I was up to my favorite pasttime, tweaking rightwingers on Facebook, when I noticed how government statistics are now jacked to make the border with Mexico look like an absolute disaster. The particular rightwing claim was: "In January 2020 there were a total of 16,182 illegal crossings compared to 206,239 in January 2022." That sounds really terrible - a huge increase. Bad Joe Biden!
But wait! The Jan. 2020 number is apprehensions only. The Jan. 2022 number is apprehensions plus expulsions. Starting with the pandemic in Mar. 2020, the numbers exploded with Title 8 and Title 42 expulsions - people who otherwise would have been allowed to cross legally into the U.S. to apply for asylum. The number of "illegal crossings" may not have gone up at all. Maybe the number of "illegal crossings" actually went down. Who knows? You'd have to really get into the statistical weeds to tell if things were getting worse, or not.
So, apples and oranges. It only looks like a crisis if you first deliberately jack the statistics to manufacture a crisis out of it. Still, things probably aren't as bad today as they were under G.W. Bush.
With statistics like these, you can hide anything. The border with Mexico might actually be a land of theme parks, candy canes, and unicorns, but with all the Title 42 expulsions, the border looks like a disaster.
Maybe the Border Patrol wants to manufacture a crisis, and manage it, in perpetuity. Maybe that's what Title 42 is all about; feathering nests.
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