd see the same drop again, purely by chance. Now there's been a big uptick again in 2018, which Trump is claiming is nothing to do with him.

[Sheb]

Should also be noted that while there was indeed a drop right after the election in the number of border crossing, that number then went up again. It looks either like a temporary effect, or like Trump claiming success for random noise in the number of crossing that anything else.

Spoiler:  Nice image from the US Border Patrol website, although only for the Southwest sector (Aka Texas, but looking at their numberit's like, 80+% of arrest) (click to show/hide)

One can see that there was a big year-on-year drop in the early months of FY2018, but that's largely because oct-dec 2016 was an outlier. Crossing under the Trump administration seems to be in line with the long-term average.

[EnigmaticHat]

I also have a sinking feeling than the emigration of those with the bravery and will to improve their life to emigrate illegally to America has been devastating to Latin America as a whole. These countries are slowly losing their best citizens or their leadership is free to slough off responsibility to the average citizen by pushing the poor off to America. Either leaves an increasingly dysfunctional nation behind. An open border does not do our neighbors any favors.

I don't think people differ from each other that much in quality.  I'd pretty much blame the cartels.  We're financing cartels by importing drugs, but... to our credit, we tried pretty damn hard to stop.  Remember kids: for every line of cocaine you snort, a small latino boy joins a gang.  Don't do drugs.

Also worth pointing out: "Latin America" doesn't have a third of the world's murders, specific countries (like Honduras) do.  However those countries are basically war zones.  If you compared the amount of people killed in Honduras every year to the amount killed in, say, Syria.  Latin America doesn't look all that different.  It comes down to the line between "murder" and "kill."  Since criminals aren't soldiers, they murder.

Edit: well, okay.  Aside from legalizing pot we tried hard to stop.

[Shazbot]

http://www.newsweek.com/2018/01/19/mexican-drug-cartels-taking-over-california-legal-marijuana-775665.html

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/921983/netherlands-holland-narco-state-police-association-organised-crime-drugs-gang-underworld

Yeah, no. The cartels will adapt their methods.

And its strange, every page is saying the border crossings are at an uptick but at a historic multi-decade low. But I don't know. 100,000 less is still 100,000 less. Then again, he's also deporting.

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/579884642/trumps-ice-deportations-increase-from-obamas-figures-data-show

And who's talking about Mexicans? MS13's members are from El Salvador and formed in LA. I don't know why Nanci Pelosi is talking about the divine spark in MS13 murderers and rapists but wants full term abortion. I mean, when does that divine spark enter the body? After you kill someone with a machete?

[Reelya]

The thing about growing marijuana by cartels in California is only economically viable because you can sell it illegally in other states. e.g. you grow in California, where you're going to get less charges if caught, then you export it to states where it's still illegal so you can sell it at black-market prices, without having to deal with border security.

None of that implies that if you legalized it nationally that cartels will thrive, because the whole point of those operations is to exploit the difference in legal status between different states. Read the article, the sites in California where it's grown for cartels are all illegal growing sites, and that's all so that they can ship it out of the state to other still-illegal states, without their being any paperwork in California. Legalizing it nationally removes the basic profit incentive here.

Cartels = maximum profits for minimum work. When you legalize things, the free money dries up and normal business become more efficient than hap-hazard cartel operations. Cartels just aren't as efficient as regular companies, and that's sort of the point: by focusing on inefficient markets, you can do less work yet make more money. That's the basis of why cartels do the stuff they do. e.g. regular companies make cigarettes, and regular companies make alcohol, and cartels don't have a big hand in either of those markets, because when you legalize a business completely, then the inefficiencies get driven out of the market. A cartel exploits illegal markets purely because they're inefficient, thus you can make high profits for low amounts of work. e.g. cartels don't sell drugs because "lol, drugs" they sell drugs because the profit margin is high vs the amount of effort put in, and that profit margin is because they're illegal.

If you federally legalize marijuana, then it becomes no more attractive to organized crime than cigarettes and beer are. e.g. cartels could produce their own cigarettes and beer, but there's just no incentive to do that, because the effort to do so is the same as the effort to just have a regular job. It's the same with marijuana. If marijuana was legally treated like beer is, then the market around it would adjust the pricing so that it's in line with other legal products of a similar nature. Cartels just couldn't compete with licensed above-board growers who are selling to licensed shops through licensed distributors, any more than you'd be able to start your own home-brew company and out-compete Budweiser.

[Shazbot]

Also worth pointing out: "Latin America" doesn't have a third of the world's murders, specific countries (like Honduras) do.  However those countries are basically war zones.

Well those specific countries don't have a third of the world's murders either, 2% of the streets have 80% of the murders. But its like saying only 2% of your skin has 80% of the anthrax spores. Please don't hug me until you get well, and here's all the help we can spare. But stay over there. Latin America's crime problems are from the rapid urbanization of rural dwellers fleeing violence in the countryside. If they flee into LA and Houston next, aren't those problems going to continue here, where the cultural alienation is even worse?

[EnigmaticHat]

You lost me after the first sentence.  If the crime is caused by people fleeing violence in the rural countryside... what caused the violence in the rural countryside?

[martinuzz]

The Dutch problem with marijuana laws is that they created a legal retail, but kept production and wholesale illegal. Which is just dumb, and has created rich organized crime gangs out of thin air.

[Shazbot]

The thing about growing marijuana by cartels in California is only economically viable because you can sell it illegally in other states. e.g. you grow in California, where you're going to get less charges if caught, then you export it to states where it's still illegal so you can sell it at black-market prices, without having to deal with border security.

None of that implies that if you legalized it nationally that cartels will thrive, because the whole point of those operations is to exploit the difference in legal status between different states. Read the article, the sites in California where it's grown for cartels are all illegal growing sites. Legalizing it completely removes the black market profit margin. This is just common sense if you understand how markets work. Cartels aren't interested in products that are legal, which therefore only get a regular level of profits.

I know how markets work. I also know "that's a nice pot store I wouldn't want to see your girlfriend hacked to pieces all over it" is a pretty common phrase. Criminal organizations cannot be defunded by legalizing what they do. They will simply reorient their organization to another income stream, be it protection rackets or child prostitution. The Netherlands tried legalizing their way out of crime and it has failed. Rotterdam is now the drug importation capital of western Europe because while growing pot stopped making them money, they can still smuggle and cook up whatever they like, fighting turf wars and shaking down brothels and coffeehouses. Or they will just steal what someone who isn't part of an armed criminal organization makes to sell through their legitimate business.

I mean, organized crime sells everything from stolen cigarettes to pharmaceuticals to power tools and cars. I cannot imagine how wild it would get with something unserialized like cocaine. And with a nationwide network of muscle and officers, why would they not continue with turf wars as well? They're all over Amsterdam for things that are perfectly legal. Making it legal didn't take the vice out of vice.

[Shazbot]

You lost me after the first sentence.  If the crime is caused by people fleeing violence in the rural countryside... what caused the violence in the rural countryside?

A communist insurrection and civil war funded by Cuba.

Thanks, communism.