How Much Time/Effort Should be Spent Attempting to Find Compromise on Immigration?

Also, some people think that "compromise" is the answer to everything, as if both sides of every problem has merit. And it assumes there is a solution which all parties will accept and live under.

Wrong.

Lets go to the extreme. How do you compromise with a Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Genghis Khan? Their goals and attitudes are not suitable to compromise, their egos refuse compromise. How do you compromise with people who will literally kill you in order to get their way?

The Founders of the USA tried compromise with England, there was none to be had.

In 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Caesar offered 2 choices, total surrender with Caesar as Emperor or war, that was his offer of compromise, nothing else was acceptable.

Look at the USA today. progs want to replace the Constitution with a socialists/communist system, conservatives want to reduce the govt and move back toward a more original Constitution. Two mutually exclusive goals, no way to compromise so both can exist at the same time in the same place.

Sometimes there is no room for compromise. Sometimes you just have to put on your big boy pants and pick a side.

 

I have suggested a compromise on other threads, and I'll state it here. Here goes ...

First, we must better secure the border. This means physical barriers, electronic, aerial, and human surveillance all must be improved.

Second, we must require nationwide e-verify to work.

And here comes the compromise ...

Third, we should require all illegals already in the country to self-report to ICE. Not for deportation, but for documentation. I would recommend a one year period in which to do this, so that ICE can handle the volume of work. These "self-reporters" would be fingerprinted, background checked, given a Tax ID Number, and an ID card. They would not be made citizens; they would be made into legal aliens. There would be no expiration date after which they had to return to their home country, but they would have to update their information to ICE every year or two. This window of time to do this would be finite - like one year. After that year, any undocumented alien would be deported when found. These would be people who, for various reasons, refused to report or people who snuck across the border after the one year grace period for self-reporting.

I think that's a fair compromise.

 

I don't think compromise is possible on this issue. So we should simply go by the law. Enforce the law.

 

I don't think this is the time or the climate for compromise. Nobody these days is getting elected on a platform of seeking compromises and creating legislation based on compromise and those who were, have been stampeding out of Washington for the last twenty years.

I would have been delighted with efforts under the Bush or Obama or Clinton administrations but not now. We have to wait for the voters to decide that slogans are not as valuable in governance, as real legislation. That may be a generation away.

 

It isn't, because in this case fairness and compromise are mutually inimical.

 

Nothing was compromised, Reagan went on to advocate for chain migration which was passed when Bush Sr signed it into law along with refugee status for Panamanian refugees after the war with Panama...Also read the immigration reform law from 1996, passed by a Repub controlled Congress and signed by Clintoon...

 

I like you.

 

What is there to compromise. Enforce the law. Period. Thats what a president is supposed to do.

 

Like I posted before, there are alternatives to the current system which I have given. I don't like ranked voting. 8 million people voted third party in 2016, most to show their disgust for the two major party's nominees or candidates. They went to the polls to vote against Trump and Clinton, both. Not to put a number 2 or 3 behind their name. They did this knowing full well that one or the other would eventually become president regardless of their vote. But it was important enough for them to get out to vote against those two, to have their vote officially recorded. I'm part of that 8 million.

CNN exit polls showed exactly what I have said. CNN asked third party voters if their choice was just between Trump and Hillary, no third party candidate, which one would you have voted for. 19% said Trump, 16% Clinton, 65% said they wouldn't have voted. That comes out to 5.2 million people who would have opted to stay home instead of voting if they couldn't register their vote against both Trump and Clinton. Remember 58% of all Americans had a negative view of Hillary Clinton, didn't want her to become the next president. 60% held that same view of Trump not wanting him. But our system makes one of them president and ranked voting wouldn't change that.

Here in Georgia, we just finished our primary and the runoff. For governor the Republicans choose a far right wing wacko, the democrats a far left wing wacko. I don't want either, I'll either vote third party or not at all. It won't do me any good, one or the other has to win. Put I could register my official vote as being against both if I do vote. With no Senate election this year, unless one of the local races interest me, I won't vote at all. I won't condone their choices by ranking them which with ranked voting you are doing exactly that.

We don't have a plurality winner in Georgia. If no candidate doesn't receive 50% plus one vote, there is a run off between the top two finishers. Georgia has solved that problem already. Although the winner will always be one of the two major party candidates in the end. Ranked voting doesn't solve that problem either. As long as Republicans and democrats who write our election laws continue to do so as a mutual protection act, no viable third party will arise. Regardless of the system, Plurality winner, Runoff majority winner, even presidential elections by congressional district such as Maine and Nebraska, ranked voting, in the end either the Republican or Democrat will win.

2016 still would have give us a Trump or Clinton regardless of the system of voting, this year Georgia will either get a wacko from the left or right regardless of the system of voting. As the two parties shrink, the hard core extreme rightest and leftests gain more and more control, the farther left and right their candidates will be to which we will be given a choice of extremes in November, ranked voting doesn't address that problem. Only the die hards vote in the primaries.

We seen the beginning of having to choose between two unwanted and disliked candidate back in 2012 in Missouri where 65% disapproved of McCaskill and 76% of Aiken. Missourian's didn't want either to be their next senator, yet one would be. 2016 presidential, the same, the percentages were different, but one or the other would become president even if 58% didn't want one and 60% didn't want the other. I would wager once the favorable/unfavorable polls that both are way above the 50% mark in the unfavorable column.

 

The left wants to end illegal immigrating by legislating away the 'illegal' part.
The right wants to end it by making it hard a possible to do and deport those who manage it.

There can be no compromise.

 

No need to continue wasting the time to negotiate. Congress will never come to an agreement, which allows President Trump to interpret / dictate what the law is.

 

Trump should not shut down the Government.

The last moron that tried that was Tex. Sen. Ted Cruz and it cost him in the POTUS primary.

 

Agree.

 

Don't you know likin' leads to lovin' ?

Etc.

 

Never going to happen.

Not unless one party gets a supermajority in the Senate first.

 

I didn’t say voters don’t matter, I said our specific conclusions on this (or any other issue) won’t have any impact on what actually happens to the people effected on the ground.

We collectively vote for political representatives not based on specific detailed policies but based on more general principles, ideas and desires. That’s because no individual elected politician in our systems can’t simply create laws alone, they have to achieve agreement with the majority of their peers. That’s where much of the practical compromise happens, largely independently of the specific opinions of individual voters (and even that assumes the system works, without partisan political games, outside influence or corruption).

And all of that is still several steps away from what the people actually working on the ground do day-to-day in response to all the policy, orders, regulations and laws which come down from above. That disconnect is how you got in to the mess with the children of imprisoned immigrants, both initially with the increase in the numbers indefinitely incarcerated without all the appropriate infrastructure in place and now with the rulings limiting how long their held when there is nowhere else for them to go.

The problem is that random citizens don’t know any better than elected politicians and the impact of “mob rule” means a group of random citizens often know even less.

I would personally like to see more appreciation and respect of independent subject matter experts, both from politicians and the public. I think there are major issues with both a general resentment of intelligence and education and also a resentment of experts because they tend to say things we don’t like or agree much of the time (because they talk about how things are rather than how we’d like them to be).

I’m all for people getting more informed over issues like this but I don’t think we need to reach definitive conclusions on them. In fact, I think it’s beneficial not to as it can discourage acceptance of further contradictory information or changes of practical circumstances. There needs to be an understanding of the practical difficulties and unintended consequences of simple, definitive answers (even after compromise).

Politicians (as opposed to public servants) often play on that to sell the big simple ideas which get them elected. Even if they know it isn’t really that simple, they can always blame someone (anyone) else when reality inevitably doesn’t meet expectation. I was really trying to avoid mentioning Trump here but in this context it was an obvious example (though far from alone).

 

Elected politicians can represent anything from several thousand up to hundreds of million people. Even if they could collate the unique individual conclusions of those individuals, they couldn’t implement them all given how may will be contradictory and that’s before considering how many are totally uninformed, literally impossible or fundamentally illegal. As it happens, politicians will receive loads of communications from voters will all sorts of opinions, ideas, policies and demands. I’d hope and expect the few rational ones will actually influence the politicians decisions but they’re unlikely to get a complete, fully formed policy from any singular source.

I was thinking more about how it should be rather than how it is. I’ve no time for truly single-issue voters and even less for those blindly following party lines. We have systems of representative democracy (because that’s really the only way large democracies can work) so we have to accept that our elected politicians are our representatives, not just raw conduits for our individual opinions.

You presume there is an unconditionally “better” solution we’ve failed to implement. I’m not convinced immigration is one of those issues with an answer. It’s never going to be solved, only ever managed and it’s always going to be a shifting and changing issue.

But lots of citizens agreed entirely with that kind of policy. If anything it was an attempt to sate part of the voting population with exactly what they were demanding. More influence from random citizens is no guarantee of better outcomes. That’s why I think the focus on independent subject matter experts is more important, for both the politicians and the people.

The mob don’t want that though. We’re irrational, emotion-driven animals wearing a thin veneer of society. Even if the kind of citizen-driven policy was viable and beneficial, we’d almost certainly vote against it in favour of the charismatic man in the expensive suit blindly promising to make everything better for us all.

 

People have disagreed, and agreed with me (and everyone else) all our lives. The intelligent way to proceed is to reason with each other and compromise. Yes, this often produces those "half-a-loaf" results, but it's better than nothing and frequently provides a path toward something better. The only alternative to the legitimate compromise process is 'boot-in-your-face" totalitarianism, engineered by plutocrats of one faction or another.