Matthew Larsen

On February 21st, Phil Weiser and Michael Bennett will be together on the same stage to discuss their approaches to housing and transportation issues if elected Governor. Don’t miss this singular opportunity to hear it in person - sign up now! www.eventbrite.com/e/gubernator...

YIMBY Legislative Kickoff Party The fight for state level reforms to make housing more affordable in Colorado begins again in 2026. Find out how you can help!

Do you care about making housing more affordable for all in Colorado? Come to the YIMBY Denver Metro Legislative Kickoff this Tuesday & find out about laws on deck for this session that can help make Colorado a better and less costly place to live. RSVP today! www.eventbrite.com/e/yimby-legi...

Lord knows the Nuggets need everyone healthy to go far in the playoffs but if they can get through this stretch above .500 it will be a testament to the changes they made to get depth. Last year it would have been a dumpster fire with these injuries.

“They never say so” but they elected Trump and it’s still his best issue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, I think the majority of Americans do not want to have to follow this law. I also don’t think most Americans care much about people in other countries facing persecution.

If we are to have more immigration, which we do need, we will need to do it in a way that the majority of Americans support.

Again, I don’t think it’s good for a country to allow our enemies to determine who and how many people we allow to emigrate. Also, I think it’s bad to not allow the polity to have a say on who and how many people are allowed to emigrate.

In effect how many people are allowed into our country is dependent on how oppressive the various dictators in the world want to be to their people. It’s nuts.

The problem is the way the law is set up, anyone who qualifies gets it. It doesn’t matter whether we want that many immigrants. It’s a path to unlimited, uncontrolled immigration.

I think we need to convince people that more immigration is good so we get legislators who will expand immigration via our normal processes. I don’t think asylum claims should be a way to short-circuit the public’s desire to manage the immigration process through democratic decision-making.

Congress and Trump obviously don’t want to change law or practice in a way that would end up letting more people in.

Don’t put words in my mouth. Trump is a disaster. My point is just that Biden mishandled asylum-based immigration, and the legislation is/was unworkable beyond some volume of claims.

If you make laws conceiving that they will apply to small numbers of people, and it turns out they apply to large numbers, there is a difference yes. If half the nation turned to killer zombies, we would probably have to suspend trial by jury.

But they obviously don’t want to.

Nope. As we’ve seen, the polity didn’t conceive of it being used at the levels it was, and didn’t consent to it. Nobody thinks that if half the world qualifies for asylum they should all be able to live in the US.

The problem is the asylum system was meant for Cold War era political dissidents, not everyone fleeing a shitty government. The public never got to weigh in on the change.

I want more immigration. The asylum was never designed to work as an alternative to the normal system to bring in high volumes of immigrants, and it’s not clear it should be.

Congress wouldn’t have supported it. Biden should have better dealt with the situation as it was. Failing to do that let Trump turn it into one of the most salient election issues and one of the biggest reasons Harris lost.

Congress would never have changed the law that way.

Uncontrolled immigration is bad. These folks were not contributing to local economies - they couldn’t work legally, they had no money and no housing. It was a mess. And yes, if Biden had directed federal resources to deal with it, it would have been better. But he didn’t!

Then yes you have an emergency that should have resulted in changing how they interpreted the law to prevent this. And then changing the law.

If the law says anyone who claims asylum gets to chill in our country for a year or more, and possibly disappear, and we have hundreds of thousands of people doing this, with the burden of dealing with these folks all on local governments…

Biden mishandled it. Greg Abbot was busing thousands of people all around the country to be plopped down with nothing, it cost cities millions to deal with these people, and Biden did nothing for a long time.

Yes, basically the solution is to deny people claiming asylum entry and to make it clear to people who want to claim asylum that they won’t be in the US while their claim is reviewed.

It doesn’t have to be super common to be a problem when you have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers spread throughout the country.

Ignored it and went on the lam.

The problem is the asylum system became overwhelmed and Biden’s solution was to let many of them in and then we’ll figure it out. But with no federal support or organization of where these people were going while they were here.

Yes, some of them just became illegal immigrants.

It’s a problem because Biden essentially created a legal pathway for mass illegal immigration. I’m not sure who ever wanted this result.

50%+ of these claimants didn’t end up having valid claims but were already in the country when this was determined and most of them didn’t just say “oops, my bad” and head back. They became illegal immigrants.