I hope that this is true, but I doubt, but I am profoundly dubious that once the American public will end its support for ICE-type brutality they understand what is being done in their name.
This othering has been central to American politics since before the founding of the Republic, so count me as skeptical.
While I do think that one could turn this hostility towards employers who exploit illegal workers, as well as those who weaponize hatred in order to exploit legal workers:
The Gallup poll on whether Americans think immigration should be increased or decreased shows a curious pattern. From about 2001 at a high of 65 percent, there was a steady decline in the fraction of respondents who favored less immigration, with a corresponding upward trend in the fraction favoring more. The lines briefly crossed in mid-2020, with a plurality in favor of increased immigration—but starting in 2021, there was a sudden jump back toward restriction.
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump consistently received his highest approval ratings on immigration. The fraction of people saying that immigration is the most important issue in the country jumped from 9.2 percent in 2021 to 14.6 percent in 2024. And Trump’s xenophobic stance seemingly paid off even among Latinos who would be targets of his mass deportation agenda—he was the first Republican to win the Rio Grande Valley, which is chock-full of mixed-status families, since 1912. Post-election reporting saw many anecdotes of unauthorized immigrants themselves saying they would have voted for Trump, because surely he wouldn’t deport hardworking people like themselves.
But now, that support is fading fast. More recent polls show the priority of immigration plummeting, and majority disapproval for Trump on the issue. In the most recent YouGov/Economist poll, he is now 11 points underwater, down 16 points since he was inaugurated. Among Latinos, he is now 46 points underwater.
I think it is reasonably clear what is going on here. Republicans have a highly effective propaganda apparatus that, with the decline of mainstream journalism and the rise of social media, is more effective than ever. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, conservatives successfully whipped up a xenophobic anti-immigrant frenzy with a torrent of outrageous lies, against a background of perceived crisis at the border. But as soon as Trump takes power and makes actual decisions rather than just spreading misinformation, the public gets a whiff of what Republican anti-immigrant policy looks like in practice, and they don’t like it. It turns out that few people thought they were voting for the president to kidnap a legal resident by mistake, deport him to a torture prison in a foreign country, and openly defy a Supreme Court order to bring him back.
The problem here is that things really suck in our society, and until we direct people's attention to the actual causes of these problems, which is to say what Theodore Roosevelt called the, "Malefactors of great wealth."
The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needs to stop pre-conceding negotiations with the Republicans and point the finger at those who are actually
0 comments :
Post a Comment