I definitely support Trump on this one. Don't let these people into the country.
Why?
Should we just have open borders? Why would we allow these folks in but not others who try to cross everyday?
Should we just have open borders? No, but our mechanism for processing and vetting asylum seekers and immigrants is not functional. Both parties are to blame, but there was a line-- cruelty to children-- which previous administrations made attempts to avoid, that has been disregarded by the Trump administration. To be honest, I think that the immigrant work visas suggested by the GWB administration would have been a better solution, although the implementation should have been tweaked to ensure that citizens had first shots at jobs and that minimum wages and workplace safety continued to be enforced.
The following graphic is a few years old, but the situation has gotten much worse since. I have read that, for instance, that there's now a 150 year wait for Indian immigrants with advanced degrees.
https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/a87d1550853898a9b306ef458f116079.pdfWhy would we allow these folks in but not others who try to cross everyday? Who said we should do that? Nobody here. The point is that we should have had a system in place to meet and process all the asylum seekers within a reasonable time frame and to let them know they had a place in line.
It was a tremendous failure to not anticipate the surge in applicants with the arrival of the caravan. When you're teargassing kids, either your system has failed, or it worked as you planned because you're evil.
"The waiting list for asylum claims had 3,000 names on it before the caravan arrived, and the San Ysidro center is processing fewer than 100 claims a day."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/whats-happening-with-asylum-seekers-at-the-borderThis isn't a perfect analogy, but if there were a big family concert with 6000 people expected, insufficient staffing at the box office, a huge line, and some people jumped the fence, would you teargas the whole crowd? Or would you arrest the people attempting to jump the fence? And who would be to blame... the organizers of the concert or the crowds spilling around the entrance to the venue?
And P.S., there were only a few hundred people in the march, most of whom were not causing trouble.