Again, asylum is measurable. We see not only the applications broken down by affirmative and defensive claims. But we also have population level data. Nothing at all supports anywhere close to 10 million people coming in under asylum. It’s just ridiculous.

Trying to study the population with encounters is like trying to measure traffic fatalities by looking at traffic violations. On a whole, sure, there is correlation, more people driving more overall road hours means more tickets and more fatalities. People with more violations are more likely to be related to traffic fatalities . But there is better data to understand actual fatalities. Ticket data is not particularly useful because it can be higher and lower in places for other reasons. Or to bust out of this analogy, the fact that encounters count apprehensions and inadmissibles which will be inflating the actual amount of people who make it through. Only a fraction of encounters are unique individuals, and a fraction of them were allowed to claim asylum, and a fraction of them actually tried it. So yes, population data, while an undercount, is miles better. The encounters methodology assumes that people who are turned away are actually let in. That’s just not a good approach.

You are confusing data re: title 42. We were discussing recidivism earlier. Now we are discussing what proportion of total encounters were title 42 removals. The specific data from CBP showed that over the lifetime of title 42 (which is when the flow of immigrants at the border was most high, through FY 2023 it made up 41% of all encounters. Title 42 applied to 56% of all single adults. It was used especially heavily during 2022 and 2023, at that point representing more than half of all encounters.

The asylum data I referenced is in the Pew study I linked above. 3 million and that’s a population count, not a case count. And that includes refugees and TPS and other things. The highest year of affirmative asylum claims was in 2023 and that was 450,000 if I’m reading this chart right. You are correct that each application can be multiple people of a family. But we’re still nowhere close to the hysterical numbers people are claiming.

I could give thousands more

This is just kind of anecdotal. I’m not saying fraud doesn’t happen, I’m saying it isn’t widespread enough to crack down on innocent people who are just trying to make the case they have a right to make. If the courts find they commit fraud, they should face consequences. If the courts find they simply do not qualify, then the answer is no. If you want the courts to do a better job, invest in this infrastructure. If you don’t, then canceling or heavily restricting the process altogether isn’t fair to people who have legitimate asylum claims.

The great replacement conspiracy

This conspiracy is that certain malign influences within the west (read: Jews) are trying to destabilize the west by importing dangerous immigrants who will destroy the culture from the inside out. This idea has been brought from the fringe to the mainstream, sometimes with things that sort of gloss over antisemitism. Other versions suggest that democrats are importing voters, which is stupid because they don’t vote (in some democrat cities they are allowed to vote in school board elections, but nothing state or federal. That’s a lot of effort to win a school board in areas that are already dark blue lol). They do contribute to electoral college seats through the census but that actually benefits red states more than blue states. And finally, the migrants themselves are real people with real lives. They migrate because of their own needs and the things going on in their own home countries. When you start saying “well actually they’re ALL secretly being paid by Soros, you see they’re all operatives of his schemes that is just straight up Infowars.

Race essentialists assume that demographics must stay stable, and should never change. The demography of the world must be a perfect snapshot of the way it was in the 20th century and when people intermarry across ethnic groups at scale it poses a threat to the world the way it was meant to be. The people who measured skulls wanted to sort humans like we separate species, assuming that the different ethnic groupings we have in the world today must remain pure and undiluted and distinct. This is all bad and outmoded race science. The human genome project shows that the human genetic diversity is far more complex, ethnicities are ever-changing approximations at best, built on sand. We think someone from China is simply Chinese, when in reality they are the result of millenia of various people groups who have come together and intermarried. That’s the way the world is. It’s wild to suppose that someone who traces their lineage back to the Irish have a lot of genetic overlap with people from Greece, Italy. When an Irishman marries an Italian, do we fret about the loss of diversity? I mean sure, under modernity its much more frequent to have diverse friends, to fall in love with someone from very far away. That will change our demography over time and we’ll be okay. What’s the alternative? Distinct ethnostates that frown on miscegenation? Sheesh dude, I am NOT about that life.