The Republican Immigration Illusion

I recently attended a party where a professional magician was both performing before an audience and walking around during dinner and performing for different tables. I had never see a magician perform in person. I knew the illusion was all about distracting me with chatter and arm movements away from where he actually was moving his props around, but I still could not see how he did it, even when he was very close. He was a master of manipulating my perceptions to disguise what was actually happening.

Not unlike what Donald Trump and the Republican party do with Immigration. Immigration is a really complex and difficult problem. Complexity is the perfect setting for illusion.

To understand how the Republican Illusion works you have to keep in mind one basic fact. Only Congress can change the immigration law. The President oversee’s enforcement but only an Act of Congress can change the law.

In the run up to the 2016 election, about 70% of voters said immigration was an important issue. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress in 2015 and 2016, and a number of immigration bills were introduced with press releases touting their release, but none made much headway, fixing immigration was not a priority for the Republican leadership. We saw why in the campaigning for the 2016 election, as Donald Trump and the Republican party harped on evil immigrants and our border problem. It worked, they won the election.

In Trump’s first two years in office we had a Republican President and Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. It was the first time since 2006 Republicans controlled everything. Early in that Congressional term Republicans loudly introduced some immigration bills, but over the next 18 months or so they quietly let the bills die. Congress did nothing to change the law governing immigration.

Consider that — Republican’s controlled both houses of Congress with a Republican President. They could have rewritten the immigration law any way they wanted to. They either had no idea how to fix immigration, or they did not want to fix immigration.

Contrast that with Obama’s two years where he had Democratic majorities. He enacted Obamacare against ferocious opposition, because he wanted to solve the problem.

Here is the misdirection part of Trump’s trick. To avoid revealing the Republicans didn’t really care about immigration, Trump began issuing Presidential orders. Many of his presidential orders were patently illegal under existing law, so the courts would then strike them down and feed into his narrative that this was a huge problem caused by the Democrats and Deep State, that only he could solve.

The fact is the Republican party is the party of big business, and they like immigrants who work hard for low wages. So the Republicans do not want to solve the immigration problems. But they need it as a issue to win elections, and in particular Trump wanted the issue for his reelection.

The notion the Republican Congress in Trump’s first two years was incompentent to change the law is refuted by the rapidity with which they amended the tax code to benefit wealthy business owners (like himself), tax cuts that further acelerated the rate of growth in the national debt.

Some of Trumps executive orders cut the allotment of legal immigrants by about 50% — a stroke of evil genius. With the stroke of a pen he created more illegal immigrants by eliminating about 50% of the legal immigration slots available. In the meantime he imprisoned families, seperated children from their parents , built vastly expensive and ultimately disfunctional walls— all great media events that kept his face at the top of the news feeds, and greatly exaggerated how big a problem we have with immigration, and distracted folks from the simple fact Republicans controlled Congress and made a deliberate decision not to the change the immigration law.

Republicans have thrived over the last couple decades by harvesting votes from single issue voters, anti abortion voters, anti-gay voters, racial bigots. Immigration is the last hot button issue left for them since the vast majority of Americans no longer have a problem with gay people, or people of color, and the Supreme Court has turned abortion into an issue that helps the Democrats and hurts the Republcians. They can’t run on the economy, given that Wall street and all the economist are talking about how Bidenomics has turned a probable recession into a strong economy.

So immigration is all they have left to save their perks and power. Altough a century of data demonstrates when Republicans control policy the National debt rises, GDP drops, working folks wages stagnate, fewer folks can afford homes, so a big Republican loss would be good for the country, it would put a lot of Republicans out of a job, Republicans now focus on creating the illusion of chaos all across our nearly 2000 mile long southern border.

They used to argue immigrants took jobs from Americans. That argument was never really true, they took jobs no citizen would do. Now many employers cannot get enough employees to run their businesses. A problem related in some small part to Trump cutting 50% of the legal immigration slots to aggravate the immigration problem. So their only option left is to convince voters there is chao’s at the border.

Immigration is a policy where there are a lot of legitimate views, depending on the factors each individual believes to be important. But historical fact demonstrates the Republican party is more interested in aggravating the problem than solving it.

Although a lot of voters haven’t figured this shell game out yet, Congressional Democrats have. So early this year Congressional Democrats told the House Republican’s to write an immigration bill amending the law. The House Republicans wrote their dream bill, I suspect thinking the Democrats to would object to lots of stuff and turn it into a fight where nothing would end up getting done and they could blame the Democrats. But, Democrats said fine, lets enact your proposal as is into law. Trump immediately said no, so the Congressional Republicans refused to move forward on their own immigration bill because solving immigration would kill their election chances — they have no other issue to appeal to the vast majority of voters.

The illusion they worked to establish over the last 6 years was exposed.

Don’t judge Republicans by what they say about immigration, or any issue. Like magicians, they live off misdirection to foster illusions.

Judge them by what they do. Since Ronald Reagan started cutting taxes on the wealthy 40 years ago the first thing Congressional Republicans do when they get control of both Congress and the Presidency has been to enact further tax cuts for the wealthy and find ways to push more of the tax burden onto the not so wealthy. There is little else Congressional Republicans can point to as achievements over the last 40 plus years. The fixation on tax cuts resulted in the Great Recession that then evolved into a cycle of low interst rates that blew inflation to a 40 year high, In the meantime we now have the highest National Debt in our nations history, working incomes have stagnated, buying a house has become a pipe dream for many, homelessness has exploded, and the nation has bred a new breed of people sucking up enormous amounts of the wealth our economy generates.

See through the charade.