Comment by jmyeet

That's not contradictory at all.

The comment you are replying to quite intentionally said "legal immigration". Republicans love illegal immigration. Why? because it suppresses wages of both documented and undocumented workers.

Undocumented workers can be employed below minimum wage. If they get an attitude and start demanding a fairer wage or better working conditions, their employer just calls in an ICE raid to clear them out and then they start with a fresh batch. They pay a token fine and that's that.

Several sectors are completely dependent on this arrangement, most notably agriculture and food processing (eg chicken farms)

If they actually cared about this, they would seriously punish the employers for employing undocumented workers. they do not. In fact, when that's been tried it's been a disaster (eg [1])

And because the system allows this to happen, it suppresses the wages of documented workers as well. That's the point. The entire system of restricting immigration is designed to increase profits. Nothing more.

What's the alternative? Easy. Document them. We've done this before. When there was a shortage of male workers in WW2 (because a lot of men were in the Army), we had the Bracero program [2] for temporary workers.

Historically, many such workers came to work then went back to (primarily) Mexico. They only ended up staying permanently when it became too hard to cross the border.

As for these latest bans, well we had 3 Muslim bans in Trump 1. The 19 then 39 (and now apparently 75) countries are pretty much jus tprimarily Muslim and "shithole" [3] countries.

All of this stems from the desire to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy but only for white people.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...