Yup and that's why the last 2 comprehensive immigration reform bills were killed by the GOP, they need the issue. Trump said it explicitly when he told Republican Senators to kill the Lankford Bill, a bipartisan agreement, he needed it to campaign on.

And one that you need to live. So it's no surprise people are trying to constrain competition for that limited resource.

Stopping immigration especially in countries where birth rates are below sustainability will create a permanent recession like Japan has. I don't think that's really up for debate we've seen it play out in Japan to the extreme and in South Korea to a lesser extent.

But the problem is if you do not have enough places in society for the people who are already here and can vote they are going to do terrible terrible things when they are not just left out in the cold but facing homelessness and starvation.

We could of course try to spread the wealth around but after a hundred years of Cold war era propaganda that's just not on the table and I refuse to pretend that it is anymore.

Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't on the table but we do not have a third option. The best you can do is buy time and if you're going to do that you need to constrain immigration. Even if your economy takes a hit even if people are doing worse off they at least have a place in society. They are at least needed enough that we can justify giving them food and enough shelter that they are informing roving bands of bandits

It's almost like they don't actually consider immigration a pressing emergency and it's a performative measure to continue stoking the culture war as it's their only option to cling onto political power because their entire party has been stripped bare of any principles, values, reason and logic by their embrace of a personality cult. Almost exactly like that.

Billionaires control 90% of the media in america. No joke and no exaggeration. I don't get to define the terms. They have control of the media they get to define everything.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.

If only the US had some sort of aid program designed to try to make conditions more favourable in the sort of countries that economic migrants tend to flee from. Maybe the US could call it "US Aid" or something, and give it a decent budget rather than gutting it to save $23 per American.

But the main issue is that the proper solution is obviously to have a formal, controlled, actually viable work visa system for economic migrants, distinct from asylum. The US economy is immensely boosted by millions of (generally awful) jobs being done by illegal immigrants at substandard wages (which are still vastly more than they could get at home), making US goods far more competitive than they would otherwise be and pumping huge sums of money into the economy. Formalize it. Basic worker protections but not the minimum wages or benefits that citizens get. You drop off an application for a sponsoring company, and so long as you're employed with them and not causing problems, you can stay. Fired, laid off, or quit, and you go back to your country (where you can reapply for a different job). You can also promote maquiladoras, wherein immigrants are also working for your companies, but the labour is being done across the border (but the goods move freely without tariffs, so it's like having the work done in your country).

(I find it hilarious hearing people like Vance talking about how he'll bring housing costs down by kicking out immigrants, freeing up housing. Um, dude, exactly who do you think it is that builds the housing in much of the US?)

You actually don't have evidence of that

You actually don't have evidence of that, thusly why after, what, 3 congressional investigations and the FBI having an open case for like 4 years you got... a single gun charge. Oh yeah, who is Alexander Smirnov?

Joe Biden is a far better person than Donald Trump. Mentally, emotionally, patriotically competently.

It's 2025 and I'm on ./ explaining what "chilling effects" are.

The reason this is years long is not just the number but our immigration courts have been vastly understaffed and overloaded for years and years now, mainly because we've had no immigration reform legislation for like 40-ish years, every attempt like the Gang-of-8 bill or the Lankford bill gets shelved for....reasons. It's always a huge problem and priority but for some reason when it comes time to vote those same folks don't want to act.

One of the things the Lankford Bill was going to do was fund more judges and courts and expedite the process and put more restrictions on economic migrants and move them through the system faster.

"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...

hard not to notice you could have but didnt

Yeah if only there was a way for tourists to declare where they are coming from

Stop bringing in your money and spending it on our local businesses and hospitality sector.

There is a government contract to go with this and it'll go to somebody well connected, probably Elon Musk. That was what Doge was all about. They caught a bunch of things and turned them into a juicy government contracts. The 250 million Elon spent on electing Trump was money well spent.

Everything is a grift now. Capitalism is collapsing and the only thing left is crooks trying to get the last bit of what you have out of you before the collapse.

We really need a third way. I get that nobody in this country is going to get behind socialism. Not after almost 100 years of propaganda.

But it's pretty obvious capitalism is collapsing too.

So we can't have capitalism and we can't have socialism so what's it going to be?

And we better figure out something fast because the clock's ticking and right now the third option is a total economic collapse. They're already talking about using AI to deny people Medicare and let the AI companies keep the savings. So even if you are retired you better start thinking about it

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at fully closed loop self-regulation. That doesn't work, and is not what is under discussion. The discussion is of using systems to maintain environments.

Production of oxygen is not remotely difficult. Not by plants, but again, industrial systems. Systems to make O2 from CO2 and/or water are TRL10. They exist, you can just buy them off the shelf. Same with reusable CO2 scrubbers (it's a very simple chemical process: cool = absorb CO2, hot = release CO2; they just cycle between cold and hot and whether they're connected to the input or output)..

You seem to have the idea that the proposal is just to have plants and humans life in harmony with no technology. If that were the actual proposal, I would agree with you. But that's not the actual proposal.