Yeah, this is one of those problems that leadership just ignores and passes to the next person.
"Reports of sewage leaking over the border into the San Diego region stretch back at least to the 1930s. Significant improvements were made in the 1990s, but Tijuana's wastewater facilities haven't kept pace with growth while many poorer communities remain unconnected to the city's sewer system." https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-25/tijuana-...
The nativist constituency of the GOP is a relatively recent development in the last couple decades. If you watch the Reagan/Bush debate they are falling over each other to demonstrate who is more pro-immigrant. Imagine the GOP offering amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants today:
No, I’ve only been around the sun enough times to say about a handful of cities. ;)
The inference to draw from that statement is that it’s not an externality for Republicans in SD (ie they exist), so the idea they’d want the situation to stay bad or get worse is fairly easy to consider before posting a ridiculous, baiting comment.
50 million is the same amount that the US has displaced in its reply to 9/11. Seems perfectly fine to me that it should take them in with open arms and open purses.
More people -> more consumption -> more workforce needed ad infinitum
Or maybe technical innovation is needed to raise productivity? Maybe some services shouldn’t exist if people won’t pay for them enough to make them viable without cheap labour?
> In the meantime, we have labor shortages that could certainly be addressed by more legal immigration
In a country of 330 million people, it's hard to envision us having labor shortages. Do we really have labor shortages or a low wage problem? Also, both legal and illegal immigration addresses labor shortages, if indeed such a thing exists.
A country of 330 million people involves an economy scaled to support that many people. You either do or do not have the labor force able to deliver necessary services in that economy at a given price point. The number of people we have has very little to do with the underlying problem. If you want to pay $10 for a loaf of sandwich bread and 50% more for elder care, by all means, transition the economy entirely away from immigrant labor. You will have managed to immiserate millions of economic migrants and hundreds of millions of Americans, which is a neat trick for a single intervention.
That's dystopian. It's like an industrial farm where the soil has broken down, and you need to buy new seeds and fertilizer every year to keep things going.
There are physically demanding low paying work in agriculture for instance that would be challenging to fill at any wage that wouldn't result in sticker shock down the line.
Americans don't want to destroy their back 12 hours a day for a short term job that will need a only a fraction of the labor after harvest is done.
Many other jobs could profitably be automated away or filled by Americans.
I would prefer we accept immigrants because it's the right thing to do and because long term those people and their children will enrich and add value to our society rather than hoping it will do something about the help wanted signs in the service industry.
I think the much worse failure is assuming all immigrants come from "immigrantland". The impact of a Chinese physicist (and his children, and his children's children) will be much different than a Guatemalan farmer. Until those left-of-center can admit this reality of life, they just need to be totally ignored.
I agree high skill immigration is different, but I don't think it’s better. My dad came here as a skilled immigrant. He didn’t need to rely on welfare services, sure, but my parents are still steeped in the classist/elitist mentality that’s deeply ingrained in our south Asian culture. They think it’s right and proper for elites to dictate to “the common people” how to live, because that’s how our society is structured. They also think religion is ignorant/backward, because they come from this tiny secular elite in our overwhelmingly Muslim country. They bring all these foreign values to the polling place every time they vote.
At the end of the day, you have to ask: what makes America, America? Is it the best minds from all over the world? I don’t think so. America was a world power long before significant skilled immigration. Instead, I think it’s the distinct cultural and political values of the English settlers who founded the country—not just the elites, but especially the “common people.”
There's a simple hard truth that intelligence is largely heritable and intelligence has a significant correlation to an individual's fiscal net effect (not only that individual, but his/her children, and the children's children, and so on). There's a level of low-skill immigration (or at least guest workers a la Asian countries) that is good because you allow high-skill people to work in high-skill occupations. But once you cross that level you just drag down overall productivity. What's happening in America is you have an extremely productive class of (typically white and Asian) skilled workers, and then an extremely unproductive class of service and public-sector workers that are increasingly a drain on fiscal health. The left doesn't see this differentiation (or they do, but they refuse to acknowledge it because noticing differences among groups is what bad people do) and just simplify it to "immigration good" like some sort of late night watching, reddit-reading NPC.
That assumes that intelligence is what makes a country successful, and I don't think that's the case. Australia became a first world country starting from a British penal colony.
The Chinese and Japanese want more Chinese and Japanese people because they have mismanaged their population. Some are arguing for immigration to address a population decline.
I see very few people in those countries expressing the American sentiment that the country is “enriched” by having immigrants from non-Chinese/Japanese backgrounds come to the country. If those countries could stabilize their populations without foreign immigration, they’d do that in a heartbeat.
It's very simple: Chinese and Japanese people do not like people who don't look like them. Were you trying to bait someone into saying that? I'll say it because I have been told by natives of both that it's true. Here in the US, we consider that to be a base instinct and try to suppress it.
Suppressing bad instincts is good and all, but don't overdo it. Central American farmers are not interchangeable for Chinese physicists. It's really amusing how much of leftism relies on discredited 1960's blank slate ideology.
How about the third option, that the distinction doesn't matter, and that xenophobia is bad and doesn't need to be respected? Regardless: the issue with immigration in China and Japan is racism.
The distinction does matter. Racism is wrong because race is without substance. Your genetics don’t determine anything about you that would matter to people living around you.
Everything else is fair game. Having people in your community who don’t share your language, or your cultural context, etc., makes your life more difficult. Those difficulties are what cause Japanese and Chinese people frustration even with foreign-born Japanese and Chinese people. (Which is why you can’t chalk it up to “racism.”)
Moreover, that sentiment is not limited to China and Japan. Indians, Bangladeshis, etc., don’t want mass immigration either. It’s not as much of a political issue in this countries because those countries don’t have inverted population pyramids. I suspect most people in the Middle East or Africa would feel the same way if immigration were a major phenomenon in those places.
Now you can say “the rest of the world is just wrong” but you’re going to need more than that ipse dixit.
I am not required to take seriously the concern that people who "don't share your language" "make life more difficult". Coping with, and eventually prospering from the complexities of other people is part of building a western-style free society. If this is an elaborate rhetorical ploy to get me to say that American culture is superior to that of the rest of the world in this regard, you needn't have been so coy, because I'm happy to come out and say it. You can decode a lot of our political differences to my lack of contempt for American culture and civic values.
> I am not required to take seriously the concern that people who "don't share your language" "make life more difficult".
Of course you are. It’s a social problem that is so recurrent that it’s literally in the Bible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel. Disunity and a diversity of languages was God’s punishment for humanity’s hubris.
> Coping with, and eventually prospering from the complexities of other people is part of building a western-style free society.
This is an empty assertion. How does “coping” with “complexity” result in “profit?” Does America seem to you like a country that’s on a good track as a result of the “complexity” caused by immigration?
> If this is an elaborate rhetorical ploy to get me to say that American culture is superior to that of the rest of the world in this regard, you needn't have been so coy, because I'm happy to come out and say it.
I get you think American culture is better. I’m blown away that you think the American approach is a moral imperative.
> You can decode a lot of our political differences to my lack of contempt for American culture and civic values.
My contempt is for the version of American culture that was manufactured in the 20th century to create a moral justification for globalization. That certainly wasn’t the sentiment of the framers, who rooted their theory of society and government in the history and tradition of the English. Even though the founding documents tackle cultural diversity as a matter of necessity—among different subgroups of English-you don’t see that “complexity” being framed as a positive thing.
I think the “culture and civic values” you’re referring to reflects a minority of Americans even today. Of course, half the country voted for Donald Trump. Among the other half, there are many who prefer to live in cultural enclaves. Bangladeshis in Queens aren’t thinking that what their blocks need is more non-Bangladeshis.
By contrast, what is a fundamental American civic value is self governance. And mass immigration fatally jeopardizes that. You can’t have real, bottom-up democracy where large swaths of the population lack generational experience in democracy, or are insecurely rooted in this country and will vote for whoever promises them support and services. That’s a recipe for oligarchy.
You've confused American values for those of Stan Kelly. Here's an actual founding father:
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
I don't see anything about "Bangladeshi or non-Bangladeshi" in there.
Probably because the Guatemalan immigrant is taking care of elderly people in a retirement community in Tulsa, and the sixth generation Appalachian isn't.
That’s a retcon ginned up in the 20th century to assimilate Irish and Italian immigrants. The US was established by colonizers and settlers and enslaved people, not immigrants. Colonizers and settlers displace an existing population and create a new society in that place. In 1790, over 90% of the white American population was British ancestry. My wife’s family, which populated Oregon in the 1800s, were settlers, not immigrants. My family, which came to Virginia in the 1980s, are immigrants. It’s an important distinction.
Much of the immigration of the 1800s was similarly settlement, as German and Northern European immigrants pushed west along with British settlers and established their own communities there. Mass immigration in the modern sense, such as Italian immigration to existing communities, happened long after the nation was established.
Is it? New York City grew from 60,000-ish to 3 million from 1800 to 1900 - did a person from Europe that move to New York city in 1816 or 1876 immigrate or settle? They were not getting 40 acre land grants!
That’s a fair point. New Amsterdam is a good example of a place that has long been a “city of immigrants.” But I’d submit that it’s not representative of America, and is in fact the opposite of the America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about.
I think he'd disagree with you. In fact, he does, explicitly, and specifically about New York! But, serious question: who gives a shit about the America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about?
In a footnote to Chapter 9 of “Democracy in America”—addressing what maintains Republican government in America—de Tocqueville writes about Philadelphia and New York:
“Also in [their] midst is found a multitude of Europeans pushed daily by misfortune and loose behavior to the shores of the New World; these men bring to the United States our worst vices, and they have none of the interests that could combat the influence of those vices. Inhabiting the country without being citizens, they are ready to take advantage of all the passions that agitate the country; consequently we have for some time seen serious riots break out in Philadelphia and New York. Such disorders are unknown in the rest of the country, which is not worried about them, because until now the city population has not exercised any power or any influence on the rural population. I regard the large size of certain American cities and above all the nature of their inhabitants, however, as a genuine danger that threatens the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I am not afraid to predict that it is there that they will perish[.]”
The America that de Tocqueville wrote about is America. At least, it’s the America that’s special and worthy of emulation. It’s a democratic America, where free, independent citizens engage in collective self-governance.
New York City is the antithesis of that—a place where elites leverage ethnic conflict to garner votes, to control a population that mostly doesn’t have the tools or traditions necessary for self-government.
In 1831, the year of Tocqueville's visit, Nat Turner's rebellion took place in rural America, a part of what would eventually became the deadliest conflict in the republic's history and the closest it came to perishing.
It has contrived to survive Tammany Hall and Gritty (so far).
You gotta pump the brakes on on the de Tocqueville worship buddy, I love the guy but he didn't unlock the secret of America, pastoralism was a fad at the time and he was as guilty of it as many others.
(That said, do listen to these excellent radio shows about his time in America! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/tocqueville-s-america-revisit... )
> New York City is .. a place where elites leverage ethnic conflict to garner votes
This is sort of an hilarious assertion at this moment in time.. I mean, elites didn't pick Eric Adams to be mayor of NYC.. they think he is a buffoon!
And every wave of settlement we got was unwelcome, resisted, and discriminated against by the incumbent residents. It's you making the special pleading argument here, that Czechs, Italians, and Irish people deserve to be here, but the Guatemalans don't.
Remind me again, how did it work out for the Native Americans who let outsiders come in large numbers?
>It's hard to muster up conviction that US citizens are any more deserving of US opportunity than anyone else willing to work for it.
This is what a lifetime of globalization and capitalist propaganda does to a brain. In societies where the poison has not fully taken hold, people care about their fellow citizens' well-being being more than that of non-citizens. If a fellow citizens struggles to compete in the job market, they don't think "Job Unit #123123213 should just work harder if he doesn't want to be replaced".
All humans deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Obviously the US can't take in the world's entire immigrant population, but IMHO because of its history it has a moral imperative to accept a large number of immigrants.
And if it should come to pass that anti-immigration talking points come true, and immigrants do indeed 'take our jobs', then that needs to be addressed at a structural level (tax, education, welfare policy) rather than the border.
Are Americans allowed to choose which kind of immigrants they want? I know those on the left think merit-based immigration is "condescending" (Pelosi's exact words), but can we at least not pretend all immigrants come from immigrantland?
I feel like I'm the rare type of person who is both very pro immigration but also very anti- endless low skill immigration.
I kinda wonder whether the chicken or the egg came first. All Anglo countries have a strong individualist streak. Did America cultivate that individualism to the degree that now they can't see a nation as being anything more than a collection of unrelated individuals? Or did wave after wave of immigration--resulting in a society where people had less and less in common--produce/reinforce that mindset?
the latter. But what does individualism really mean? We don't believe in strong free speech, religious, or other rights even though it is in the Constitution. The individual "rights" that are strongly enforced tend to benefit The Party of course. The ones that do not attract FBI interest. The US empire is quite authoritarian.
> Why does a Guatemalan immigrant add more value to American society than a sixth generation Appalachian?
Why would a Guatemalan immigrant + a sixth generation Appalachian add less value to American society than only a single sixth generation Appalachian?
> Where does this thought process come from?
Immigration is a source of economic growth at a certain threshold. China doesn't need net immigration because they have too much labour relative to their economic potential, India likewise. The Japanese on the other hand are indeed considering changing their position on immigration because of a labour imbalance.. in 1995 Japan's per capita GDP was nearly double Canada's.. now Canada is crushing Japan - which has become a nation of retirees. Now perhaps there is a magic formula to generate levels of productivity that can offset the fertility issues that come with prosperity but no nation has managed to find it. The fact of the matter is that all modern research seems to indicate that poorer nations waste labour, rich ones lack it - so net immigration works out to be a win-win in general. (The specifics of skilled immigration is more complicated, there are of course some market inefficiencies in all things.) Japan has invested a lot of public resources into figuring out how to age & grow and they've aged and not grown, if you have a solution to offer them that has worked elsewhere I know they would be excited to hear it.
It would be very surprising to find a large number of Guatemalans saying “what we need to improve this country is a bunch of non-Guatemalans” where non-Guatemalans implied "cheaper labour" because they have lots of cheap labour doing absolutely nothing productive.
There is plenty of room in America for both. I have no idea why you phrased it as either or.
Why do you think folks who walked thousands of miles to somewhere nobody would receive them to build a better life for their family mostly through backbreaking Labor would be a shitty American?
Less kindly the Average Appalachian voted to reinstall a reality TV star who wants to end democracy. I don't think Appalachians on average actually share our values.
People are really saying the quiet parts out loud in this thread.
> Why do you think folks who walked thousands of miles to somewhere nobody would receive them to build a better life for their family mostly through backbreaking Labor would be a shitty American?
Because there’s more to being an American than willingness to engage in backbreaking labor?
> Less kindly the Average Appalachian voted to reinstall a reality TV star who wants to end democracy. I don't think Appalachians on average actually share our values.
What does “democracy” mean? Does it refer to collective self-government, or just harvesting the most ballots from everyone we can shove into the country?
A certain party wouldn’t have won any elections in recent memory without the support of people who weren’t born in America, who are just giving their vote to whoever promises them material support. Is that democracy?
>> Why do you think folks who walked thousands of miles to somewhere nobody would receive them to build a better life for their family mostly through backbreaking Labor would be a shitty American?
As a group they tend to be great Americans — the backbreaking labor is just part of it; the main story is that we all benefit from an influx of immigrants who have demonstrated the ability to formulate and execute an action plan to try to improve their and their families' lives in the face of difficult circumstances — hmm, sounds like entrepreneurial startup founders, no?
> A certain party wouldn’t have won any elections in recent memory without the support of people who weren’t born in America, who are just giving their vote to whoever promises them material support. Is that democracy?
There is not a single group of Central Americans that have positive fiscal impact over their lifetime. Their kids are also not becoming doctors and engineers.
By the way, I'm totally fine with allowing some number of people that we know are going to be fiscal negatives (likely into perpetuity) come to the country. There does need to be some aspect of empathy in the immigration system. That being said, those left of center are just so naive about this topic. Noticing differences in groups is so taboo that they throw common sense out of the window.
> There does need to be some aspect of empathy in the immigration system.
Agreed; glad you think so too.
> Noticing differences in groups is so taboo that they throw common sense out of the window.
The problem is that "common sense" often proves to be neither, because we're quite capable of grossly misjudging what constitutes valuable human capital. Recall that we used to deny adult citizens the right to vote, or to serve on juries or in public office, unless they were white male property owners over 21 years old — who knows how much society lost as a result by way of productivity, and how many such men were actually counterproductive.
Wow you convinced me, there is no difference between any group of people and we should just take in the entire population of Central America. There will be no negative effects whatsoever. In fact you could swap the population of Beijing with that of Guatemala and you would see no difference whatsoever. You are so smart dctoedt.
We have decades of hard evidence that only a certain type of immigrant is successful and increases overall productivity. You want to ignore the wealth of data because "America was bad in the past".
Simple game theory: we have two choices - A. focus immigration on high skill or B. focus immigration on low skill. If by some possibility you're right, and all people are blank slates and genetics is fake, then either choice is correct. If I am correct (suggested by ~50 years of hard data), then choice A is a huge boon to the country, while choice B bankrupts the country.
It is astonishing that you are pushing for choice B with this knowledge. Like I said before, the worst thing for those left-of-center is thinking that there may be some inherent differences in different populations. It's the worst thought that could enter their mind. They live their entire lives trying to prove to people that they don't think this. This (plus knowing that you have enough money to shield yourself if the ideas that you advocate end up being destructive), allows you to virtue signal without a care.
Your argument is "America did bad things in the past therefore we should adopt hard leftist policies even if its not in our best interest". That is the logic of unwashed, tattooed community college dropouts.
A question dctoedt - I assume you're from DC (per your name). Do you live in Columbia Heights since you think all people are equally interchangeable? Why not? Are you one of those limousine liberals that advocates for policies you know could be destructive but know you have the money to shield yourself from?
If you'd clicked on my handle, you'd immediately see that's an unfounded assumption. (Although I did live in suburban Maryland for a few years in my early teens when my dad was stationed in downtown DC.)
> Do you live in Columbia Heights since you think all people are equally interchangeable?
Somehow I don't think you're a lawyer — please stop trying to play Perry Mason (you do know who that is, right?), because competent lawyers don't do what you're seemingly trying to do here, not even on cross-examination: Jurors see through the bullshit and it pisses them off.
> Are you one of those limousine liberals that advocates for policies you know could be destructive but know you have the money to shield yourself from?
Au contraire: I didn't grow up with money; while I'm not poor, I hardly qualify as a limousine anything. But as I've gotten older I've become less rigidly judgmental; less inclined to berate people for (what I regard as) their fuck-ups; more respectful of differences in viewpoints; and more tolerant of errors in judgment (of which I've made my share). I've also come to appreciate that more people need opportunities like the ones I had --- as well as those that I didn't have.
“ Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It isn't just that: we have a shortage of well paid people in the trades, which exacerbates our housing shortage as, even if the land and materials were free, it now still costs $2-300k to put up a modern home.
The solution is probably just prefab from a factory in Mexico, but I don't see that as better than just letting in more immigrants.
> even if the land and materials were free, it now still costs $2-300k to put up a modern home
Where do you live that the legal labor costs that much and how big or bespoke of a house are we talking? You can build a new home for 300k in a lot of places with the land included.
That's a good link. If you try to build anything these days, you are paying a lot more than that. $150k in Seattle might barely be enough for a kitchen renovation, renovating a whole house is going to go for $300-400k or so. A new build...here @ $500k (and a lot of that is labor). I bet it is significantly cheaper in the USA south/southwest (due to immigration).
> I bet it is significantly cheaper in the USA south/southwest (due to immigration).
If you want to do it illegally, sure. Legal labor (immigrant or not) is most assuredly more expensive almost anywhere in the Southwest, compared to Seattle; and a requirement for anything beyond the most trivial of projects.
Labor costs are a huge part of that, and Seattle housing is pretty cheap quality considering that our weather is mellow (townhomes they put up now to sell for $1m would have been fairly affordable 20 years ago, but these developers are barely breaking even because of a labor shortage). Seriously, nothing in them would be considered luxury except maybe the bathroom with a full size shower.
I'm suspicious that the numbers might be still out of date.
> Bautista Corona said city workers have collected 6,000 tons of trash from storm drains over the last three years through a program that specifically targets big items like couches and refrigerators.
Good griefs. That is a new one for me. I would not expect to see couches & refrigerators dumped into manholes anywhere.
Probably not so much forcing couches and refrigerators through the drains on streets, but tossing them into the typically open air channels where storm water flows on its way from street drains to rivers or the shore.
Some places have combined sewers where storm water drains into the same underground channes and pipes as sanitary sewage; it would be hard to dump couches and refrigerators there. But that's usually seen in cities with very old infrastructure: combined sewers don't make sense when you have sewage treatment plants. During a storm you have a lot more flow, and you'll exceed the capacity of your treatment plant and have to let untreated water through. Even in separate sewers, you have higher flow in the rainy season; utility sewer pipes aren't usually sealed at connections, so if there's a lot of ground water, it leaks into the pipes and flows through; the change in volume during a storm is usually not that fast, but flow rates during the rainy season will be significantly higher than the dry season.
Sounds like Tijuana has separate sewers, but lots of unauthorized connections from indoor plumbing to the storm sewers.
Living in the SF Bay Area, I have witnessed people pumping flood water into the sanitary sewer. There are some low-lying spots where the storm drains can fail to keep up with the storms, and people get desperate when their homes are flooding.
During large storms sewage does end up in the bay and ocean. SF county has pretty active monitoring and you can view hotspots in almost real time. San Mateo samples weekly and their warnings follow a moving average so their don’t swim warnings are delayed. Linda Mar is pretty consistently borderline or unsafe by county standards, bad news for the tech bro kooks on here. Personally I just try to not touch the creek water and hope for the best.
In SF they hVe a combined system so there’s not alternative.
In peninsula there are separate storm drains in the streets. Better in theory! But they don’t permit a direct connection from your French drain’s sump pump into the storm system. So some people pump into their household sewer instead.
They're not being dumped down a manhole. More than likely, things like that are being dumped into the larger open storm drain canals. And often storm drains run along the courses of creeks or rivers that have been covered up/paved over, so it's more like throwing your garbage into the nearby river.
Isn't this endemic in beaches throught the country? I grew up in NY and one summer job I had was testing beaches for bacteria levels. Most beaches were one rainy day away from being closed down, and they were certainly nowhere near Mexico.
My impression around here (southern Ontario) is that when this happens (high e.coli counts after heavy rain) this is mostly due to runoff from farms and from seagull, goose etc feces, not human sewer overflows. Areas with high waterfowl populations are the worst for it.
> Most beaches were one rainy day away from being closed down, and they were certainly nowhere near Mexico.
I think this is the most salient point -- most beaches are probably fine most of the time, but when you get a big storm or some other event that causes a lot of runoff, the beaches quickly become health hazards. And it doesn't even need to be anything particularly nefarious, even just dumping a bunch of nutrients into the water will cause more things to grow, nasty things included.
I've been to plenty of beaches where after a strong rain, they had signs out on the beach warning about potential sewage runoff, and to avoid swimming in the water.
I never knew this until I Googled 'is it OK to surf in the rain?'. In the context of urban beaches. I think the answer was yes, as long as it wasn't the first rain after a dry period, because of runoff from streets etc.
It's not just the street runoff. You have to consider all the stuff in the water basin that is draining into the ocean closest to the beach. For example, many coastal communities might not have a sewer system, using septic tanks and leach fields instead. When it rains enough, some of the runoff gets into there (ever seen pictures of septic tanks improperly secured that pop out of the ground after a rain?) and then moves down to the ocean. Then you also have agricultural/animal runoff if there are farms or ranches in the basin, and potentially industrial runoff if there's any heavy industry in the area too. And even if you have none of these factors, just the simple influx of nutrients can cause things like algal blooms that can be just as bad.
that's crazy, i grew up in Daytona Beach FL until I was 12 and I don't recall anything like this. Ever. Maybe because it rains so much there the runoff is basically clean? Also, i've vacationed up and down the AL and TX coast and have never heard of a beach closed because of bacteria/pollution.
Many older areas have no separate storm sewer system; rain goes into the regular sewers and significant rain will overload the treatment systems and lead to "bypass". Lots of these in the NE.
Many lakes are regularly closed for bacteria, definitely. Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and Lake Michigan far away from Chicago don't have this issue, but of course they are exceptional in volume.
Yeah you have to go up to Pacific Beach / La Jolla and farther north to avoid the runoff from the Tijuana river. Of course during long dry spells it is not so bad, because there is basically no runoff. Imperial Beach is almost always dirty, though.
Unfortunately this is a common thing in Mexico (and extremely likely other 3rd world countries)
For example, in Puebla City there is a river (Atlixcayotl) that is literally where all the local industries and waterparks dump their "runoff" (let's be honest, poop and industrially-produced chemicals)
Which is a shame that this happens (even in 1st world countries). So much taking from land that has been living and forming for millions of years (the dirt is alive) and we dump all the poop/industrially-produced chemicals into the rivers.
Not to mention these rivers flow into oceans and the ocean currents do not respect any borders, the fish that are affected. The rivers that touch the soils that grow food (yes your meal was created from these soils)
Sorry I just meant to make a quick comment and it spurred into an entire mini-rant lmao.
I'm not sure if it's really true about this being a Third World issue, leaving aside the fact that Mexico is a well-developed nation with a large economy and outside the technical Cold War definition that nobody uses, I am not sure you can label Mexico "Third World". But the reason I object is there are a large number of American cities that have combined sanitary and storm sewers, including ones that are ridiculously wealthy like San Francisco.
When you see the well developed parts of Mexico you could say that it isn't a third world country... But once you see the poorer parts that quickly changes. The poorest parts of Mexico are very poor, unfortunately a very unequal country. Not to mention the Mexican government is consistently ranked among the most corrupt in the world.
Now look at Oaxaca and Chiapas where people build their houses from stacked cinderblocks and take home plant clippings for fuel to cook dinner from their job as a gardener.
And more importantly compare the pay and purchasing power and the school systems. I don't think Americans realize how little Mexicans make and how expensive everything is to them except for labor.
Portland spent well over a billion dollars on the Big Pipe. It helped a lot but there are still sewer overflows a few times a year. Better than after every rain in a city that gets 9 months of rain a year.
You can say whatever you want of course, but 3rd world define countries that are neither aligned with the West or the East, in the Cold War. China is part of 3rd world countries.
It is called Developing nations today and Mexico is not part of either.
Funny, last time I was there (nearly two decades ago), the sewers were overflowing heaps of shit into the street gutters... Memorable. Crazy city, even for Mexico.
You might want to go back and see if that “crazy city” conclusion merits revision. I visited Tijuana last winter and was amazed how little it resembled stereotypes from two decades ago. No longer are there any safety concerns about walking or cycling across the city during the day, and I discovered that thousands of Southern Californians are now living across the border and commuting to work everyday, because cost of living is much cheaper in Mexico and crossing is fast with Global Entry.
I left out the world "[city] center" from my comment. Crime may well be a risk in certain neighborhoods that a visitor need not go to. But walking or cycling across the city center does appear to be safe based on the following:
* Upon arrival at the bus station I ask staff if they can recommend a safe route for me to cycle (I had a touring bike) the several km to near the US border. They say the center is safe, the bad barrios are elsewhere, and it was a bit silly that I would even be worried.
* I ask the first police I see the same question and get the exact same answer.
* I am occasionally passed by lycra-clad locals on expensive bikes. Here and there I see a lot of conspicuous American tourists of the fanny-pack variety walking around, mainly elderly. These are the sort of things that would not be done if people had to fear for their lives.
* I go into an Oxxo for some snacks and ask the clerk about safety. He says it hasn't been a concern in that central area for a long time now.
* I stand in a queue for two hours to cross the border. The people around me in the queue, Mexican and American alike, say safety hasn't been an issue in the city center for a long time now.
That is a difference from a couple of decades ago, when one was warned about even the city center and even in daytime.
Which of those people I listed has jobs depending on tourism? Even the bus station staff I asked hardly count for that, as the bus in Baja is used mainly by locals, and the long-distance bus station is in a part of the city center some km from the city's touristic strip.
The first thing you see driving in to TJ are decrepit and destroyed buildings. We always made our way out of TJ as fast as possible, either on to the toll roads south to Ensenada or east out to La Rumorosa. Everyone I know, whether from Mexico or not, knows you don't really hang around TJ for long if you can help it.
Mexico is a beautiful country but it still has its problems. You've just kept to tourist areas if that's your view on it.
> Mexico is a beautiful country but it still has its problems. You've just kept to tourist areas if that's your view on it.
I spent last winter cycling the length of the peninsula, avoiding the highway. Didn't see a single touristy place until a month into the journey when I reached San Ignacio and Mulege. Then didn't see another touristy place again for weeks until La Paz.
On a previous trip to Mexico I cycled the length of the mainland from Mazatlan to the Guatemala border mainly on unpaved roads. I am well aware of the country's challenges and the need to ask about safety conditions. I stand by my assertion about Tijuana -- if safety in the city center were an issue for tourists and people passing through, local people would readily tell you that and elderly Americans wouldn't be strolling around carefree.
> The first thing you see driving in to TJ are decrepit and destroyed buildings
That describes a considerable portion of the world, including places where safety is not a concern.
I was told that there has been a massive construction boom in recent years to build housing developments specifically for Americans who want to live on the Mexican side and commute, and the COVID era brought unprecedented interest. If this was already trend, it seems to have accelerated.
It’s likely that the wealth of those willing to do it has increased; when I had experience with it it was mainly blue-collar laborers stretching their dollars.
Historically lots of US goods have been manufactured in Mexico. The difference is that Mexico's government is not highly coordinated like China's. The same resources would not achieve the same outcomes.
There's a real problem in the US with cities that are near the US border. It's hard for anything to get done across the border by US entities. At least that's my hunch. Can anybody confirm if this happens with other near-border cities?
San Diego is located within an awesome ecosystem with a lot of fascinating native plants and animals. A lot of research into native stuff never crosses the border despite the fact that better data is often over there.
I'm not at all surprised that "Natural distribution of Xylococcus bicolor in California." shows the distribution stopping at the border of California. The text actually says "It is native to southern California and the Baja California Peninsula, south to the Sierra de la Giganta." so the known data does extend beyond the border.
I recognize that my initial example may have been ill-chosen since the Calflora range tool stops at the border, despite having data beyond it. However, the actual known data does support my point.
In the Calflora database, six percent of the Xylococcus Bicolor observations extend beyond the border. Most of these are dated, and the plants may no longer exist. Filtering for observations that are more recent than 1990, the number falls closer to two percent beyond the border.
Local researchers are aware of this issue, and I've come across it in various research papers on Xylococcus Bicolor.
If you're truly curious the author of that thesis expanded his work into the book "Kumeyaay Ethnobotany: Shared Heritage of the Californias" that looks more closely at these issues.
A bit off-topic, this reminded me about the sewer connections between east and west Berlin, which apparently were shared in places but had grates installed to prevent people escaping from the east. They also had a subway which iirc served the west but went through a couple of east berlin stations without stopping because the route predated the split.
I don't understand how this would work... is there some surefire way of knowing it is raining, and then somehow opening up the storm drains in time for the runoff?
Remember that if this automatic opening-closing mechanism fails, you get widespread flooding, likely leading to a lot of property damage and maybe even some lives lost depending on the severity of the storm.
Sewers aren't really made in ways that make it easy to restrict their flow in a controlled manner. Storm sewers especially are designed for lots of unrestricted flow.
Even if it were possible, purposefully blocking flows so that they overflow into people's homes is an acute sanitary issue, especially when whenever you put a block, everything upstream is going to discharge at the lowest egress... If you're the lucky winner, you get not just your toilet overflowing into your house, but the neighborhood's toilets too.
Fixing this will be a big mess, but it'll probably need some amount of inventorying unpermitted buildings, allowing them to connect to sanitary sewers, and then auditing all unpermitted buildings to confirm where their sewage goes. Hopefully people built to make it easy/feasible to to switch to the proper sewer, but unpermitted buildings are what they are, I guess.
Putting colored dye down the drains and seeing if it comes out in the storm or sanitary sewers is a lot of work, but that's what it will take.
Don't know why it says the Baltic's in unsafe. Most of the water there comes from deep underground wells. I'd rather have that than water washed with chlorine.
Yea, me and my imperial buddies been doing it like that forever. We just go around colonizing and taking stuff, doing real imperial shit, know what I mean?
“When the sweatshops you extract megaprofits from are right next door. Have heard the San Diego-Tijuana economy described as a kind of microcosm of the global economy.”
Bags are like 0.10 cents. I agree there is hysteria over straws and bags, however, your opinion is undercut by hyperbole. But you knew that, your post was more about gloating over your perspective than contributing to the conversation.
Next time, please try to think what is the point of making a post. This one, for example, is an attempt to help someone realize their perspective is useful to share if it can be done in a manner consistent with community guidelines.
What annoys me is that in 10 years they will "discover" that the chemicals used to make paper water resistant enough to be a shitty straw, cause all sorts of cancers and disease.
A lifetime of avoided plastic straws will then be instantly cancelled out due to the absolute mountains of plastic waste necessary to provide healthcare treatment. Oh, and you also gave the person cancer or ruined their health.
You can already see the early signs - not that there will be political or media will to admit that their moronic approach is moronic:
And I'm only talking about the unnecessary disease caused in humans, not to mention what will probably be the environmental impact of adding new forms of chemical contamination to the ecosystem, some of which are of the with-us-for-a-long-ass-time variety. Unlike plastic straws, we are adding this in a dissolvable medium, which also seems like a particularly bad idea.
I do think the metal straws are a good idea though, they're just incredibly hard to clean. And of course, if you care about this stuff you should be avoiding all take out and disposable cutlery/tableware.
Ironically enough it seems every time we find a new approach to minimizing pollution it usually comes in the form of inconveniencing ourselves, despite the fact that individual pollution is relatively minuscule as compared to the pollution committed by global industry. The paper bag to plastic bag conversion has just ended up creating a separate issue, and this same trade off seems to exist across the board. I guess there really isn't a way to have our cake and eat it too. The real solution is stricter environmental laws regarding industry, who have profiteered off of a total disregard for the environment for decades, not making everybody drink through shitty (and likely poisonous) paper.
It truly is crazy how most of us have been gaslit into thinking that global pollution is largely a result of our own individual actions, and not the action of mega-corporations who operate independently of any concern for the environment. Sorry, I'm going to have to opt out of all of the idiotic soapboxing about how I'm the issue because I don't drive a hybrid while BP/Exxon/Oil Corp #53 plunder the Earth and produce magnitudes more pollution in a day than I could hope to make in 100 lifetimes. /rant
> The paper bag to plastic bag conversion has just ended up creating a separate issue
Are there places banning paper bags and requiring plastic bags? Every place I’m aware of eliminated single use plastic bags and makes you pay for paper.
I fully agree that industry is the primary culprit in our environmental problems but that absolve the rest of us from at least trying to do better.
Plastic bags were adopted in favor of paper largely because of cost, but companies also asserted moral superiority because they truly do use fewer resources, vastly less landfill. Especially when they are reused as bin liners or to pick up waste, plastic bags are vastly more environmentally friendly than any option.
To match one-time use plastic bags:
- polypropylene bags (most of the green reusable bags found at supermarkets) should be used 37 times
Not to negate the information in the provided article (as I certainly don't know enough of the specifics to debate, so feel free to correct me here), but I'm unable to ascertain whether all potential environmental impacts were factored into those numbers. I would think on aspects such as biodegradability, plastic bags would be essentially one of the worse options available when compared to counterparts such as paper and cotton which seem to have a much more straightforward decomposition? At a surface level, the provided article seemed to be comparing environmental impacts from production and recycling alone instead of also accounting for the impact of the large amount of plastic bags that end up as litter.
It certainly doesn't absolve us- we should try to do good when possible. Should you recycle that aluminum can? Yes. Should you not throw trash out your car's window? Also yes. I was just trying to point out that the more extreme people among the movement to minimize carbon footprint are missing the bigger picture, and us as individuals are not going to be able to move the needle in a significant way, even with mass action and inconveniences.
the federal appropriations bill signed last December cleared the way for the EPA to transfer $300 million to the International Boundary and Water Commission for infrastructure projects.
So is the US paying for sewer works in Mexico? This doesn't feel right to me when the article points out the problem is a failure of Mexican government and citizens to properly address the problem. How do we even know the money will be put to good use?
How do we even know the money will be put to good use?
I guess that is why it is going to an international organization that the US is a part of, instead of directly to the Tijuana, Baja California, or Mexico governments.
How does an international organization solve that problem? Are international organizations known for never being corrupt and wasteful? I wasn't aware. How does an international organization enforce illegally attaching sewers to storm drains?
If you look at foreign aid the US is ranked far from the best givers (those are mostly from Northern Europe) simply because of the strings attached: "We give you X if you buy Y from our War Industry" is not really foreign aid but war industry aid. International organizations are more often than not better at this as they don't give with one hand while taking with the other. Of course some are even worse, like the World Bank Groups.
Some of it goes to a plant on the US side of the border, near the point where the Tijuana river crosses it, flowing north. Think of it as a kind of very direct foreign aid.
If its already affecting American territory, what are the other options? Invade Mexico and take over the land and administration of it? Bury our heads in the (contaminated) sand?
Diplomatic relations?? I don't think every international issue was solved by agreeing to throw money at an issue for a project that hasn't clearly stated how it will solve the problem permanently and all inside of a country with a relatively high location on the corruption perception index.
>How do we even know the money will be put to good use?
The IBWC is its own thing, directly run under the State Department, with its own engineering staff and field offices.
When we give similar water/sanitation aid to other countries, it goes through the USAID branch of the State Department. The US sends its own experts who live in the countries and direct the money to the best possible uses.
https://www.usaid.gov/water-and-sanitation/us-global-water-s...
> This doesn't feel right to me when the article points out the problem is a failure of Mexican government and citizens to properly address the problem.
Cleaning up Imperial Beach is very low on the Mexican government’s priorities
Mexican drug dealers who snuck into America import drugs from Mexicans in Mexico. Americans to blame. Nice victim-blaming.
I remember the US briefly had a president who wanted to protect the US-Mexico border but he got called racist by the people who profit from importing problems into America.
The OP seems to be making the commonly made point that drugs wouldn’t flow into the USA if there were not lots of Americans (rich and poor) who wanted to consume said drugs. Before you attack me, I am not trying to argue for or against that point, just noting that it is a common one on any of these HN threads.
That doesn't change the facts. The problem is the buyer, not the seller. If Mexico doesn't sell, someone else will. If Americans doesn't buy there's no other buyer. Mexico isn't the problem. The rich neighbour with bad laws is.
"Reports of sewage leaking over the border into the San Diego region stretch back at least to the 1930s. Significant improvements were made in the 1990s, but Tijuana's wastewater facilities haven't kept pace with growth while many poorer communities remain unconnected to the city's sewer system." https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-25/tijuana-...