Damn freeloaders takin' all the jobs!

That was my first thought as well. Assuming a large enough amount of immigrants, they could be overwhelming both the welfare system and the job market. A sufficiently large group of additional people would overwhelm every system, and depending on the preexisting conditions, that group might not need to be all that big

Take my angry upvote!

They should feel privileged that he deigned to notice them, I guess. He big-um strong "man", they being weak tiny women-folk and all. (this one yes \s)

I would be only half surprised if he or one of his follows became the world's first man to get a surgery to graft on a second (no... ah... FIVE!) penises, just to prove how "masculine" he is.

Then he could show them off at every rally, by peeing on all the attendants. They would thank him for his service! :-P (extremely unfortunately, no \s on this one...)

Yup. They are playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette, hoping it won't be them that actually gets the blast. Or maybe "chicken" is a better phrasing - which side will blink first? The one who cares least about losing is the one that "wins", except can you call that winning, REALLY?

Like, hey I have an idea, let's beat up all the nerds, who actually like... think and stuff... and junk. THAT will surely turn out alright? :-(

It reminds me of how Kansas lowered taxes, then went bankrupt, then did it again, then wanted to do it AGAIN!? (then other states wanted to follow suit - it really is a repeating pattern, where nobody ever learns the lessons of even just a handful of years prior) There, they stuck microphones in the farmers faces (farmers would have been the top benefactors of lowering taxes in that state) and asked them what they would do if taxes were lowered - would they "create jobs"? Their answers were absolutely priceless. "No... (looks with disgust on their faces) why (the fuck) WOULD we!?" They even went into detail - there is only so much crop out there, you can't simply hire more workers and somehow magically get more profits. Plus Americans don't want to work those jobs anyway, plus they already manage to get the tasks done as it is, what possible reason would they want to hire on more people for, especially stable jobs, for American citizens? So then the reporters would ask what they would do with all that extra money. "I dunno... prolly put it in the bank, I guess?"

Apparently "JOBS" is a magical 4-letter word that if you lower taxes on the wealthy, somehow just magically materializes. Meanwhile the actual job creators are saying... not so much. Companies like Garmin in Kansas want a nice workplace for their workforce - they want hospitals, roads, bridges, and the like. If they wanted to live in Mississippi or Florida, then they would move there, but they do not. i.e., they WANT to pay taxes, or at least benefit from a place where taxes have been paid into, in the past.

So Republicans in Kansas lowered taxes, supposedly for the sake of the farmers, except even the majority of farmers did not want that, and then the entire state went bankrupt, AGAIN.

But by all means, let's try it still yet again, on the scale of the entire nation this time, and against the will of the majority of voters - surely that will end well once more? :-( (to clarify, I mean that it will work out well for Putin, and really if you stop to think about it, that is all that matters... right? RIGHT!?)

Whether or not his administration managed to cut back on illegal crossings (mainly ICE raids I would guess), he definitely and dramatically did cut back on legal visas offered. Thus farmers, who relied heavily upon those with temporary work visas, panicked there during the first year of his administration, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-backed-trump-but-now-fear-losing-field-workers.html.

If conservatives really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they would go after the employers who hire them

Conservatives never really want to accomplish most of their stated goals - it's like a dog chasing after a car, they wouldn't know what to do if they ever caught it. The catch is that Trump isn't actually conservative, he simply used those talking points, too dumb to realize that he wasn't supposed to mean any of it:-P.

He also wasn't Republican either, although there he won, since he hollowed out the Republican party, laid his eggs inside its brain and now he controls the corpse. I think McCarthy was the last vestige of a Tea Party style fiscal conservative, and now the Alt Right has taken complete control, even as they already have started eating their own and demolishing that from the inside with an even more hardcore line, where e.g. the infamously extreme Fox News is no longer extreme enough.

But anyway, yeah if they truly wanted to stop immigration that is what would need to be done, but they don't be it's such an easy talking point that they've invested so much effort into, they can't afford to lose out on it now by actually solving the damn thing!:-P

Surely there are things that he says that I would even agree with - though I more often question how he says them (that is not me down-voting you though to be clear - a respectful conversation as you are doing is always welcome in my book).

e.g. I agreed with Hillary Clinton on the "ninth-month abortion" topic - there are only less than a handful of those all across the country, and at that point there is 0% chance that they are from irresponsible loose women forgetting to take a pill (or whatever the thinking is there) and 100% chance that it is a huge medical complication. Her answer there was "politicians should not be dictating such matters - that is a subject best left up to the experts and the patient to decide together". She may be corrupt as sin and her answers were all focus-tested prior to delivery but... nevertheless she was right about that, imho.

Whereas his answer was "baby killer" - as if this literally heart-rending occurrence where the life of the mother is at stake and the loss of the fetus is virtually a foregone conclusion at that point was all besides the point.

They BOTH played the game in their respective ways there. And while I may not have liked her, I did like her answers, while his to that question was so incredibly juvenile that I could hardly believe my ears and eyes, seeing it from the leading candidate of an actual Presidential race. (btw funny video about it - she goes first but don't worry, after the first minute he comes with some really great jabs:-P)

I would encourage you to remember though that even if you enjoyed his performance in the debate: he is so dumb that other people ended up pulling most of his strings after he got into office, and he never even realized how much he was being manipulated - in fact he still does not, years after-the-fact. Trump is not "conservative", nor even quite "Republican" so much as a mad bull tearing through the china shop breaking everything that he pleases touches. A vote for him is a vote for anarchy, which sounds fun only to those who have neither experienced it nor studied history to realize what it truly means. imho at least, ofc take with a grain of salt (i.e. be properly skeptical), except it also happens to be shared by most people who study most matters all across the nation world. When the experts (almost) all agree on something, it is either the largest conspiracy of all time ever, or else it just might be true!

I agree that everyone uses the system... but not equally. She would have been a horrible President - more than half the nation agreed with you on that so hard that they outright handed the election to him (with deeds, not merely words) - but that does not in turn mean that he was a good one, and especially that he would be again.

strange that a lot of the antivax crowd also happens to be nazis

You could accuse her of many things, but not of being smart.

If an employer can't 'afford' to pay you properly he shouldn't run a business.

While that's a nice sentiment that I agree with, you need to remember that those low paying jobs illegal immigrants often take, still pay far more than they could ever hope to make back home. Add to the low to nonexistent job skills and language issues, they start from far, far behind the eightball.

Having worked with large number of illegals back in the day, I found the vast majority to be quite genuinely nice people and co-workers. And they were some of the hardest workin' sumbitches you would ever be around.

What I found interesting was the friction between the second and younger generations of Tex/Mex families and the newly arrived Mexicans, (I use Mexican to denote the actual country of origin here - sad that I need to do so). The first generation immigrants were very religious and conservative. While the second generations often adopted the more liberal attitudes of the locals. It caused a lot of ill undercurrents between the two groups.

If a Mexican dude tells me his gang will refloor my living room for $5/hr. per man, I’m all in because I can’t afford to pay “real” labor prices.

IDK if that's really the general case. Everyone in my social circles tips well and pays decent wages when they need help, even though we're all kinda poor. I'm sure there are some people who feel differently, but I suspect the majority are decent folks who treat others the way they want to be treated themselves.

Are you trying to say there's oil in Mexico and invading a sovereign state is justified if you think you run things better?