Trump vs. Mexico omnibus thread

[eric82oslo]

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/04/politics/bush-trump-immigrants/

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I like what Governor Bush said, and he was very diplomatic in stating that Trump isn't a moron, which he is.

The fact that Donald Trump is considered a legitimate Republican shows a failure of the media to hold this man accountable. He isn't successful because of his own doing, he's successful because of government corporate welfare policies, bailouts, and generous bankruptcy laws that have enabled him to use what money he already had to expand in ways small business could not. Additionally, Trump is a socialist who once supported a wealth tax and socialized medicine, he is still a protectionist who would have left Saddam Hussein in power.

Bottom line: Trump is a bigot, a sociopath, an egomaniac, and a socialist and I'm tired of this entertainer running for President. This nation is hurting, and this guy makes bigoted comments and takes air time away from serious candidates like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.

Trump may be all of these things, but he's the most likely Republican to tell the rest of the world where they can stick NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, and TPP.  He's against the Establishment and Beltway classes; the folks who keep telling me how good "Free Trade" is for America.  He has an idea as to what it takes to maintain a middle class society, and he actually knows something about how the macro economy works.  (Scott Walker knows about state and local government.  Whoopee!)

Trump's comments were certainly inflammatory and somewhat overstates, but are there not serious problems with crime stemming from the behavior of illegal immigrants?  The 18th Street Gang (a major gang in California) has approximately 20,000 members, 12,000 of which are illegal gang members.  In Los Angeles in 2006, 2/3 of the 17,000 fugutive felony warrants in Los Angeles County, CA were for illegal aliens.  Even more remarkable, 95% of the 1,500 outstanding warrants for homicide involved illegal aliens as defendants.

Is it wrong to talk about these numbers?  Is it wrong to assert that numbers like this suggest a real problem in terms of who is able to gain entry to the United States?  Is it wrong to suggest that such a wave of immigrants involved in such activities coming from a country that has recently been awash in bloody drug violence represents the exporting of criminality from Mexico to the United States, and the result is a net decrease in public safety as a result?  Is it wrong to suggest that these problems do not occur with every immigrant group to the degree that they do with Mexican immigrants?  Because if it is wrong, then certain matters touching on the safety and welfare of individuals has become off limits for discourse; we are to operate on the assumption that immigrants from Mexico are just as law-abiding and contributory as immigrants from China and India, and that no special problems arise from their entry into the US, other than the "made up" problem of "undocumented" immigration that can be resolved by "meaningful reform".  

Mexican immigration is, in many ways, different from immigration from other countries.  They are  our neighbor, and there has never been a case of a nation being so much poorer than its neighbor as Mexico is in comparison to the US.  It's not an impossible situation to resolve the issue of immigration in a fair way, but it's not unreasonable to protect our borders, deport those illegally here, and be unapologetic about it.  There are lots of specific problems stemming from illegal immigration from Mexico and specific proposals to address this.   But it's time to get real on this.  

The best way to remedy this would be to increase by at the very least tenfold the amount of aid the US gives to Mexico and Central America. But for some reason, Latin America seems much more unimportant to almost every single US politician than Asia, Europe and Africa. For a European standpoint that I am, it just seems like madness. It could be compared to Norway caring much more about the wellbeing of Australia and New Zealand than the well-being of our closest Nordic neighbours.

[eric82oslo]

I sense a new Iran-Contra where Trump will secretly fuel millions (or maybe billions?) of dollars to the Mexican government in order for them to officially be paying for the new border wall. That's at least the only way he could get Mexicans to agree with them "paying" for it.