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Notes -
How did illegal immigration become so polarizing? The last two Democratic presidents prior to Biden, Clinton and Obama, both talked about maintaining strong borders and deported millions of illegal aliens. Suddenly in the last few years, Democrats act like it's always been our cultural policy to allow whoever wants in, to live here. Is this really just a crass strategy to build a larger blue voting base, or is it something more?
The best way to model the immigration policies of each party is thus:
Republicans are unwilling to accept any policy that will lead to a lawbreaker being rewarded.
Democrats are unwilling to accept any policy that might require being mean to someone.
As a result we haven't had a coherent immigration policy in decades. Democrats won't accept any policy that will deport millions of people living peacefully (who exist, regardless of the quantity or density of rapists and whatnot in the population). Republicans will not accept any policy by which illegals en masse become legal. In reality since at least 1992, through Republicans and Democrats:
has been the de facto national policy. As a result you have these huge communities of millions of people across the country who were let in, the only way to get them out is through quantities of cruelty unimaginable in the Lower 48 in living memory. The only way to legalize them is to abrogate the idea of rule of law and justice.
The modern Trump policies are, to this point, de facto the same as those in the past, just with some random cruelty thrown in to make sure that the illegals don't get too comfortable. Stephen Miller's reach goal is 3,000/day, which, if we're generous and assume that government workers get in a whole 52 weeks a year, would be 156,000/yr, and leaving aside a lost half a year, let's say about 600,000 across the Trump administration. Low end estimates place the number of illegal immigrants in the country at around 12,000,000. As I've repeatedly been told that no one will self-deport, Trump is not going to significantly lower the number of illegals in the country. We're not going to feel any difference in the number of brown people around.
What is going to be achieved is preventing illegals from having contact with the legitimate world by arresting them at churches, courthouses, etc. Which probably reduces welfare spending enough to be worth something!
But at the end of the Trump administration, even if you pretend he's going to get entries to zero, we're going to have a giant lump of illegal immigrants in the country, and we're still going to have a weak response to it.
Correction: "might require being mean to someone who isn't on the least of group identities that are allowed to be subject to being mean". They are just fine being mean to the deplorables.
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