Former President Barack Obama deconstructed some of Donald Trump’s playbook attacks while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada on Saturday.
Speaking at a rally in Las Vegas, Obama accused the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), of leaning on scaremongering about immigration as an answer to any issue.
“If you challenge them, they’ll fall back on one answer. It does not matter what it is — housing, health care, education, paying for the bills — one answer: blame the immigrants,” he said.
“He wants you to believe that if you elect him, he will just round up whoever he wants and ship them out and all your problems will be solved,” he added.
He acknowledged that there’s a “real issue” at the border and elements of the system are “broken,” but criticized Trump’s approach.
“When I hear Donald Trump talk … he’s very quick to say to Kamala, ‘Well, you were vice president for four years,’” he added. “Dude, you were president for four years!”
If I say it, I get buried in down votes. Yes, we have a problem and it involves real people with real lives. Acting like the issue is 100% GOP bullshit isn’t helping to either fix the issue or help these people.
For example, look at the downward trend for 2024. Well, that’s good news isn’t it? That’s 100,000 people the Border Patrol encountered trying to get in, in a single month. We have to talk about how we are to employ, feed and shelter that many people. And they are constantly flowing in.
I have no idea how best to proceed, the logistics are boggling, but pretending nothing is happening is not a strategy.
No one is pretending that nothing is happening. The Democratic Party has proposed a variety of solutions and the GOP has blocked 100% of them. Everyone recognizes there’s a problem, but only one of the major parties is blocking progress on this specific issue.
You’re getting down voted because you’re giving credence to the GOP argument that this is somehow due to lack of action by the current administration. There’s a problem with our immigration system AND the GOP is completely full of shit 100% of the time on immigration. Both are true.
And the Democrats have zero plans as to how:
All I see from the left side of the aisle is more ways to prevent immigration. And once again, liberals have no clue that real lives are on the line and use this as a political football. Not nearly as bad as conservatives, but still, I’m not hearing how we deal with these folks once they’re here. All the Dems got is finer-honed blocking plans, nada about the humanitarian crisis.
Notice how your comment says nothing about the real humans involved?
Trump’s plan for the real humans involved is to deport them all. Which would take so much time that it would involve concentration camps.
Democrats have proposed a path to citizenship. They have proposed improving the process of immigrating to the United States by adding judges and streamlining the process. They support a strong social safety net. They support improving working conditions. All things that help with the root causes for a lot of the problems in our immigration system. And all of which have been shut down by the GOP.
Hell, the only reason the Democrats are mainly talking about enforcement and not fixing the system in its entirety right now is because that’s literally the only thing the GOP would entertain when they negotiated the deal Trump tanked.
I don’t think it’s fair to claim the Democrats are using the issue as a political football when they’re actually operating in good faith. We need to stop allowing Republicans to get elected and sabotage the process.
I wonder how much the influx of immigrants has to do with the GOP falsely claiming ‘the border is wide open, they’re letting everyone in!’ on an international stage at every opportunity for the past two decades.
I have no idea. I asked my Filipino wife how much American politics entered into her plans to come here. She told me that they’re really not aware of the political situation, don’t care, they just want to get here.
I find that hard to believe, but there’s an anecdote, hell I know. We got a Honduran friend I’ll ask. Doesn’t speak a lick of English after 5-years stateside, but I’d be interested in what he can say. Cool note: That man walked for a month to get here. Probably getting away from homosexual persecution, whatever, he’s a brave man.
I’m also interested in what your black friend and jewish coworker have to say, please let me know, thanks!
That 100,000 number is the number of border encounters, which counts people caught crossing illegally and people trying legally but being denied entry. While we don’t have any way of knowing for sure, the apprehension rate was estimated at 78% in 2017-2020 and has quite possibly gone up a little since then. The 78% of people caught crossing is 100,000, the number of people actually crossing successfully is a lot lower.