You’re exactly right, there isn’t a real and legal difference between “undocumented worker” and “illegal immigrant.” This is done purposely, to murk up the issue of legality. Saying someone doesn’t have documents is more palatable than saying someone’s entry is illegal.
Immigration may not be an issue in your view, but it is for others. I agree that the looming fiscal issue is a major player not given enough attention, perhaps the people view a business man as a more qualified person to address this issue. At bare minimum, he has thorough understanding of costs and revenue, something that went right over Obama’s head.
You continue to blame Trump, and your blame is misplaced. Any one of the GOP candidates could have talked about the same things Trump did, in a more tolerable manner, but they didn’t. They continued with the same platitudes and talking points. They kept on with the same drivel, and it cost them.
Trump has a good understanding of borrowing galactic amounts of money and plowing it into failing enterprises. I’m pretty sure we need the opposite of that.
And to your other point, Trump didn’t prevail because he spoke to the issues better than his rivals - Hell, he barely spoke to any issues. He prevailed because the field was weak and crowded, and the marginal candidates who had no chance refused to leave in hopes of getting easy money at Fox and never allowed support to consolidate behind other candidates.
Platitudes or different messages had nothing to do with it.
Immigration is important to 60-70% and a top 6ish issue in a variety of polls Pew, Gallup. Unless you consider 2/3 of US Nativist. Maybe we are.
Not sure you have ever revealed you state, but personal experiences do inform ideological positions.
I’ll repeat, the government doesn’t have a right to tell you what to do with your goods and services.
I should have been more clear, my bad. Weld is the one I oppose on eminent domain and gun control and yes, I am lumping them in together. My biggest knock on Gary is the cake ordeal.
Yes, precisely. It’s not that it isn’t an issue – it’s that it’s nowhere near the all-consuming obsessive fixation that the Trump Clown Army pretends it is. As you say, it isn’t even top ten among urgent, consequential policy considerations. I mean this in an objective, these are the numerical stakes kind of way.
Why then has it driven one party to tearful, face-painted autoerotic asphyxiation? My theory is that in Trump it offered a mating ground for two distinct but related groups: regular losers full of what is sometimed softened as “racial resentment,” i.e. poor uneducated whites looking to blame Mexicans for the fact that (e.g.) they spend their days snorting oxy in trailer parks; and alt-right muppets obsessed with brown penises. The former supplied the numbers, the latter supplied the viral energy, and between them they managed to lift Trump to 35-40 percent, which was enough to win the nomination in a divided field.
I haven’t looked much at Weld, but good to know. Those don’t happen to be decisive issues for me, but if they were for somebody I could see how that could be important to their choice. Thanks for the clarification.
The people on the economic ladder most at risk (in theory) to lose their job and economic opportunity to “invading” immigrants are far more likely to lose their job due to trade policies that have been a non-negotiable part of the GOP platform over the years. And while they’ll pay some lip service these days to unfair trade deals, they are foaming at the mouth over the arrival of immigrants.
Meaning, to your point, it ain’t economics driving this rage.
Chinese naval aggression; Russian revanchism and expansionism; nuclear modernization and non-proliferation (really two separate issues but whatever); terror and the Middle East (really like five separate issues, but whatever); wage growth; fixing or replacing the ACA; entitlements; climate particularly vis-a-vis BRICS; drug war reform with emphasis on fighting opiates; education reform with emphasis on ECE and high school.
Edit: in before “illegal immigration is a minor, numerically tiny, component sub-issue of some of these.” Yeah, that was the idea. It’s a bullet point on a larger slide in a PP presentation. It’s nowhere near the fervid obsession it’s being made out to be.
I think its a top 10ish issue, but certainly isn’t the biggest most pressing gotta focus on it now or the US will end issue. Literally from Trump’s speech (paraphrasing):
“in a matter of months our we will solve more than our politicians have accomplished in 50 years…Solving immigration will allow peace, law, justice, and prosperity to prevail. Crime will go down. gangs will disappear. Welfare will decrease, there will be peace to rebuild.”
I feel like the transcript should be in yellow ink with black background trailing off into the distance… the empire is finally eliminated… all we needed was TRUMP!
