[quote=@Vilageidiotx] I think I brought up before that the "They just need to be allowed to do their jobs" is a political line and describes more or less paying a few people to look for needles in haystacks. Case in point, Ann Coulter said it. She's as trustworthy a figure as quoting, like, Bill Maher or something. Political pundits are not sources. Low-skill workers are also Wal-Marts base. Limiting the amount of employees doesn't work because it limits the amount of patrons by the same number. This I think is where I really disagree with Trumps economic policies; It's smoke and mirrors, to hide the fact that the conditions the working class are faced with are naturally dictated by the nature of capitalism. This is pure economic snake oil. It's a good position because it's a problem that cannot be fixed (short of Latin America getting its shit together) and therefore can always be there to be blamed on the liberals. As for agriculture, this is where illegal immigrant and just immigrant gets mixed together. The migrant agricultural workers, generally legal, have been part of the Western economic culture since, like, there was white people out there owning farms. It exists because the work is seasonal, low paying, not enough to sustain non-migrant populations, and because Americans generally don't like migratory work. Even if Trump manages to somehow get rid of all the illegal immigrants in the United States, Hispanic migrant workers would still be there. Which is good, because getting rid of them would be highly disruptive. You aren't going to be able to empty a bunch of Idaho bedroom communities to get your potatoes picked. That sounds so easy on paper, but it's a lazy dream of a plan. Okay, so you build the wall. The coyotes get clever, illegal immigration becomes a professional deal, and we have a big cement mess on our border for people to bitch about. You drag a few abuellas out of their sanctuary cities, make a few ugly headlines, and what you get out of it is a population stealing industrial jobs from Chihuahua because as it turns out you cannot get rid of them as economic units even if you throw them across the border. You shut down the guest worker program and western agriculture has a fit (probably won't be shut down because of this. Agriculture is a hell of a lobbyist). And what you get is... well, like I said, you've just moved economic units around. If we take a protectionist stance against Mexico and China, our access to cheap products dwindles equal to our cheap labor so that the purchasing power of the average American either stays the same or dwindles. Protectionism doesn't work. This is, like, economics 101 from every modern economic theory still in practice. It's populist but it's impractical because it always requires making decisions on half of the information. A competing worker lost is a customer lost, a foreign competitor quelled is a foreign market closed. It sounds good because it allows people to imagine that there is just this one tiny thing in their way, but it's not the way the real world works. I guarantee you, grab some modern economic books, the heady academic shit and not the silly pundit to-be-sold-in-grocery-stores stuff, and you'll find immigrants on the backburner to real, and much more complicated, problems. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Always? I've done this plenty of times and never saw food come up as a serious argument. It seemed a bit tone deaf that you took it so seriously. I guarantee you I don't base my ideas on what the Mexican government thinks. They're to blame for a lot of this. That they'd chase a childish policy like building a border wall is par for the course as far as their poor method of government is concerned. The drug problem is incidentally where I come to agree with you here. Whereas the economic argument might be diversionary at best, the drug problem is something we should really be focusing on. A big part of Mexico's problem, and really our problem as well, is the cartel empire in the north pushing drugs over the border. There is nothing good coming out of that. Now, I don't think a wall will fix that issue, but moving resources currently committed to chasing abuellas, or cracking down on drug-users or the production of soft drugs, to deal with the hard drug problem, that seems like it would be good policy. But the rest of it is weak. The world economy as it stands now is global. A Mexican stealing an American job in Tulsa, if sent back over the border, will steal another job in manufacturing. If we went back to the high tariff system, Mexico (or China or whoever) would reciprocate and our access to cheap goods would diminish. You can't really find the 'Golden Capitalism' or whatever, what you see is what you get. Illegal immigration is as it stands a cheap populist issue the right likes to use because they know it can't go away, and because they have maneuvered themselves into a place where they can always blame liberals on it. It's like a pinata with an endless supply of candy (or whatever a Trump regime would rename it. A Freedom Beating-doll?). Hell, I'm not even particularly offended at the idea he may try, because whereas I think he's chasing unicorns, It's not like anybody is suggesting anything growed up yet. Because really, the thing that annoys me about it is that we'd waste so much resources chasing such a stupid fix, taking away energy from any real fixes. But for that to be a problem there would have to be somebody trying to get a real fix in place, and we aren't really spending the energy to do so yet. It's like we are biding our time until the whole system blows up or something. What do we do in the mean time, watch Trump pollute a few news cycles beating up field workers, or watch Hillary basically do nothing and tell us everything is fine? Neither does much of anything that'll have a good effect, so we are basically just choosing how we are going to fuck up. [/quote] Well a couple of points: -People with decent paying jobs shop and Walmart too. It's not a 1:1 ratio. -What's wrong with stopping cheap goods from being imported from China? I shouldn't have to remind you that there was a time when such products were all made in America, and the economy was doing just fine. -Well if there are any academic-level economic books on the subject, that you've personally read, you're welcome to cite them, and I'll give them a look. -I'm sure you're likewise aware that protectionism comes with tariffs on imported goods, meaning a Mexican thrown out of Tulsa, won't "steal another job in manufacturing", as there won't be any American manufacturing south of the border. I think you lost me a couple times. One was at the Chihuahua comment. If you don't mind, could you explain how exactly they're going to continue occupying American jobs when they're thrown out of the country? Likewise, what does "Latin America getting their shit together" have to do with this?