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All I care about is immigration. Am I happy that boorish, poorly dressed morons who don’t know the first thing about chesterton’s fence are now in power unraveling a century of American hegemony for no real reason? No, of course not. But this is only happening because the people who opened the gates and didn’t close them went against the will and welfare of the public for decades too long.
The immigration situation could have been resolved firmly in the mid to late 90s, when even California voted resoundingly for highly punitive measures against illegal migrants and at the height of Pat Buchanan’s popularity and the height of American prosperity and global power. Nobody listened. Now, the idiots are in power, and likely won’t even do anything substantive about the immigration issue, but the lesson for politicians is this - until the immigration situation is fixed, populists who promise to tear down institutions will keep getting elected, endlessly.
I won’t defend this administration, though I voted for Trump (not that my vote matters). But I will hold my nose and vote for the most-electorally-viable anti immigration candidate in every single race, in every single jurisdiction in which I can vote, forever until something is done, come what may.
I know nothing short of mass deportations counts as "substantive" for you, but I'm pretty sure they already did do something. There was some chart going around recently about how Trump cut bordering crossings by something like 80-90% pretty much the moment he walked into office. It was on Twitter, and it was an image, so I'm having a tough time finding it, but maybe someone here knows what I'm talking about.
That can be turned back.
What may be decisive is that he may have demoralized the Democrats or at least their donor base on this issue. There've been a few post-mortems on just why immigration has to be one of the sacred values of the Democratic party and whether it's what even Latinos want. If it ceases to be a sacred value then someone might just decide to do "common sense immigration reform".
Then again, Republicans had some soul-searching on immigration after Romney too and then did the mother of all reversions. It's only been a couple of months. It's not particularly far-fetched that Trump wears out his welcome with the electorate and the next Democratic administration acts in a more sensible but pro-immigration manner because the President isn't a doddering old man who can't keep the administration on the right side of political tradeoffs.
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