[beering]

Yeah, the move to take in only white refugees from SA was a clear message to their voter base that it’s about race. They could have chosen not to do that and have some plausible deniability, but they wanted to make that point very publicly.

[randerson]

Not just race, but political orientation. Not all white South Africans qualify for refugee status - only Afrikaners. A group who are generally conservative and likely to vote Republican once they've been fast-tracked to citizenship. (English-speaking, urban white people tend to vote more liberal there.)

[gottorf]

Do you think the Biden-admin immigration shenanigans (2M illegal crossings a year, "temporary" protected status, CBP One, etc.) weren't predominantly aimed at a group of people who were deemed to be more likely to vote Democratic?

[esseph]

> Do you think the Biden-admin immigration shenanigans (2M illegal crossings a year, "temporary" protected status, CBP One, etc.) weren't predominantly aimed at a group of people who were deemed to be more likely to vote Democratic?

Most Hispanic families and cultures are overwhelmingly socially conservative leaning.

In addition, non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections.

That "theory" has never held water, and was always a racist dogwhistle.

[gottorf]

> Most Hispanic families and cultures are overwhelmingly socially conservative leaning.

The idea that Hispanics and other ethnic minorities would vote Democratic was so popular that people wrote a whole book about it[0], until the idea was finally put to bed with Trump's electoral gain among every nonwhite group between 2016 and 2024.

Until then, the broad demographic makeup of the illegal crossings during Biden's years would absolutely have been assumed to lean Democratic.

> In addition, non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections.

Noncitizens count for Congressional apportionment, and as GP said, there is the implicit understanding that at least some of those noncitizens will become citizens in the future and vote for the party that facilitated their arrival into this country.

[0]: The Emerging Democratic Majority, 2002.

[esseph]

> In 2015, in an essay The Emerging Republican Advantage,[4] Judis recanted his views in the book and argued that the long term Democratic majority had given way to an "unstable equilibrium" between the parties. He wrote that the long term Democratic Majority was gone as Hispanics and Asians were considerably less Democratic than he assumed and that white working class voters were abandoning the Democratic party.[5]

It was a stupid premise, of course they were wrong.

It did more to help US conservatives through counter-propaganda than anything else.

[randerson]

I won't defend Biden's weak border, but I don't see any signs that he was specifically letting in people based on their political leaning while excluding others, nor were they given a fast track to citizenship.