Last year, a tough bipartisan deal was cut that curbed asylum immigration. Trump squashed it because he wanted to run on immigration and problem solving would interfere with his ability to run for office.
Exactly. The immigration issue is all political theatrics: anybody serious about it would regulate it at the employer level. But that effective, low-drama approach wouldn’t include performative cruelty, so it’s rejected out of hand.
I wonder sometimes just how much of it is lying and how much is wishful thinking. As far as I can tell, Trump is doing exactly what he told us he was going to do. The only surprise is him trying to follow through on a promise.
How much of it is just not giving a shit about the differences?
It’s malign indifference all the way down, but we’re getting close to near-universal human nature.
The longstanding challenge for the GOP is to persuade the middle class to vote against its economic interest. They used to toss raw meat to rabid dogs during election time, only to pivot to oligarchical policies during the other 3 years of a Presidential term. I miss those days. Trump, with his animal cunning, recognized that only a few actually give a shit about over-regulation or whatever they want to call it, and demonizing minorities won’t actually chase away GOP soccer Moms. So performative cruelty is the way to go.
The GOP business class is ok with culture wars, as long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line. So US immigration policy must be cruel and ineffective. Cruelty wins the GOP primaries; ineffectiveness ensures campaign financing by the dark money crowd.
Personally, I would care little if immigration doubled or was cut in half. But once a person sets foot in the US, they should have human rights - you know, the unalienable ones. This implies that you penalize employers for hiring illegal aliens and toughen up eVerify. Such controls would be effective and humane, which is why the US won’t do it. Business demands ineffectiveness, and GOP primary voters reward brutality.
ETA below: Lying to yourself is sometimes called bad faith.
Lying to yourself is still lying.
Thing is, this is basically like the old dark humor about compromising with Nazis and letting them only genocide half your population. One side wants cruelty and persecution and racial purity, one wants ruthless exploitation for profit, and a third just wants to treat immigrants like people. Compromise is both unethical and won’t work. Not with such fundamentally incompatible goals.
There’s almost a an article of faith among a lot of conservatives that large, complex problems must have a simple solution, and perversely, the feeling is seems to be that the more complicated the problem is, the simpler the ideal solution ought to be.
So for illegal immigration, the clesr and ideal solution is simply to eject anyone who’s not here legally.
The problem that they always ignore is that the devil is in the details of the execution.
That’s no small part of Trump’s popularity - he proposes simplistic solutions to complex problems and when they inevitably fail outright or fail to be simple, he just blames it on liberal obstruction and complicating.
Disagree. We’ve cut immigration deals in the past; we will do so in the future. The treating the immigrants like people side will give up a fair amount for the Dreamers. They will also give up a lot for nothing at all: they did this in late 2023/early 2024 before Trump squashed the deal. There’s a long history of the cruelty side being bought out with symbolic gestures and pompous rhetoric. Even the business group is vulnerable, given that most democracies regulate immigration in that manner, because it’s sensible.
Will the deal be a final one? No. Few deals take the issue entirely off of the plate. That’s not how democracies work.
No, we’ve caved in to the greedy and the sadistic, in return for nothing of importance. That’s surrender, not a “deal”.
Don’t confuse “the past” of 50 years with “the immediate past” of the criminal trump era.
In the 2000s, the Bush Administration actually had a fairly sensible plan for immigration reform, that included a path to citizenship for the documented. In fact, before 9/11, immigration reform was set to be one of Bush’s signature accomplishments. But, then the War on Terror took all the oxygen out of the room, and when Bush finally got around to focusing on immigration again in about 2006, the xenophobes in the GOP were trying their damnedest to derail any reform efforts, and his plan died a quiet death in the Senate.
In retrospect that was really the beginning of the GOP establishment losing control of the monster it had created, or at the very least enabled, and of the hurr-durr faction firmly taking charge.
I recall this. I was a staunch conservative back then and consumed a lot of conservative media, and the people I listened to were not happy about the plan. The narrative then was that the focus should be on getting border control tightened down to stop illegal entry before focusing on paths to citizenship.
(Of course, completely stopping people from entering illegally is impossible.)
Especially since some undocumented people started here on a visa of some sort that they overstayed.
Nuance doesn’t play very well in pithy soundbites between rants and radio commercials.
I’d be interested in hearing the OP - or anyone else - explicate on the conservatives who express this opinion. (Besides the fact that I do not know what it means to describe someone as a conservative, or whether such people exist.)
I have not heard of any large outcry from Fox, or the R side of Congress. The only objection I have heard is from businesspersons who apparently didn’t believe THEIR undocumented workers would be targeted. (I also don’t understand why those employers are not charged with wrongdoing.)
My understanding before the election was that in order to get anywhere NEAR Trump’s promised # of deportations, they were going to have to cast as wide a net as possible, and that there were nowhere near enough “wrongdoers.” What were these “conservatives” listening to that persuaded them otherwise?
And because of this betrayal they plan to do what, exactly?
Besides putting on a mask of anger when publicly confronted, that is?
This doesn’t sound like any conservative I know. The cruelty is the point and they love it.
Not true. The US managed to do so for at least its first 26 years.
Politically unpopular in the current climate, of course, but possible.
Presidential Candidate Trump?
He told them there were millions of criminals and gangsters and gangster-criminals crossing the border every year, and they believed him. That this claim is absurd had no bearing on the matter.
These are the same people who heard “They’re eating the cats”, and still voted for him. They’re not great at figuring things out, is what I’m saying.
Okay, fair. If we shrink down to the border we had in the early 1800s and adopted a policy of genocide, we might just barely pull it off.