Big Ag and commerce love them so much that once upon a time the big growers actually convinced Congress to send a fleet of buses down INTO Mexico to RECRUIT BRACEROS for the picking seasons.
And then suddenly just a handful of years later, these SAME people were rounded up in Operation Wetback, and dumped off in the middle of the Mexican deserts with no food or water, creating a massive humanitarian crisis. But we won't look at that stunning display of hypocrisy, will we?
That's precisely WHY few if any have respect for our immigration policies.
They're as fickle and changing as the wind, and utterly beholden to the whims of the big industrial and agricultural barons in this country, and any pretense that this has anything to do with national security or any other values statement is pure theater.
I assure you that once produce prices begin to skyrocket, and once cheap labor becomes too expensive, Trump and his supporters will quietly seek whatever loopholes they can muster to poke holes in the so called "wall" and our so called "airtight immigration policies".
And Trump supporters, who are also every bit as fickle as he is, will pirouette and pivot once again, as they always do.
As always, they will even lie outright to defend such pivoting, because that is what HE does, therefore that is what THEY do.
So, I don't care if this thread mushrooms to some record setting number of pages, because no matter how much shrieking, yelling, wailing and squawking his supporters engage in, none of that changes this eternal truth:
America NEEDS the cheap labor offered by illegal immigrants, and will DO ANYTHING to get it.
If that was not the case, crops wouldn't be rotting in the fields right now, and costs in several key industries that use cheap illegal immigrant labor (mostly construction, hospitality and agriculture) wouldn't be on the rise.
One other side effect:
Thirteen billion dollars was paid into the Social Security Trust Fund in 2010, and similar amounts were paid in the years prior and after as well.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_notes/note151.pdf
Of course, losing that extra money provides extra ammo to the Right Wing that advocates for abolishing Social Security altogether anyway.