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Comment by caconym_

17 hours ago

> No conservative I know "hates immigrants." Consider what the policy intends to do rather than blanket-blaming it on hate.

If you look at the rhetoric from the Trump people over the years, they absolutely and clearly do hate immigrants, or are doing their best to seem that way. As an example, consider the following quote^[1] from Trump just a few years ago:

> They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country [...] That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.

It's trivial to find more like that. Weird white supremacist-adjacent rhetoric. Equating immigrants with animals. Etc.

American conservatives may not hate immigrants, but they sure love a guy who fervently expresses his hatred and disdain for immigrants every chance he gets. They've voted him into our highest office twice, and immigration was a central pillar of his campaign both times. I fully understand that many people who voted for him did so for reasons besides immigration, but at this point if they aren't willing to disavow him after the catastrophic first year-and-change of his second term then I am done giving them the benefit of the doubt, because there must be some reason they still support him, and at this point it sure isn't his performance on inflation, general affordability, etc.

In fact, looking at the Silver Bulletin charts^[2] as of right now, immigration is the only macro issue they track where his approval isn't in free-fall.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im... [2] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... (paywalled i think, unfortunately)

15 comments

caconym_

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kortilla  14 hours ago

That quote you pulled is about illegal immigration. Conflating undocumented immigrants with “anti-immigration” is a false equivalence.

There are no doubt people against immigration entirely but the majority opinion I hear from conservative leaning people is that legal immigration is great and people that skip the system are the problem and the drag on social safety nets.

  • tablarasa  13 hours ago

    But the legal immigration system is broken and they did that on purpose. And how is your immigration status relevant to your contribution to taxes?

    It is not a false equivalence. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are net positive for our economy, less likely to commit crimes, and part and parcel to the American experiment. This “we only disapprove of the illegal ones” continues to be a disingenuous and ignorant point of view.

  • anon7000  11 hours ago

    It’s fine that many conservatives still feel this way, but they are not electing officials implementing fair, mature immigration policies. They’re electing immature people who aren’t willing to systematically think through immigration policy, and instead say whatever hateful blurb gets them the most attention.

    It’s frankly despicable, and I don’t respect conservatives who continue voting for politicians who are obvious liars and at a minimum are not campaigning on bringing level-headed reasonable ideas to immigration policy — only on how much they hate immigrants. Which reflects very, very poorly on conservative voters.

  • caconym_  13 hours ago

    Whatever man. Do you remember his comments last year about Ilhan Omar ("garbage") and Somalis?

    > I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you, OK. Somebody will say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason,

    > Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country,

    > I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

    > We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? [...] Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.

    > [Minnesota is] a hellhole right now. The Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain,

    Some other selections I found with zero effort:

    > I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,

    > Our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting, and I say, 'Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?' Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Do you mind?'

    > I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn't exist ten or 15 years ago.

    > And I think [Europe] better watch themselves because you are changing culture. You are changing a lot of things. You’re changing security. You’re changing — look at what’s happening. I mean, you take a look. I mean, look at what’s happening to different countries that never had difficulty, never had problems…. I do not think it’s good for Europe and I don’t think it’s good for our country.

    What do you call this rhetoric if not anti-immigrant? None of this is specific to illegal immigration; he commonly targets legal immigrants with his denigratory, hateful rhetoric (see above), and his second term immigration policy has in several high-profile instances targeted legal immigrants for deportation, as well as making it more difficult to obtain residency/citizenship (see: the subject of this post).

    I guess he's specifically calling out immigration from "shithole countries" (brown/black people) while he is explicitly (though apparently hypothetically) fine with white people ("people from Norway, Sweden, just a few") coming in. Maybe he's just openly racist? Is that better, easier for "conservative leaning people" to swallow? When they say "legal immigration is great", is "legal" just a wink-wink shorthand for "white"?

    ---

    Edit: I alluded to this in a reply below, but thanks to everybody replying to this comment for demonstrating that the theoretical "conservative I know" and "conservative leaning people" are, apparently, not universally representative of conservatives.

    I hope you will not be offended if I don't reply to you individually, but I'm just not interested in having a conversation about whether these attitudes are valid. It's off topic, for one thing—the fact that they exist, that they surface in this context, is the only relevant takeaway here.