Comment by caconym_

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"?

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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.