Discussion Day

Today was discussion day. I don't know how to start this blog, but I guess I'll start it how we started class. We started off by continuing the podcast. We would stop the podcast every few minutes to talk about what we just heard and that led to the beginning of the debate. One of the first things we talked about which I mentioned in yesterdays blog was the asylum. Asylum was first created in 1951 at a U.N. meeting that was called to talk about refugees going from one country to another. The original criteria to seek asylum was created at the meeting, and it listed you had to be suffering from one of these five things: race, religion, nationality, political beliefs, or social groups. However, when Obama became president he added a sixth category of domestic violence. This was in effect until recently when Trump became president. Personally, I am against Trump and don't exactly believe in what he does sometimes, so this topic brings out a lot of strong opinions. In the podcast they explained that Trump is chipping away at asylum, and is changing so much in such a short period of time. Trump now denies the victims of domestic violence and gang violence, and has put something called metering in effect, which limits the amounts of migrants seeking asylums. The fact that raised the most concern for me was that Trump has suggested we use Mexico as a 'waiting room' for immigrants trying to get into the U.S. ??????????????????? I do not understand how this is a good solution. Although it may be slightly better than living in a terrible condition of their home, will it not eventually cause the exact same problem the U.S. is currently having? Too many people are going to want to stay in this little waiting area and if the U.S. knows they have some place to stay this might delay the acceptance of immigration to even longer than what it is right now. Also, currently how the United States handles it, as stated in the podcast, is immigrants are let in with restrictions or maybe an ankle cuff but are still allowed to live and work here. If we changed it to now people must live in Mexico, it will be much worse for people. I understand it is a hard situation and it's hard to please everyone but I don't understand why the conditions are now getting worse instead of improving.
                 In the discussion, many people participated and I was surprised at some of the people's comments and also shocked at who was saying what. In my opinion, Colin Westermeyer really did a good job brining up points and talking about compromise. Also, I was really proud of Patty for keeping his inputs short and important. What I didn't exactly like was the input from Trent. I do realize that I most likely didn't like it because we have such different point of views, but I feel he didn't exactly back himself up or provide any explanation. I was overall proud of the class though and would love to do this again.