I’m unable to see how the Trump administration’s actions on immigration have improved anything for anyone. ICE certainly seems to have engaged in some shady and disturbing practices and I can’t think of a single positive.
Stephen Miller has apparently made all sorts of claims, even going so far as to say the traffic in LA would get better once we removed all the illegal immigrants, which sounds like nonsense. Every time I’ve looked into it, I’ve found that immigrants are more likely to be law abiding than citizens, so I don’t see how removing them improves safety.
So I’m curious if anyone can make a serious case for how our new immigration policies are a net positive, or might be over time. Are there tangible benefits? Or is is just the smug satisfaction of ejecting “the illegals”?
It’s this and nothing else. White nationalism in action; malice and racism, even at the cost of self harm. Nobody benefits, but benefiting people isn’t the point.
As always with the Right, The Cruelty Is The Point.
Well, tourism to the US is way down, because no one wants to visit the US any more, so whatever benefits accrue to lack of tourists would be a plus. I dunno, maybe shorter lines at Disney World? Although if by “us” you mean the world in general, yes, tourism is way up in traditional non-US tourist destinations. Ironically, Cuba, which the US is still trying to embargo, is a major beneficiary of increased Canadian tourism.
Votes for what? After his term is up, what’s he gonna run for? Dog catcher of West Palm Beach? No, here I have to side with @Der_Trihs – this is just pure hateful bigotry – it’s the archetypal war against “the other”. It’s all about the promotion of Aryan supremacy.
The immigration crackdown has short-term benefits to some natives and harms others. It nets out to where societies that welcome a very large (but still limited) number of newcomers being more prosperous than others, but the crackdown has short-run benefits to some natives.
No matter how low the immigrant crime rate, sometimes an immigrant murders a native. And sometimes an immigrant prevents a murder. Walking down a deserted street, deserted because of Trump’s deportations (and because of fear keeping immigrants from going out much), I might be murdered by a native. But if there had been an immigrant walking down the street, the presence of a potential witness would have saved my life. I believe that the net is that immigrants make us safer. And if there were more legal immigrants allowed in, after criminal background checks or comparable screening, in their native country before coming to the U.S., we’d be safer yet.
There are recently hired natives who wouldn’t have been hired if some deported person had been able to apply for the job. There also are jobs supplying food for immigrants, and supervising immigrant workers, that do not exist because of the deportations.
As for traffic, in the short run, less people means less travel means less traffic. But without immigrant tax dollars there will soon be less road repair, and, eventually, fewer highways.
Same with public transport. The buses are less crowded after ICE raids, but what will that do to how frequently the transit authority runs buses?
I’m pro-immigration, but it is not blindingly obvious how the pros and cons of immigration net out. No post can get far into it. I have recommended this book before, and will again:
Trump’s not running for anything ever again. All claims to the contrary are either paranoid fantasies or attempts by his lickspittles to soothe his ego.
To answer the OP - it hasn’t benefited anyone, including the people who wanted it.
I just want to acknowledge, to any immigration-skeptical lurker, how blindingly obvious it seems that if it wasn’t for competition from immigrants, salaries for their jobs would be bid up. And it sometimes happens. So you aren’t dumb to think that. Bernie Sanders, much of his career, has thought it. The other side is that all those immigrant laborers pay taxes and make purchases that result in more job for natives, and the kinds of jobs natives do – like supervising immigrants – usually pay more. It nets to where the places, in the U.S., with few immigrants tend to have lower wages.
As others have said, the true purpose of the immigration crackdown is tribalism, and a desire to create a nativist white supremacy state where brown skinned others are violently expelled.
The only reason this administration goes after brown skinned immigrants is because it has the legal authority to do so. If they could deport brown skinned people whose grandparents were born here, they’d do that too.
But I guess there are some possible short term benefits:
More unoccupied housing (in theory lower housing prices)
Less competition for low wage jobs
But the drawbacks are there too:
Less people to work in fields like construction and agriculture (less people to build houses or pick crops)
America’s reputation is damaged
Tourism is down
High skilled immigrants (people with graduate degrees) don’t feel nearly as safe coming here
During the Great Depression, Japan and the US undertook two very different public works programs. Japan herded its masses of unemployed young men into the military and invaded Manchuria for its natural resources. The US herded its unemployed young men into the Civilian Conservation Corps and enhanced its internal natural resources.
I leave it up to you to decide which example more resembles the current ICE program, and its prospects for national prosperity.
No only are there no tangible benefits, I don’t even think the administration are claiming any. This is literally just about bad things happening to people Maga doesn’t like. There is no other benefit needed, that is the “benefit”.
No, if Trump goes for a third term he’ll be breaking the Constitution to become an outright dictator, and won’t have to care about votes. Ever.
Or the job just vanishes, because the demand for whatever it produced has vanished along with the terrible, terrible brown people who consumed what it supplies. And because of the general contraction of the economy that is the inevitable result of a crusade against immigration. And because the same people who are persecuting brown people also hate the working class, and are doing everything they can to lower wages and reduce protections.
But the “immigration-skeptical” don’t care, because in real life “immigration-skeptical” is all but synonymous with “bigot”. They’d happily live in poverty as the price of it, if they can drive out or kill everyone who isn’t white.
This illustrates how the immigration crackdown is benefiting us – if us is the MAGA crowd. Others are divided by it. This is from FoxNews, but I believe the quotes are accurate:
If the choice was between unauthorized migrants dying in the Darien Gap and Mexican deserts, on the one hand, and young workers, vetted at U.S. embassies and consulates abroad, safely flying in with immigration visas, I would be with Bernie on having strong borders. The problem – I’d say tragedy – here is that the Republicans will not allow comprehensive immigration reform, where migrants who serve the national interest are welcomed, and others are blocked. Given the two very bad choices we have today – undocumented immigration and minimal immigration – I am on the side of migrant workers in my community while staying away from insulting those who disagee.
It’s not benefiting them; they are just self destructive and don’t care that they are hurting themselves. If you handed MAGA a magic button and told them that if they pressed the button they’d die painlessly, but every non-white person on Earth would burn alive I think most of them would push the button with a smile.
I think this is an important point. Whatever personal opinion might be, completely open borders is an extremely unpopular position politically.
Or, as David Frum said (back in 2019) “If Liberals Won’t Enforce the Border, Fascists Will”.
I want immigration policies that support a strong flow of eager foreigners that have a desire to improve their lives and build strong communities with deep roots. That will make the country move vibrant, productive, and wealthy. Neither a policy of randomly rounding up anybody without papers nor one of not even bothering to check for immigration status at all is conducive to that goal.
The one possible silver lining to all of the pain and chaos of the ICE crackdown is that, perhaps, it will require the next generation of political leaders to actually formulate and implement a plan that works for the country. Too much of our current policy is an unholy alliance of employers that want cheap exploitable labor and open-borders idealists that decry any enforcement of current immigration law as racist nativism.
Making dark skinned people suffer is what keeps his base on his side. Without his base, he could be impeached, convicted and imprisoned, with them he doesn’t have to worry about the rule of law. This is also true for the cadre around him. Trump is a symptom of how diseased America is, not the disease itself. After Trump will be worse than now and the cruelty will be accelerated.
Because most Americans are bigoted xenophobes. The “open borders” people complain about is anyone non-white being allowed to enter, and non-whites who were born here not being forced out at gunpoint.
Thus all the decades-long focus on the border with Mexico, and not the one with Canada. Because most people in Mexico are brown, and most in Canada are white. It’s all about racism.
This. The only benefit is that this might lead to the Republicans losing some votes in the next election(s), from people who have many of the other traditional Republican values but don’t go in for the whole cruelty part of the platform.
If you say so. That has not been my personal experience. In fact, I am married to a non-white person who was born here and she has plenty of family members that are MAGA who are also non-white and were born here. So it would be surprising indeed if they want themselves forced out of the country.
I find the “it’s all racism” response to be rather unhelpful. We have seen firsthand the effect of a rather lax border control policy under Joe Biden. I’d prefer a policy more like Obama’s if it means keeping the GOP out of power.
