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!”
I mean, I can see it being a logistical problem for the areas directly on the border if people that come in stay there instead of spreading across the country to avoid overtaxing local resources, but on the whole, one would think lots of people coming in would be a good thing. Immigration is what is keeping the country slowly growing instead of being in population decline the way many other countries are these days, and in general, more people does translate to more economic and military power as long as you can maintain the same per-capita economic conditions once they arrive. If anything, we should be trying to attract immigrants in my view
Yes! We need immigrants, but the logistical problems are a little more than you dumb down. See my comment here. We’re not slowly growing, we’re bulging at the seams. And I haven’t even touched on the environmental impacts of this population growth.
It’s sticky as hell, and you seem to get that. Anyone with simple answers is just that, simple.
I mean, the thing with the environmental impacts of it is that these people already existed, so any increase in climate impact from them is driven not by actual population growth in a global sense, but in people here having a higher quality of life. We need to decouple that from carbon emissions of course, but in the meantime, I dont know that “Some people who were incredibly poor are now a bit less poor” is really the worst reason for an increase in climate impact. 100000 a month is a bit over million people a year, which sounds like a lot, but when the country has over 300 million people, that is in the ballpark of a third of a percent. That doesnt seem like very much to me. It seems silly to say the country is “bursting at the seams” or “we’re full” as I sometimes hear people say in the same vein- when we have a lower average population density than the world as a whole. Countries like India and China manage well over 4 times that in a similar amount of space, and if we want to stay globally relevant in the long run in a world where there are countries with over a billion people that are rapidly developing economically, it seems to me that we would benefit from roughly similar numbers. If we can achieve this by allowing the impoverished from elsewhere to come, add the better aspects of their culture to ours like migrant groups have done before, and improve their quality of life while doing so (granted, actually treating immigrants to the standards we treat eachother is something we need to work on), that strikes me as win-win. Yes, population growth poses a strain on things like housing and public services, but we do have enough raw land, and the infrastructure is something that we can build, indeed, building it is itself something that can drive economic growth and job creation.