Democrats claim to be in favor of increased border security and have voted for and continue to propose a combination of more fences (ah, fence = good, wall = bad), hiring more Border patrol agents, and increased use of technological solutions. In an October 2018 bill they were willing to spend 1.6 billion on this solution. This is also a lot of money and has no guarantee of working.
Yes?!? I am trying to see your point. (Yes I know you made your point in the next sentence, but "pause with me."
Fixing the real problem will not occur without a fundamental rewrite of everything. It is just blood transfusion after blood transfusion and then getting angry at the blood transfusions costing money. An E-Verify system is the bare minimum "main plank" of fixing the problem but even if you get all the main planks correct that still only fixes 80% of the problems and the problem still exist until you do everything.
Aka this is a "How Complex Systems Fail" 18 rules by Richard I. Cook, MD at the University of Chicago on this subject matter
https://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf
Notice rule #7 the "blame game" makes the problem worse for it puts into a form of attention where we think in singular root causes instead of "systematic" complex form of cognition. Aka this is Type 1 vs Type 2 from Thinking Fast and Slow ( Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory domain of Behavioral Economics.)
System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious.
System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
Priming can be bad some of the time, Priming also known as the blame game shifts our attention into System 1 some of the time and this can be very bad when System 1 can't fix a problem but System 2 can.
Yes. This is the problem of Democracy, but even more so the problem of American Democracy with so many veto points controlled by multiple stake holders. It often means certain types of problems rarely get fixed if you can turn the problem into the blame game.
Certain types of problems are bad fits for both governments and businesses to fix. Exponential curves are like this. For at part of the curve there is small or little growth, and suddenly there is a huge surge (also known as a tipping point.)
Thankfully immigration is not one of these exponential curve type of realities. But it is a thing that is very scary to people for it "FEELS" like one of those very scary exponential curve type of realities. Climate change is actually far worse (and a dozen of other things) for it is one of those things that it is slow continuous growth until it becomes unavoidable.
Health care spending is another such thing but it is a problem for different reasons for we can actually slow down and stop health care spending, we can run out of money and refuse to pay more to hospitals, doctors and dozens of other interested parties in what is now 18% of GDP, in 2000 this was 13%. The problem is that change of 5% crowded out other things that are very important and we are preventing other things to grow due to lack of resources. For comparison the 2nd highest OCED spender on health care is Switzerland is 12% of GDP, and most of the OCED is in the 6 to 12% range with a couple countries even lower than 6%
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What I am saying here is this is a problem, and it is a fixable problem. But in my opinion it is not even in the top 5 or top 10 problems facing the US. That said feel free to disagree with me Mookie