[ls612]

But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.

[dfxm12]

What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.

[mothballed]

I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.

If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.

[ls612]

I mean that is basically the entire basis of the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Even after 8 years of trying to correct for it it showed up last year enough to tip the election from one which the polls said was a dead heat in the Electoral College to a clear Trump and Republican popular vote victory.

[shwaj]

You missed the point: they were referring to the sentiment that lead to Trump’s election. Many of those voters , I would guess, feel that the way Trump is doing it is cruel and chaotic.

This obviously doesn’t imply that those who voted for Trump on this basis want to go back to the open border Biden days.

[rat87]

They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers

[uoaei]

Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.

[ls612]

Political support is due to people voting for it, and in the US system that is the arbiter of who will get to enact their policies.

[defrost]

This is true.

Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.

The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.

[ReflectedImage]

But if they hadn't been flouted, the US would be a dirt farm specializing in the farming and production of dirt. Hacker news wouldn't even exist.