where are the moderates on immigration?

[Johan Larson]

Judging by the coverage in the news media, there are two positions on immigration in the US political scene: for and against. You're either for immigration of all kinds, legal or illegal, by all sorts of people, or you're against it. 

But these are not the only positions one could hold. For example, one could quite sensibly be for legal immigration in large numbers, but take a hard line on illegal immigration. No doubt there are other moderate positions like this. But somehow these never get coverage. 

Are there very few moderates on this issue? Or are they simply ineffective in getting their message out? What's going on?

[johnny1...@gmail.com]

That's a very good question, and in fact most people in America are moderates on this point.  But the nature of the politics is such as to force everybody to the extremes (yet again).

The problem is that the unofficial political alliance that dominates American government and politics is an alliance of upper-class social liberal lefties, and right-wing corporate interests.  On paper, they hate each other, in practice, they work hand-in-glove because their interests are coordinate.  Some people call them the 'secular transnationalists', or the 'tranzies' and they run both major parties.

It so happens that open-borders, unlimited immigration suits the political and economic aims of both sides of that alliance.  The Democrats are more-or-less importing voters, and the corporate right uses immigration to keep wages,  benefits, and worker demands down.  It overlaps.  A lot of professional-class people hire illegal nannies, gardeners, maids, etc. and pay them under the table.  Both groups dislike national borders as a matter of policy, and want to weaken them, both groups want to undercut the American culture that often opposes their aims, so again, their only immigration policy is always more, more, more.

Not, mind you, that they openly say that they want open-borders immigration for the sake of importing a new electorate and cheap labor, of course.  It's another case where one has to ignore what they say and look at what they do.

What they have done is try to redefine 'open borders' as the default.  That's why they try so had to replace the correct but inconveniently accurate phrases 'illegal aliens' and 'illegals' with mushy weasel phrases like 'undocumented immigrant'.  It blurs the line between legal and illegal immigration.  For a little while under Obama there was even an attempt to push 'undocumented American' as the 'acceptable' phrase.

(A big turning point in Trump's rise to power was when he smacked down an attempt by a reporter to get him to refrain from saying 'illegals'.  That sort of thing boosted him enormously.  One reason they want to destroy him so badly is that he's upsetting their attempts to redefine the meaning of words.)

This goes back to the 1960s, and the Hart-Cellar immigration bill.  His name doesn't appear on the bill, but Teddy Kennedy was a driving force on it (and on most subsequent immigration legislation).  He famously vowed that the bill would neither enable a change to the ethnic makeup of the USA nor would millions of immigrants come into the country, of course both did happen.

Ever since then, every attempt at limiting immigration has been sabotaged by that combined alliance of business and social libs.  Even bills that contained solid enforcement provisions always ended up producing simply more immigration, such as Simpson-Mizzoli, always ended up being simple amnesties in practice.

Which led up to 2006 and the Bush-McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Amnesty Act, also known officially as Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006.  It looked like a sure pass to official Washington, since GWB, Congress, the immigration bureaucracy, the news media all were on board.  The problem was that the electorate simply exploded.  Resentment over immigration had been building up for years quietly, now it broke out into the open, esp. on the Republican side.  The phone calls and emails against the bill were so voluminous that they literally crashed the Congressional systems.

The loudest opposition came from the GOP voters, but a bunch of Dem voters were furious too.  It was popular with the upper-class professional/liberal class, but most union laborers, a lot of the black vote, and some of the legalized Hispanic vote hated it.  The rebellion was so intense and caught the Dems so much by surprise that the then-head of the AFL-CIO, the national labor union network, came out against the whole thing one day, then came out for it the next after Dem officials got hold of him and told him to change his mind.  His rank-and-file didn't follow him on the change.

The public backlash was so intense that the bill was pulled...then.  But they had not learned their lesson.  Even as it was, the fury over the bill was the largest single reason the GOP lost control of both houses of Congress in 2006.  The trouble was that the voters were replacing pro-amnesty Republicans with pro-amnesty Democrats.  In 2007, they tried again, twice, once more with Bush, Kennedy, and McCain orchestrating the effort, and it drove the voters to even higher levels of fury.

The roots of the TEA Party movement are actually to be found in 2006 and 2007, in which infuriated Republican voters began organizing grass-roots level networks to oppose their own party on immigration.   When the TEA Party appeared to spring to life out of nowhere in 2009, it was really emerging from this previous organizational base, which means that the TEA Party was always solidly anti-amnesty and for less immigration, it was part of their origin.

In 2007 both parties claimed that polling data said people supported what they were doing, the media insisted that most Americans were for it, it was just a radical fringe that opposed it, even as the phones were melting in Congressional offices, and once again, public backlash killed the effort, twice, in 2007.

Of the two parties, this issue burned the GOP far worse than it did the Dems, because their upper ranks are business advocates and libertarians, while their rank and file voters are largely nationalists and social conservatives and increasingly hostile the Wall Street over the last 20 years.  The GOP assumed they would never cross over and vote for liberal Dems, and they were right.  Faced with a choice of a liberal Dem and a liberal Republican, a big chunk of them just stayed home in 2006, 2008, and 2012.

All the while, a compromise offer was repeatedly made by the voters, they were willing to consider an amnesty for the illegals already here, esp. those brought here as kids, as long as the inflow was stopped first and the borders could be seen to being solidly enforced. 

To which the establishment screeched "NO NO NO!  COMPREHENSIVE!!"  Meaning they insisted that the amnesty be immediate, then enforcement.  By this point, the voters knew that meant 'no enforcement ever'.

The usual response of the establishment to complaints about open borders was to repeat over and over the deportation was unthinkable, impossible, never going to happen no matter what, even in the face of offers to settle for enforcement first then amnesty, with no deportations.  They kept insisting that the ONLY choices were 'open borders' and an impossible deportation.  Which was disingenuous nonsense, but also forced everybody toward the opposite extreme, as they became angrier, and angrier, and angrier.

In 2013, along came the Gang of Eight, in which a number of very familiar names got together to try and pass a comprehensive amnesty yet again. 

The eight were:

• Sen. Michael Bennet, D-CO
• Sen. Richard Durbin, D-IL
• Sen. Jeff Flake R-AZ
• Sen. Lindsey Graham R-SC
• Sen. John McCain R-AZ
• Sen. Bon Menendez D-NJ
• Sen. Marco Rubio R-FL

Sen. Chuck Schumer D-NY

If anyone asks you:  'How could Donald Trump become President of the United States?", a big part of the answer is these eight men.  If you don't like the Trump Administration, here's the list of the people who made it happen.  They didn't do it alone, but they played a big role.

Marco Rubio's tale is esp. instructive.  He ran and won in 2010 in Florida as a TEA Party champion, and ran as an immigration critic.  Then, in 2013, he joined with the Gang of Eight to write and back what amounted to an amnesty and open borders bill.  Apparently he was blissfully unaware of how angry he had made his own voters until a New Hampshire straw poll in 2014 saw him come in dead last in a poll of TEA Party Republicans.  Suddenly he withdrew support for his own bill, but it was too late for his Presidential aspirations, he had gone from 'our Marco' to 'their Marco' in the minds of his own voters because of the Gang of Eight bill.

Even so, the bill passed the Senate and went to the House of Representatives.  Had it passed there, Obama's signature was a given.  But just as they were closing in on passage, Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary over the immigration issue, the first House majority leader to be turfed out by his own party in over a century, and support in the House collapsed.  Despite frantic efforts to claim his loss was not about immigration, everyone knew it was about immigration.

The politicians knew the score.  In 2014, for ex, the Senate race between Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundgren-Grimes, his Dem opponent, degenerated into each other pointing at the other and chanting, "Pro-amnesty!"

Of course both were telling the truth.  But they still tried to push for more immigration.  By this point the electorate was angry enough that when Trump came down that escalator and opened his campaign by calling out the immigration policies of both parties, he took off like a fusion rocket.

There once was quite a bit of support for a compromise that would let the illegals already here stay, as long as the inflow was seen to be stopped.  That reasonable approach has been rejected so many times by the political class over the last 10 years that now the public is angry enough that formerly moderate people are actually open to mass deportation.

The reason there's no sign of moderation is that the political class, which includes the national news media, still wants open borders and amnesty, ASAP, and the electorate knows from experience that any 'deal' with them will end up being that in practice.  Pass a 'comprehensive' bill and watch the legalization happen and the enforcement be dropped, and everyone knows it.  They might go court-shopping and find a liberal activist judge to declare enforcement somehow 'unconstitutional', if necessary by simply making up a justification.  They might say they can't enforce because of some quirk in the law.  They might just ignore it.  One way or another, the enforcement part of a deal would not happen, and most people know that now.

That's why no matter how many 'comprehensive' deals get offered, the response is likely to be, "Do the enforcement first, then we talk about the amnesty."  That's not the public being intransigent, it's the public recognizing a lie.

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 8:20:32 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

In 2013, along came the Gang of Eight, in which a number of very familiar names got together to try and pass a comprehensive amnesty yet again. 

The eight were:

• Sen. Michael Bennet, D-CO
• Sen. Richard Durbin, D-IL
• Sen. Jeff Flake R-AZ
• Sen. Lindsey Graham R-SC
• Sen. John McCain R-AZ
• Sen. Bon Menendez D-NJ
• Sen. Marco Rubio R-FL

Sen. Chuck Schumer D-NY

If anyone asks you:  'How could Donald Trump become President of the United States?", a big part of the answer is these eight men.  If you don't like the Trump Administration, here's the list of the people who made it happen.  They didn't do it alone, but they played a big role.

Marco Rubio's tale is esp. instructive.  He ran and won in 2010 in Florida as a TEA Party champion, and ran as an immigration critic.  Then, in 2013, he joined with the Gang of Eight to write and back what amounted to an amnesty and open borders bill.  Apparently he was blissfully unaware of how angry he had made his own voters until a New Hampshire straw poll in 2014 saw him come in dead last in a poll of TEA Party Republicans.  Suddenly he withdrew support for his own bill, but it was too late for his Presidential aspirations, he had gone from 'our Marco' to 'their Marco' in the minds of his own voters because of the Gang of Eight bill.

Even so, the bill passed the Senate and went to the House of Representatives.  Had it passed there, Obama's signature was a given.  But just as they were closing in on passage, Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary over the immigration issue, the first House majority leader to be turfed out by his own party in over a century, and support in the House collapsed.  Despite frantic efforts to claim his loss was not about immigration, everyone knew it was about immigration.

In addendum to my post from several months ago, it's instructive to observe that now, just about six months later, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Jeff Flake, etc. are getting together in hopes of reviving the Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill as an alternative to the stuff like the RAISE Act.

Their exact goal is not entirely clear.  Unless Trump is willing to sign the Go8, then they'd have to martial 2/3rds majorities in both chambers to override his veto, which looks like a stretch, especially since the electorate is no more eager for a general open borders/amnesty bill now than they were three years ago.  In fact, if anything they're more hostile than ever.

Maybe they hope to present it to Trump as a 'take it or leave it' and demand that he sign it so he can say he got something on immigration?  Well, maybe, but it would be a profoundly stupid thing for Trump to do, and he doesn't appear to be an idiot.  He makes amateur mistakes, but he doesn't appear to be politically suicidal.

Maybe it's meant as a starting position for some kind of compromise with the RAISE Act faction?  Maybe, but there's no a lot of room for compromise that involves any sort of amnesty.  The voters are hyper-sensitized to that now, they tend to go to DefCon 3 just at the whisper of it.

Then there's Marco Rubio.  His last round of support for the Go8 almost surely cost him the GOP nod in 2016.  He lost his home State to Trump in the GOP primaries, all but one county, over the Gang of Eight bill.  Rubio seems to be trying to stake out some kind of position, he says he opposes the RAISE Act but hasn't actually come out in favor of the Go8 this time.

But they're definitely talking about trying to move this thing again.  Which is a little like Sylvester the Cat in the old cartoon, when he keeps trying to load that muzzleloader and it keeps blowing up on him.

"First the powder, then the wadding, then the Amnesty-BOOM!"
"First the wadding, then the powder, then the Amnesty-BOOM!"

"First the powder, then the wadding, then the Don't-Call-It-Amnesty-BOOM!"

That's been the pattern over the last several attempts, all the way back to 2006.  But they keep trying.

I'm sure it's partly pressure from the GOP business wing, desperate for cheap labor and to import customers.  But there's more to it, I think.  I just don't fully know what that 'more' is.

But the last attempt at the Gang of Eight was a major factor in the Rise of Trump Maximus.  Surely they can't be unaware of that.

[Johnny1A]

On Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 11:38:50 PM UTC-5, Johnny1A wrote:

On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 8:20:32 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

In 2013, along came the Gang of Eight, in which a number of very familiar names got together to try and pass a comprehensive amnesty yet again. 

The eight were:

• Sen. Michael Bennet, D-CO
• Sen. Richard Durbin, D-IL
• Sen. Jeff Flake R-AZ
• Sen. Lindsey Graham R-SC
• Sen. John McCain R-AZ
• Sen. Bon Menendez D-NJ
• Sen. Marco Rubio R-FL

Sen. Chuck Schumer D-NY

If anyone asks you:  'How could Donald Trump become President of the United States?", a big part of the answer is these eight men.  If you don't like the Trump Administration, here's the list of the people who made it happen.  They didn't do it alone, but they played a big role.

Note the emboldened names, right in the middle of the current fake controversy about Trump's supposedly using impolite terms to describe certain countries.

(I say 'supposedly' because it's his word against Durbin's, and because it really doesn't matter whether he did or didn't, the outrage is fake.)

Trump is right when he says that the Dems don't really want a Congressional DACA fix, in itself.  They want to use DACA as the opening wedge for a general open-borders policy, yet another attempt at full Comprehensive Amnesty.  A DACA bill that only amnetizes the genuine 'kids who grew up here', is not particularly useful to the Dems, because the total number of them is relatively small, and a DACA bill that combines that with restrictions on chain migration and more money for real enforcement is worse than nothing from their POV.

Note Durbin's reflexive attempt to use race politics to make the term 'chain migration' off-limits, because it's too descriptive, too accurate.  Just as the Dems have sought to replace descriptive phrases like 'illegal alien' with 'undocumented migrant', they also want to remove all the other effective, accurate terms from use as well, to shape the debate toward a state where only full amnesty and open borders are acceptable positions.  Trump, to his credit, has refused to permit them this.

OTOH, Trump's recent PR move, the 'broadcast negotiation', is less clearly beneficial to him.  When he said he's sign 'anything they sent him', his supporters exploded in naked fury.  The concern was actually less about the Dems than the GOP, the GOP base voters know that Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan, John McCain,

etc. would love nothing better than an excuse to disguise an open-borders bill as a DACA/border security bill.  If they don't think they can count on Trump to veto anything like that, the temptation to send him that open-borders bill would be immense.

Fortunately for Trump, he's been reiterating his 'conditions' for a DACA bill since then, or at least until the supposed comments a few days ago 'blew up the negotiations'.   It may be that this is what he was trying to do, it may be that the Dems were looking for a pretext to cut off negotiations.  Either way, this may yet en up being an election issue in November.

[Johnny1A]

The same old story is being retold on immigration...but somehow the plot is twisting.

We just finished a government pseudo-shutdown, in which Congress failed to pass a Continuing Resolution to fund certain non-immediately-urgent priorities, which has happened every now and then for the last couple of decades.  Back in 1995-96, we had one that lasted 21 days.

The interesting thing about these showdowns is that they are not what they pretend to be, in several senses.  The Federal Government doesn't really shut down, the military remains on duty, the Postal Service delivers the mail, the SoSec checks go out on time.  But the media usually goes into histrionics.  Each side, naturally, blames the other, and the media invariably sides with the Democrats and blames the GOP.  What these showdowns really are is contests for public opinion.

Interestingly, over the last 20+ years or so, the Dems have either won every single contest, or the effect was a wash.  In the 1995-96 'shutdown', President Clinton had the upper hand and he knew it, for multiple reasons.  The press was solidly on his side, as were most of the public employee unions and most of the academy.  The GOP foolishly misread their victory in 1994, in which they retook the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades, as a mandate for their business/economic agenda, when in fact it was more about nationalism and social issues.  So when they made a stand on fiscal issues, they played straight into Clinton's hands, because Clinton understood their victory better than they themselves did.

It never bother Bill Clinton to lie through his teeth, and he did so freely in that showdown.  The media simply echoed whatever he said without questioning it, and the GOP never expected the public to side against them after their big victory in 1994.  But side against them they did, in part because Gingrich and the GOP in Congress put up little public argument for their side, and in part because the forces arrayed against them were just too big.  The only national media voice on their side, at that time, was Rush Limbaugh.  He's powerful, but it was Limbaugh vs. ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc.  Clinton had the bully pulpit, and a total indifference to the truth on his side.

(I actually once heard an ad on Christian radio in those days in which Bill Clinton claimed that he wanted to end abortion, but the GOP wouldn't let him.  Just one example among many.)

To make it worse, entitlements and fiscal issues are the area where the public most naturally sympathizes with the Dems, and instinctively side against the GOP as the 'part of the rich' (by which people really mean 'the party of big business' whether they know it or not).  So when the GOP made a stand on reducing the rate of growth of Medicare, it was easy for Clinton to lie and claim they were trying to reduce funding outright.)

In short, the GOP lost.  Badly.  They were shocked, and so badly burned that they were skittish about standing up for anything after that, for years afterward.  Even when they had Bush Jr. in the White House, he just simply could not bring himself to use the bully pulpit effectively, either.

Part of their problem, of course, is that many elected GOP officials only really care about the fiscal/business agenda, which is unpopular, and are indifferent to, embarrassed by, and/or hostile to the social and nationalist aspects of the GOP message that are actually popular.  So they instinctively wanted to make their stands in the worst possible place on the battlefield, and to avoid fighting on the favorable ground.

But this time it was different.  The Dems made their stand on immigration, specifically illegals and defending chain migration, and Trump either accidentally or by cleverness tricked them into saying this outright.  Trump has the bully pulpit, and he doesn't hesitate to use it, and he's getting steadily better at using it.  So this time, the Dems were defending their weakest territory (immigration and globalization and identity politics), and today the battlefield is more nearly level, Limbaugh is joined by FOXNews (at least sometimes), Hannity on the radio, Breitbart and Daily Caller and Townhall and others on the Internet, OAN on cable, etc.  It's still not a truly level field, but it's far less tilted than it was in 1995.

Upshot is that the GOP actually won a government 'shutdown showdown', visibly and definitely.  It wasn't just a wash, which was the best they've managed before, it was a clean win, Durbin and Schumer folded after less than 3 days and they ended up with the blame for the shutdown.  This simply has not happened in recent memory, and Washington is in a bit of a shock.

That doesn't mean that the immigration argument is over, of course.  The Dems still want open borders and unlimited immigration, and the Chamber of Commerce and their GOP allies (Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Bennett, Cory Gardner, etc.) want it too.  But it's getting harder and harder for them to say with a straight face that the public wants that too.

[Johnny1A]

Everybody is wondering what Trump is up to, if anything.

The 'framework' his people have laid out over the last week sounds reasonable, but it's got the same problems all the previous ones have had, if adopted as written, the legalization will happen and the security measures never will.  The money for the wall won't materialize when the time comes, even if Congress votes for it now, the chain migration provisions will kick it too late to matter, or be gutted later, etc.

In fact, it looks dangerously like 'Gang of 8 lite', and already a lot of Trump's supporters are screaming betrayal.  This is dangerous, because the support of his hard-core voters is the only thing standing between Trump and impeachment, even the Republican Party privately would like him gone.  The involvement of people like Marc Short compounds suspicions because of his ties to the Kochs, who are open borders advocates.

Now if there's one thing the last 2.5 years have shown, it's that Donald Trump is manifestly not stupid.  Yet this proposed bill is just the thing necessary to shatter his coalition and hand Congress to the Democrats in 2018.  Trump had already just defeated the Dems and pro-amnesty GOP in a shutdown showdown just a few days before, he had the upper hand and this appears to surrender it.

So what is going on?

One theory is that Trump is simply selling out, that he's been offered a deal and changed sides.  Another is that he's surrounded by mostly pro-amnesty and pro-open borders people, including his daughter and son-in-law, and they've convinced him that this is a good deal.  Yet another theory is that he's new to politics, still learning, and simply doesn't 'get' that such a deal would end up being Full Amnesty and Open Borders in practice.

Another theory is that Trump is smarter than that, and knows the Dems will reject even this offer, so it's safe to make it and makes the Dems look fanatical to the voters.  After all, at least on the surface, Trump's 'framework' appears to give the Dems what they were demanding, and additional stuff besides, and they're already saying it's not good enough and it's racist and it's cruel and on and on.

If this last is Trump's goal, that part of the plan appears to be working, Pelosi and Schumer and Durbin and the activists are sounding just as extreme and radical as Trump might have hoped.

Assuming that's his plan, though, it's dangerous.  It's dangerous because it splits and demoralizes his own base, and because so many Republican Senators and Congressmen are eager to do an amnesty and might grab this as use it as a starting point, and any negotiation Graham or Tillis or Gardner did would reduce the enforcement and increase the amnesty.  The pressure from business groups would also be in that direction.  Trump could easily find himself facing a bill that does exactly what he ran against, supposedly based on his own framework, and faced with the choice of vetoing his own Party's bill or signing it and handing Congress to the Democrats and risking impeachment.

I freely admit I don't know what Trump's game plan is, if he has one, but he's dicing for high stakes whether he knows it or not.

[Johnny1A]

On Tuesday, January 30, 2018 at 10:53:32 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

Everybody is wondering what Trump is up to, if anything.

Another theory is that Trump is smarter than that, and knows the Dems will reject even this offer, so it's safe to make it and makes the Dems look fanatical to the voters.  After all, at least on the surface, Trump's 'framework' appears to give the Dems what they were demanding, and additional stuff besides, and they're already saying it's not good enough and it's racist and it's cruel and on and on.

If this last is Trump's goal, that part of the plan appears to be working, Pelosi and Schumer and Durbin and the activists are sounding just as extreme and radical as Trump might have hoped.

Assuming that's his plan, though, it's dangerous.  It's dangerous because it splits and demoralizes his own base, and because so many Republican Senators and Congressmen are eager to do an amnesty and might grab this as use it as a starting point, and any negotiation Graham or Tillis or Gardner did would reduce the enforcement and increase the amnesty.  The pressure from business groups would also be in that direction.  Trump could easily find himself facing a bill that does exactly what he ran against, supposedly based on his own framework, and faced with the choice of vetoing his own Party's bill or signing it and handing Congress to the Democrats and risking impeachment.

I freely admit I don't know what Trump's game plan is, if he has one, but he's dicing for high stakes whether he knows it or not.

Well, if Trump is trying to manipulate the Dems into making themselves look like unhinged fanatics, it has to be said that that part of his plan is operating like a well-oiled machine.  Trump's State of the Union address saw the Dems sitting in their chairs as if they were glued to them, looking sour, as Trump extolled things like lower black unemployment and the need for law and order at the border.  When the GOP started chanting USA, Dem Representative Luis Gutierrez got up and appeared to stalk out in anger.

(He now says it wasn't the situation, he was just late for an interview.  Maybe so, but it was a bad visual.)

Trump repeats his offer of amnesty in exchange for the wall and limits on chain migration, and the Dem response and the illegal activist leadership response is something close to "RACIST! RACIST! RACIST!"

Trump says Americans are Dreamers too, and that ignites the left as well, saying he's stealing their term and saying it's just as bad as saying 'All lives matter'.

Of course, that comparison doesn't look good outside the Dem core areas, either.  Most people in America don't see anything wrong with incorporating the sentiment 'black lives matter' into the larger truth that 'all lives matter', but it infuriates the Dem activists and sets them off like nitroglycerin, and the Dems don't dare be seen challenging it.

The ACLU put out a statement complaining that Trump used the word 'American' too much in his speech, and reiterating that the Dreamers must stay:

https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-trumps-america-exclusionary

This is spite of Trump offering them a partial amnesty.

Joy Reid, a commentator on MsNBC, made the following observation about Trump's SOTU address:

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/958528313563254784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fthis-tweet-says-much-more-about-msnbcs-joy-reid-than-it-does-donald-trump%2Farticle%2F2647647

Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for. #SOTU

Well, I don't know, but somehow I'm not sure a Dem game plan for 2018 based on running hard against church, family, police, military and the national anthem is necessarily the best possible political approach.

Sally Kohn, a writer and contributor to CNN, said Trump's SOTU speech was 'truly scary', and that hearing the USA chants sent chills of fear down her spine.

https://twitter.com/sallykohn/status/958544672233873409

https://twitter.com/sallykohn/status/958543566619447297

Then came the train/truck collision a couple of days ago, it so happened that a lot of GOP Congressmen were on the train, and some lefties in the media and such celebs as Stephen King start tweeting jokes and snarky comments about it, even though people were killed and others hurt..

As I noted, if Trump really is trying to provoke the Dems to look and sound as if they were deranged, he's pretty clearly succeeding.

Now Trump has poked the hive again, saying that the Dems need to compromise now or face a worse offer later after Trump has more Republicans in Congress.  Now that's chutzpah, anyway.  The press and Dems are saying that a 'blue wave' in now inevitable in 2018, but Trump is acting as if he has the upper hand politically, and that seems likely to drive them into even further frothing fury.

Where are the moderates on immigration?  Trump appears to be trying to appear to stake out exactly that position, honestly or not, wisely or not.  The Dems appear to be determined to torpedo it.

[Warren Ellis]

I always laugh at how these politicians think they expect people to believe they really care about immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

They and the companies only like them for cheap labor and votes and nothing else.

They helped cultivate and create the conditions which allowed for xenophobia to rise in the US and now they're screaming foul about it.

They allowed for crap like hb1 visa abuse (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-h-1b-visas-have-been-abused-since-the-beginning/) and helping destroy many older jobs that provided good money, while replacing them with low-income jobs and now they're reaping what they sow.

The real xenophobes are the politicians who helped create the conditions we're seeing today. And they're in power in both parties. Just because they fool people with nice sounding buzzwords and phony platitudes doesn't mean they can fool everyone.

[Warren Ellis]

Here is another thing that helped fuel Trump I bet: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-h-1b-visas-being-hijacked-to-lower-labor-costs/

All these computer and other companies lie about requiring foreign workers, because they really want them because they're super cheap. They lie about the US not creating enough STEM workers so they can help drive down wages as much as possible.

[Johnny1A]

Another factor is the growing cultural issue.

The Western elites desperately want to keep the issue focused on economics, and avoid all talk of religion or culture as purely 'personal' matters with no public dimension.  This is utterly impossible, of course.  Since the elite-approved media channels no longer have their monopoly control on information, their narratives get undercut from other sources.

(Which is part of why so many Western governments are trying to reign in dissenting speech so hard, esp. in places like Britain and Germany.)

For ex, the 'approved' narrative about the 'refugees' is that they are decent people, mostly women and children, victims of warfare and brutality and often of Western offenses, who just want shelter and a new life.  This pleasant vision doesn't match objective reality at all well.

Most of the 'refugees' are male, most are of combat age, most are physically healthy, and most are in fact economic migrants.  If you push hard enough, you can sometimes get a cosmopolitan to admit that, though there's a tendency to try to change the subject or scream 'racist!' or 'bigot!' at people who are so unpolitic as to comment on those facts.

But the narrative is being undercut.  There's a translated interview that I found interesting, by a former migrant volunteer in Germany.  Now note, I don't speak the original, so I have to trust the translation, and I'm not well-informed about the site on which it appears.  That said, the translation comes across as believable, and matches other things that I've heard and read.

https://vladtepesblog.com/2018/02/07/those-people-who-ate-with-me-drank-danced-laughed-they-talk-about-me-as-stupid-german-whore/

It's my considered opinion that Western business, social, and academic elites are in complete denial about the realities of the role of religion in all societies, and the gap between Christendom and the Islamic world in particular.  I also believe that part of the reason that it's hard to find 'moderates' in immigration is the perception that the ruling class can't be trusted to guard the interests of the native populations of their own countries, and so all promises about enforcement and vetting are just seen as empty. 

[Johnny1A]

For what it's worth, events continue to unfold.

This week, Mitch McConnell set aside a week of Senate time for debate about various immigration proposals.  Several bills have been presented, of which the Grassley bill is probably the closest to Trump's proposed 'framework'.  But there's also the McCain bill, and what's being called the Collins-Schumer-Rounds bill, because it's sponsored by Chuck Schumer (Dem, NY),  and Susan Collins (RINO, Maine).  The news media is touting it as a reasonable 'bipartisan compromise', but of course in practice it's a giveaway to the Chamber of Commerce and social liberals, they get what they want in return for nothing, in practice.

(McCain's bill is even worse, it creates a massive amnesty in return for a promise to 'analyze' border security.)

The Schumer-Collins bill leaves the 'diversity lottery' in place, restricts immigration enforcement only to 'serious criminals', doesn't fund a wall, leaves chain migration in place, doesn't reduce legal immigration, it's pretty much 'gang of 8' lite.

The Schumer-Collins bill's other Republican sponsors are

Sen. Corey Gardner (R-CO),

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ),

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK),

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN),

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC),

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA).

If you look at my other posts on this thread, you'll recognize some familiar names on this list.

There are various reasons for this, but probably the biggest is the influence of corporate America's desire for low wages and to import customers.  Note that the U..S. Chamber of Commerce put out the following statement regarding this weeks' immigration debates:

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/15MLXV64/kv_hr2579_immigrationvehicle_senate.pdf

 Permanent Relief for Dreamers: The Senate should provide permanent legislative relief for Dreamers such that as long as they follow the rules set by Congress, they will not be deported and will be able to continue to work or continue their education.
 
 Permanent Relief for Long-Term TPS Beneficiaries: The Senate should provide permanent legislative relief for long-term beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status program, such that beneficiaries will not be deported and will be able to continue to work in the U.S.
 
 No Reduction in Legal Immigration: A functioning immigration system should promote legal immigration, not discourage it. The Chamber supports reprioritizing how visas are allocated to better meet domestic economic and workforce needs, but strongly opposes any reduction in legal immigration. A reduction in legal immigration will hinder overall economic growth and only encourage additional illegal immigration.
 
 Bolstering Border Security: The Chamber supports responsible border security efforts and believes such measures are critical to any immigration legislation that can become law.
 
 Workable Agricultural Guest Worker and E-Verify Systems: The Chamber continues to support a mandatory E-Verify system based upon the Legal Workforce Act as introduced in the House. Any proposal that includes a mandatory E-Verify system must, at the very least, be coupled with a workable agricultural guest worker program.

Note the emboldened lines.  The Chamber wants more immigration, and the claim to be OK with e-verify, but they also insist on combining it with more immigrants for the ag industry.

Very few Dems crossed over on any of the votes, but the Chamber drew a bunch of GOPers to vote for amnesty.  Still, at the end of the day no bill had passed the Senate, and Trump had already threatened a definite veto for the Schumer-Collins bill, if it passed the Congress.  It's radically improbable that the open-borders wing could raise enough votes for an override, esp. in an election year.

[Þorkell Sigvaldason]

Dude you expect us to take you seriously when you talk about computers when you do this?

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/15MLXV64/kv_hr2579_immigrationvehicle_senate.pdf

[Warren Ellis]

"doesn't reduce legal immigration"

There is nothing wrong with legal immigration. It's illegal immigration that needs to be stopped.

What needs to be done is to find the companies that attempt to use illegal immigrants or h1-b visa abuse and force them to stop doing those things. Once 3/4 of their workforce has been deported because they were all illegals, then they're forced to actually hire legal workers and pay them actual wages.

The biggest problem with a lot of US laws, is that stuff like H1-B visa had loopholes added that got us into the current mess we are in: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/how-h-1b-visas-have-been-abused-since-the-beginning/

Today, Morrison is a legislative advocate for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-U.S.A., a professional group. He believes the problems stem from a change made in a 1998 amendment to the law, after he left Congress. The amendment allows companies that rely on H-1B workers to ignore requirements about protecting American jobs as long as they pay the foreign workers at least $60,000 a year. That's now a paltry salary in the tech industry, making it easy to push out American workers in favor of foreigners who can be hired for much cheaper.

"It's really a travesty that should never have been allowed to happen," Morrison says.

[Warren Ellis]

The biggest problem with legal immigration is more that many companies lie about immigrant workers & native workers. They lie about there not being enough native workers or lie about them not wanting to do certain jobs.

In reality we graduate twice as many STEM graduates than there are STEM jobs. But companies will lie so they can continue to import cheap labor. In addition companies, perhaps mostly in agricultural companies but I Wouldn't be surprised about other sectors as well, will lie about job locations and such so that native workers will be discouraged.

One of the biggest things that pisses me off is that many of these company CEOs & politicians try to play the "how dare you be a xenophobe" card when many of those same companies and politicians abused their positions and abused laws, helping create the xenophobia in the first place. They try to act as if they're not responsible, but they are the ultimate source. Remember that.

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 at 6:28:06 AM UTC-6, Þorkell Sigvaldason wrote:

Dude you expect us to take you seriously when you talk about computers when you do this?

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/15MLXV64/kv_hr2579_immigrationvehicle_senate.pdf

My mistake, I was in a big hurry when I was posting.  But yeah, it doesn't affect the truth of what I was saying. 

You can find the pdf link here:

https://www.uschamber.com/letter/key-vote-alert-hr-2579-intended-vehicle-immigration-reform

Under "Key Vote Alert!- H.R. 2579, Intended Vehicle for Immigration Reform"

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 at 1:17:41 PM UTC-6, Warren Ellis wrote:

The biggest problem with legal immigration is more that many companies lie about immigrant workers & native workers. They lie about there not being enough native workers or lie about them not wanting to do certain jobs.

They have to lie.  If they told the truth about their motivations, they'd be locked out of power if they were lucky.

But there are other issues with legal immigration, esp. with regard to chain migration.  Immigration has become explosive because of employment, yes, but also because of issues of language, culture, religion, etc.  The majority of immigration to America is legal, and it's happening at such a level that it's starting to significantly affect the society as a whole, and alter the balance of power in the electorate, and the public is getting restless about it.  Chain migration, esp., tends to generate an endless inflow.

The combination of unlimited chain migration and birthright citizenship is probably inherently explosive, politically.

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 at 1:17:41 PM UTC-6, Warren Ellis wrote:

The biggest problem with legal immigration is more that many companies lie about immigrant workers & native workers. They lie about there not being enough native workers or lie about them not wanting to do certain jobs.

In reality we graduate twice as many STEM graduates than there are STEM jobs. But companies will lie so they can continue to import cheap labor. In addition companies, perhaps mostly in agricultural companies but I Wouldn't be surprised about other sectors as well, will lie about job locations and such so that native workers will be discouraged.  One of the biggest things that pisses me off is that many of these company CEOs & politicians try to play the "how dare you be a xenophobe" card when many of those same companies and politicians abused their positions and abused laws, helping create the xenophobia in the first place. They try to act as if they're not responsible, but they are the ultimate source. Remember that. 

Entirely intentionally.  The employers benefit in multiple ways from this sort of abuse.  They get cheaper foreign labor directly, but they also keep native workers scared to ask for raises or better working conditions too.  "Well, if you don't want to work for me, I can always import someone..."  Thus wages and benefits are suppressed even in regions where there isn't much direct immigrant presence.

That's where the alliance between big business and the social liberal left comes in.  The businessmen can pretend to be standing for 'civil rights' or 'inclusion' or whatever while they actually are looking at their bottom lines, and upper-class 'limousine liberals' get cheap domestic help and to import voters.

I remember ten years ago, back when Bush Jr. was teaming up with Teddy Kennedy and Co. to try to pass a mass amnesty, hearing a guy on TV make a really stirring sounding speech in support of the contributions of immigrants and the importance of America's immigration history to her identity and so on and on.  It sounded good, but the guy making it was the head of the hotel owner's association.  Three guesses about his real motivations.

In this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/dunkin-ceo-has-a-plan-to-win-the-coffee-wars.html, the head of Dunkin' Donuts says:

Skilled labor remains a challenge for Dunkin's franchisees, and Travis emphasized the need for immigration reform. "We need more people. Talking to Democrats and Republicans, there seems to be a fair amount of agreement that it needs to be split between the amount of security and letting all people come into the country and becoming citizens — all we're asking is to increase the labor pool."

No doubt.  At least he's honest about his motivations.

[Warren Ellis]

The cultural issues thing is more something Europe has to deal with. In addition to economic issues.

The US, thankfully, isn't facing such nasty issues like Europe has to deal with, mostly because our cheap labor doesn't have the hangups that immigrants from North Africa & the Middle East have. Our big problems are due to economic forces (both globalism & technological changes) affecting jobs and leaving many lower-skilled workers in a lurch as often good paying lower-skilled jobs are replaced by barely-minimum wage jobs which are often paying them 1/2-1/5 of what they used to make.

For example, giving permanent normal trade relations with China was supposed to help open their markets to US companies, in addition to opening our markets to China. Instead the Chinese, rather smartly I might add, swiftly put a large VAT on imported goods, manipulated currency to keep their currency artificially low (in violation of the rules but hey), and wooed other countries to invest in their factories and such which allowed them to flood the market with cheap products (and woo companies to move their factories from other countries to China).

Maybe if the US had promptly put up a large VAT like China had, maybe there would've been less job losses in manufacturing. Or at least slower job losses there. Maybe if we had protested more harshly against China's rule breaking on currency and deliberately flooding the market with underpriced goods (to destroy the competition), our workers would've been protected better.

The Internet itself has contributed to the problem by really allowing companies to centralize everything and closing down regional places which provided jobs as well. And it's damaging our news as well: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048

[Warren Ellis]

In addition to what I have already mentioned before about how these companies play a game of pretending they care about race or gender while exploiting for cheaper labor and all.

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 at 6:13:48 PM UTC-6, Warren Ellis wrote:

In addition to what I have already mentioned before about how these companies play a game of pretending they care about race or gender while exploiting for cheaper labor and all.

They pretend to care about the social issues in play, but they are tightly allied to activists who do care about them, rather passionately.  Their motives are different but their goals are precisely the same, and that alliance of big business and liberal activists has been dominant for 25 years.

That's why you see major corporations putting pressure on State and local governments to support things like gay marriage and 'trans' ideology.  It's not that they care about those things, as companies, but their allies do.  Likewise, that's why the elite Dems will talk a lot about the evils of free trade, and the need for more trade regulation and limits, but they never act on it, or at least not over the last 25 years, because that would undercut the alliance with big business.

Same deal with some other things, like Obamacare, which the GOP pretended for eight years to hate when in fact their business wing and elites liked it rather well, because it served business interests by transferring health care costs away from big corporations.

It's all the same coalition.

[Johnny1A]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 at 6:12:42 PM UTC-6, Warren Ellis wrote:

The cultural issues thing is more something Europe has to deal with. In addition to economic issues.

The US, thankfully, isn't facing such nasty issues like Europe has to deal with, mostly because our cheap labor doesn't have the hangups that immigrants from North Africa & the Middle East have. Our big problems are due to economic forces (both globalism & technological changes) affecting jobs and leaving many lower-skilled workers in a lurch as often good paying lower-skilled jobs are replaced by barely-minimum wage jobs which are often paying them 1/2-1/5 of what they used to make.

It used to be mainly economic, yes.  But now it's changing, because enough immigrants have come into the USA, over a short enough period, to start having noticeable impacts on language, culture, politics, and society.  It's not as bad or intense as in Europe (yet), but it's becoming an issue, and it's even more an issue with legal immigration than illegal.

One thing that helps in the USA is that the majority of the illegals come from another Christian country.  That relieves some of the pressure Europe is dealing with, where a hyper-secular elite made policy on the assumption that religion didn't matter, and produced an unfolding disaster.  Our own elites are just as hyper-secular, but Mexico is not the Middle East or northern Africa.

But it's still becoming an issue.  Every time people come face to face with signs in multiple languages, or official documents printed in multiple languages, every time they see a policy shifting in a direction they don't like because immigration is reshaping local electorates, resentment bubbles up.  For 40 years, and esp. the last 25, this has simply been ignored, and allowed to fester and build up to the point where it's starting to boil over.  To make it worse, any attempt to address the problem, or even admit it exists, is greeted with a chorus of 'racist! racist! racist!' or 'islamophobia!' or whatever shorthand for 'shut up' the elites want to use.  Refusing to admit the problem exists doesn't make it go away, it makes it more potent. 

[Johnny1A]

At the recent CPAC conference, the change in mood in the GOP was on clear display.

At one point, there was a panel discussion about the immigration issues, and one member hauled out the old, "We're importing conservatives!" line.  It was actually a left talk radio host named Rick Ungar who said it, but it's an old line.  Republicans used to haul it out to justify lax southern border enforcement, the idea was that the illegals were 'natural conservatives' who would over time become Republicans.  A lot of Bush II Administration people used it.

It's hard to say if they actually believed it, thought it was a good talking about to assuage opposition, or some combination.  But it's blathering nonsense.

This time, when Ungar said it, the crowd broke into boos and a chant of 'build the wall' started.

The other members of the panel were;

• David Bier, Cato Institute
• Rep. Michael Burgess (TX-26)
• Ralph Z. Hallow, Washington Times
• Scott Walter, Capital Research Center

It was a panel more broadly sympathetic to immigration than the audience, but they really reacted badly to Ungar's 'they're natural conservatives' line.  The GOP base is sick to the point of fury of hearing the standard talking points they've been fed over the last 25 years.

[Johan Larson]

Romney seems to be staking out a pretty sensible position: pro legal immigration, anti illegal immigration.

[Warren Ellis]

That's good. But then the media and the rest of the establishment will then try to confuse illegal immigration with legal immigration, deliberately, to paint being anti-illegal immigration as terrible.

Fun fact, NAFTA was partially sold to the US public as cutting back illegal immigration. Instead it helped increase it quite a bit.

[Johnny1A]

The trouble is that the GOP voters increasingly are hostile to both, and it's hard to believe Romney is really opposed to illegal immigration.  He's too much of a business-wing GOP candidate in the tradition of the Bush family or the Rockefellers.  When he ran for President, he said some good-sounding stuff on immigration in the primaries, then dropped it all in the general election to focus on his economic agenda.  His campaign manager even compared the primary comments to an 'etch-a-sketch' toy at the time, meaning they could be erased and no longer matter with the primaries over.

[Johnny1A]

On Monday, February 26, 2018 at 6:57:27 PM UTC-6, Warren Ellis wrote:

That's good. But then the media and the rest of the establishment will then try to confuse illegal immigration with legal immigration, deliberately, to paint being anti-illegal immigration as terrible.

Fun fact, NAFTA was partially sold to the US public as cutting back illegal immigration. Instead it helped increase it quite a bit.

Yes.  Exactly so.  We've have had promise after promise after promise to deal with illegal immigration, but the truth is that the business wing of the GOP and the liberal wing of the Dems just simply don't want to stop it, they want to encourage it.

The Kochs, right now, are running ads extolling the patriotism and American-ness of the illegals:

 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/26/watch-pro-mass-immigration-koch-brothers-new-campaign-for-amnesty-daca-illegal-aliens-are-patriots/

The business wing wants cheap labor and to import customers.

[Johnny1A]

On Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 9:27:03 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

The same old story is being retold on immigration...but somehow the plot is twisting.

We just finished a government pseudo-shutdown, in which Congress failed to pass a Continuing Resolution to fund certain non-immediately-urgent priorities, which has happened every now and then for the last couple of decades.  Back in 1995-96, we had one that lasted 21 days.

The interesting thing about these showdowns is that they are not what they pretend to be, in several senses.  The Federal Government doesn't really shut down, the military remains on duty, the Postal Service delivers the mail, the SoSec checks go out on time.  But the media usually goes into histrionics.  Each side, naturally, blames the other, and the media invariably sides with the Democrats and blames the GOP.  What these showdowns really are is contests for public opinion.

Interestingly, over the last 20+ years or so, the Dems have either won every single contest, or the effect was a wash.  In the 1995-96 'shutdown', President Clinton had the upper hand and he knew it, for multiple reasons.  The press was solidly on his side, as were most of the public employee unions and most of the academy.  The GOP foolishly misread their victory in 1994, in which they retook the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades, as a mandate for their business/economic agenda, when in fact it was more about nationalism and social issues.  So when they made a stand on fiscal issues, they played straight into Clinton's hands, because Clinton understood their victory better than they themselves did.

...

Upshot is that the GOP actually won a government 'shutdown showdown', visibly and definitely.  It wasn't just a wash, which was the best they've managed before, it was a clean win, Durbin and Schumer folded after less than 3 days and they ended up with the blame for the shutdown.  This simply has not happened in recent memory, and Washington is in a bit of a shock.

That doesn't mean that the immigration argument is over, of course.  The Dems still want open borders and unlimited immigration, and the Chamber of Commerce and their GOP allies (Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Bennett, Cory Gardner, etc.) want it too.  But it's getting harder and harder for them to say with a straight face that the public wants that too.

 Now we find ourselves, very nearly a year later, in the situation of a partial government shut down over the issue of...immigration again.  This is becoming the issue that ate politics, both in America and Europe.

Trump 'won' the brief shutdown in January of 2018, but in the subsequent omnibus spending bill 'negotiation', Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Trump's own negotiating team, many of whom were privately still working for various business players like the Koch brothers, or who privately preferred open borders, more or less gave the victory back to the Democrats.  When Trump singed that omnibus, the fury from the right wing voters was palpable.

At the time, of course, Ryan and McConnell promised that there would be funding 'next time'.  Of course they fully intended to keep kicking the can down the road indefinitely, and likewise maintain open borders indefinitely, because that's what business and Wall Street want.  They've been promising their voters 'next time' for ten years now, cycle after cycle.

This time, as the deadline drew close before Christmas, the Senate under McConnell once again tried to kick the can down the road.  He proposed and the Senate passed (without a roll call vote) a bill to fund the government for a few weeks, promising to take up the border issue again then.  Of course 'then' would have a Democratic House under Pelosi, making any progress toward funding border security or a wall impossible, which is of course what McConnell and the old-line business wing GOP want.  This time, though, either on his own or under pressure from his voters, it hardly matters which, Trump drew a line and threatened to veto the temporary funding bill if it didn't have what he wants, forcing McConnell to have the fight he'd rather not have.

Once again, a pattern we've seen for 2 years now emerges, whether Trump succeeds or fails, he's forced the politicians in Washington, and esp. the GOP politicos, to reveal who they really are and where they really stand.  There's a raw fury on display that this is happening, outgoing Senators like Corker and Flake can barely contain their anger and disdain.  Corker was out saying over the last couple of days that he had proposed a bill to do everything Trump wants and it had been rejected.  Of course that's true...technically.  It was another 'comprehensive' bill, containing both enforcement provisions and amnesty provisions.  Of course, only the legalization would ever have happened, the enforcement would have been dropped, and by now, almost everyone knows that.  That's part of why Corker is an outgoing Senator this year.

The GOP just lost the House because they had Congress for 2 years and managed to achieve nothing on immigration reductions.  They leadership still doesn't want to address this, because their donors and business supporters are getting frantic over wages beginning to rise, and are demanding more immigration to bring it back down.  The GOP voters are existentially opposed to that, it's an unbridgeable gap that is tearing the GOP apart.

As I said, immigration is becoming the issue, the argument that is beginning to define politics.  That's dangerous, but it appears to be happening.

[Johnny1A]

On Monday, December 24, 2018 at 1:16:37 AM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

The GOP just lost the House because they had Congress for 2 years and managed to achieve nothing on immigration reductions.  They leadership still doesn't want to address this, because their donors and business supporters are getting frantic over wages beginning to rise, and are demanding more immigration to bring it back down.  The GOP voters are existentially opposed to that, it's an unbridgeable gap that is tearing the GOP apart.

As I said, immigration is becoming the issue, the argument that is beginning to define politics.  That's dangerous, but it appears to be happening.

Now it's over a week into January and the 'shutown' continues, and Trump made a fairly coherent, reasonable address to the country last night.  The Dems made a 'response' that didn't play as well.  The news media, leaning Democrat as they do, are pressing the idea that the majority of the population is with the Dems on this, but the eagerness of the Dems to end the 'shutdown' suggests they privately think that this is hurting them worse. 

The underlying politics remain much the same, though.  The GOP business wing still wants more immigration, to keep wages down and to import customers, the Dems still want to import voters.  Both parties in Washington privately want to get back to the pre-Trump status quo, but this issue refuses to fade away.  Losing the House of Representatives seems to have liberated Trump rather than restrained him, in part because a large percentage of the departing GOP members were open borders advocates and business-wing voices, in part because Dem control of the House gives Trump a clear rival target to blame.

[Johnny1A]

A lot of people have been wondering what's up with Lindsey Graham (R-SC).  He's always been an open borders man, but lately he's been backing Trump and sounding border-hawkish.  A lot of cynical GOP base members have been waiting for the betrayal, and this might be it.  Apparently, Graham has teamed up with a few other GOP Senators to produce a bill that would (supposedly) partially fund the border wall in exchange for some amnesty giveaways to big business (H1-B, etc).

The Senators are:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Susan Collins (R-Maine)

Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)

Lisa Murkowski R-Alaska)

Rob Portman (R-Ohio)

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

In short, the same old same old, who look to be trying, yet again, to disguise an amnesty bill as an enforcement bill.   They risk infuriating the base voters, but at the same time, they are utterly dependent on big business funding.  Same old split, yet again.  The GOP business wing wants increased immigration for cheaper labor and subsidized customers, the GOP voting base wants immigration reductions.  This divide is bidding fair to rip the GOP apart.