@gater Explain if you can, how walling off the border (physically impossible, by the way) solves the problem of asylum seekers being put in detention and their children separated from them to possibly die. (Not just the children- adults are dying too.)

The vast majority of immigrants are stopped at legal points of entry, where they request asylum. This is their right under US law. The crisis is that the Trump administration's INS is not processing these asylum seekers according to its own procedures, since (Trump claims) they just disappear and won't show up for their asylum hearings. Therefore, rather than give a hearing date and release them to stay with their sponsors, asylum seekers are detained in overcrowded warehouses.

The crisis is created by Trump to illustrate how much we "need" the wall that he promised to build to combat the imaginary threat of illegal immigration- which actually peaked in 2000 at 1.6 million arrests and has declined steeply since then. There were less than 400,000 arrests Trump's first year in office, according to the CBP. So either you believe the CBP is no good at arresting people, or there's no crisis except the one Trump himself created with his policies.

I agree it's sad. Very sad that you accept the idea that there's some kind of "invasion" underway that can only be stopped by walling us off from the rest of our hemisphere; a method that didn't work for East Berlin and won't work for us. Sad that so many people are afraid of the rest of the world. Sad that they want to waste so much money, when a fraction of it could go to help nations like Guatemala help themselves and create decent living conditions, where people wouldn't feel the need to flee to America.

And it's especially sad that we have a president and party who've forgotten the words on the Statue of Liberty.

Asians actually outnumber Hispanics as new immigrants. So I guess the next step is walling off the West Coast?