Friday, March 08, 2019

NYT Says Border At "Breaking Point" 1 Month After "Fact Check" Claimed No Emergency

It's from Breitbart, but it checks out.
   I also thought and claimed there was no emergency...but suddenly we're deluged with stories that seem to show that's false. What happened? Was Trump accidentally right? Is this upsurge new? Or was it underneath our radar? Or what? Even I doubt that the media was suppressing the information in an effort to "resist" Trump's executive order...

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I actually think we need to appreciate the dynamism of the situation in some sense. When immigration debates get into the news cycle, oftentimes information about weaknesses in our system get leaked out globally. For instance, the difficulty in detaining families, people where return is cost-prohibitive (like anywhere but Mexico). This then incentivizes migration within those categories, and creates a crisis, even if point-in-time there was none. This really happened in the European migration crisis after Merkel basically made it clear to everyone that they were going to let anyone claiming asylum in in response to Syria. People aren't stupid, and they take advantage of poorly framed policy.

The structural problem is debate on this stuff is hyper-moralistic instead of pragmatic. If we could accurately gauge the incentive effects ahead of time, we could preempt this stuff, but that's not where we are.

1:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's also a limit of dumb-as-rocks empiricism as practiced by journalists. They will recite a statistic about broad border apprehensions as proof, but not recognize changing internal data and trends within it that are showing emerging weaknesses, like the trending increases in family migration which can easily exploit existing immigration laws.

1:27 PM  

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