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The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
In a similar vein:
UK voters: we want less immigration.
Boris Johnson: you want less Eastern Europeans? Heard you loud and clear! A million non-EU immigrants a year coming right up!
American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.
Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.
Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.
The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".
Can you clarify? If ever a sentence needed punctuation...
"nobody is illegal, open borders, extremists should be kicked out"
or
"nobody-is-illegal-open-borders extremists should be kicked out"
AFAIK the current level of immigration is very unpopular with the median voter, and it regularly comes high in people's concerns, but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away. Which frankly we could do by issuing fewer visas.
What I mean is that the noisy left sound like they support open borders, and that it sure looks to the average man-in-the-street (certainly in the UK, the US, and most of Western Europe, though not as far as I can see in Australia, or Canada before Trudeau fucked things up) as though the current immigration policy is de facto open borders through deliberately ineffective enforcement.
The median voter does not support open borders, either de facto or de jure, and so the immigration debate when both sides are talking to the median voter is about trying to credibly claim not to support the status quo. The actual substance of a sane immigration policy is less relevant. Telling people that you want to kick out their immigrant friends/colleagues generally goes down like a lead balloon with people who are close to the median voter on the left/right axis.
I don't think the median voter understands immigration numbers. If you focus-group the question of which legal immigrants we should kick out, the answer you get in the UK is basically "violent Muslims" and not much else. Dominic Cummings says that moving to an Australian/Canadian points system (which would not mean a large drop in overall numbers) is hugely popular in the UK. There are definitely people who don't like using European immigrants for seasonal agricultural labour, but they are closer to the typical Tory/Reform switcher than to the median voter. (Before mass immigration, Ireland was poor enough that the Irish did a lot of migrant work in the UK, and they don't really count as foreign.)
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