(no title)
dachworker | 6 months ago
The facts are that for many decades past, it was possible for hopeful economic immigrants to abuse asylum laws, or the back then less protected border, to gain entry to the US. Neither red nor blue administrations handled this properly and lots of people benefited from the status quo, and your focus on, "the left" is quite conspicuous, because one does not tend to think of farm owners, meat processing plants and construction contracting businesses as "the left".
And rightfully past administrations should shoulder the blame for not dealing with immigration in a lawful manner back then. If there was a need for immigrant labor they should have handed temporary VISAs or whatever, instead of ignoring illegal immigration.
qcnguy|6 months ago
Trump 1.0 tried to build his Big Beautiful Wall and implement many other policies to get a grip on abuse of the immigration rules.
Obama ran a relatively normal immigration policy with "deportations" (incl border turnarounds) increasing until wokeness emerged in 2012, after which number of deportations went into sharp decline.
George W Bush more than doubled border spending, ended catch and release, created the Secure Border Initiative, sent 6000 National Guard members to the southern border, and called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration enforcement upgrades: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/...
Bill Clinton did a crackdown against illegal immigration, passing the 1996 IIRAIRA act that made it easier to deport illegals and increased border security.
This has been a live issue for a long time and was a bipartisan issue up until 2012, when wokeness took off (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVtE!,f_auto,q_auto:...). After that the Republicans stuck to the prior position and the Democrats moved FAR to the left. Bill Clinton would be a "fascist" to them. The fact that Bill Clinton had nothing in common with Hitler or Mussolini doesn't register with them at all.