The best synopsis of the politics behind immigration I have ever read:

Why didn’t Trump do anything about the biggest source of illegal immigrants, those who overstayed their visa?
To be blunt, the Republican Party doesn’t actually care about immigration, illegal or otherwise. That should be fairly obvious to everyone by now: their purpose in talking about it so much is to get the Democratic Party on the “wrong side” of the issue, in order to win the GOP votes at election time.

Donald Trump’s wall, as you’ve obviously noticed, was just an expensive extension of that same approach: appearing to be doing something whilst actually doing nothing. Building a wall doesn’t do a damn thing, particularly since it a) could be climbed over (as was proven several times), b) kept falling over, c) didn’t cover obvious possible points of entry, like the Rio Grande and, as you noted, d) because the vast majority of people staying in the US illegally entered legally and simply overstayed their visas.

Now, the way we know that the GOP don’t give a damn about immigration is twofold: firstly, because a fairly large number of Republican businessmen (including Donald Trump) have frequently hired illegal immigrants as a source of cheap labour. Secondly, and here’s the most important part, they could resolve illegal immigration simply by enforcing the current law. If you arrest/fine every American businessman that hires illegals, there’ll be no work for them to take on the US side of the border…and no reason to emigrate illegally.

Why don’t they do this? Easy: because, in addition to alienating American businessmen, it would resolve the ‘problem’. The Republicans can’t solve the ‘problem’, because then they lose something that they can use to garner votes. As long as immigration is an electoral issue, they can campaign on it, and use it to get votes.

Of course, that’s only part of it. The other part is that they can keep attacking the Democratic Party on the basis of being ‘weak’ on national security, and for letting too many immigrants into the United States, thereby ‘taking jobs from hard-working Americans’ (not that most Americans would care to do the arduous jobs in question for the pathetic wages involved)…you’re familiar with the rhetoric, I’m sure.

Trump didn’t do anything about the issue because it was in the Republican Party’s interest that the issue remain unsolved. That’s true of a lot of GOP talking points, I might add. Look at the number of times that the Republicans have claimed that they have the solution…and look how many times they’ve actually resolved an issue. They’ll tell you that they know of the perfect approach, the best solutions ever, but when it comes time to implement them…

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Trumpers are Traitors
A place to speak plainly about those who would betray the US for a gameshow host
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Anglyn Hays
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