And what defen is saying is that the actual debate is about "illegal" immigrants. Not all immigrants. I have absolutely no idea where the idea that Trump doesn't want legal immigrants in the country came from; as that's certainly not true.
It's more than just immigration, it's trade too, as mentioned in the OP.
I work for a multinational contract manufacturing company; we currently have plants and employees in (among many other nations) Mexico (full of the Mexicans Donald Trump threatened to build a wall around) and Malaysia (which is majority Islam, of whom Donald Trump threatened to ban from the USA). So, yes, this result is quite... interesting... to me. Hopefully Trump is more bluster than action here.
I'll be honest, the problem with the current wave of anti-globalization (eg Brexit and Trump, also count France's Le Pen among others) is that I can't see the solutions being advocated doing any good economically for those who are advocating it. If anything, it may make things worse. Of course, a lot of what is driving these movements is more cultural anxiety and has less to do with pure economic factors, which in my opinion makes this a lot more challenging to resolve.
> I work for a multinational contract manufacturing company; we currently have plants and employees in (among many other nations) Mexico (full of the Mexicans Donald Trump threatened to build a wall around) and Malaysia (which is majority Islam, of whom Donald Trump threatened to ban from the USA). So, yes, this result is quite... interesting... to me. Hopefully Trump is more bluster than action here.
Those are certainly valid concerns, but can you explain to me how legal work visas don't address that? (Serious question.)
Legal work visas don't address the trade angle. It's unclear to me how Trump as president will affect both our global suppliers and our global customers, particularly the trade across borders.
It may end up being nothing, but to me it is an uncertainy. Businesses generally don't like uncertainty.
Plus, if we took Trump's primary bluster 100% literally (that "ban all the Muslims" talk), no one from our Malaysia plant who is Islam could visit corporate headquarters for any reason, work visa or not.
Such of course could end up being complete bluster, it probably is to be honest. Again, though, there's the uncertainty.
> I have absolutely no idea where the idea that Trump doesn't want legal immigrants in the country came from; as that's certainly not true.
He probably got it from Trump himself on one of the many occasions when Trump has talked about it. It seems plausible that he wants a c. 30% drop in net legal immigration.[1]
This is also a cornerstone of the Brexit "movement" (if you can really call a loose coalition of people without degrees in low income areas a movement). They want to cap or limit immigration, despite not being exposed to it in any meaningful way. (40% of inner-London's population is "foreign born", which suggests that a disproportionately high number of the UK's migrants live here -- a city which almost unanimously voted to stay in the EU.)
As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect. There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain. No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.
> As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect.
It's interesting that a "highly educated physician" can't draw a distinction between one potentially anomalous datapoint -- their own characteristics -- and the data drawn from the characteristics of 15 million people. I had thought the makeup of the two respective movements were well-known.
Remain voters are more likely to be degree educated, and to live in a large metropolitan area which experiences significant immigration. Leave voters are more likely to be older, have tertiary college or a GCSE as their highest form of education, and live in a smaller cities, towns, and villages.
> There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain.
By and large they're shuffling about with their tails between their legs at the moment as every single fiscal institution's observations about what a disaster a "leave" vote would be comes true, but you're right and I don't dispute this. The point I made is that the aggregate view of the leave movement -- and you can find this as galling as you like -- is of an uneducated, parochial, and ageing demographic.
> No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.
This is true, and is entirely unrelated to my original post. Amongst the college-educated, Trump won men and women by the bucketload (I think the only category he didn't win was college-educated white women but it was still a close-run thing).
Actually there's quite a body of evidence to suggest that when GDP is growing and income disparity is not significant, culture/sovereignty/immigration are not used as political footballs. When income disparity grows and GDP growth slows (or there's a recession), extremist politics -- usually centred around some sort of binary opposition -- rise. I.e. economics is everything, and people only kick up a fuss about other things when times are bad.
> Sovereignty
In purely semantic terms we are a sovereign nation irrespective of our EU membership. So it would be useful for you to unpack exactly what you mean by sovereignty. (IIRC the only way to violate one's sovereignty are: harbouring terrorists, invading a neighbouring country, violating the genocide convention, breaking nuclear non-proliferation.)
> Population density
Population density is fascinating to me because when you look at the 6m or so foreign-born workers in the UK, only 1.9m of them come from the EU. Bans on India, China, and Pakistan would be better ways to reduce population density. And, of course, if you removed all of the foreign born workers in the UK, you would see a massive reduction of… 24 people per km2.
I always thought people really cared about immigration's perceived drain on welfare. Which is why it's so funny that EEA migrants either a) overwhelmingly pay for themselves (pro-Remain numbers) or b) almost pay for themselves and certainly do a better job of it than the average UK national (pro-Leave numbers). Of the 7% of non-UK nationals who take up the welfare budget, Pakistanis are more likely to receive benefits than any other nation, and in the top 10 there's only three or four EEA nations.
> Culture
Left this one until last. The culture of Britain hasn't changed for the worse since Enoch Powell in the 1960s, Paki bashing in the 1970s, monkey chants from the football terraces in the 1980s, has it?
The "uneducated" argument is beyond played out now. One does not become "enlightened" and align some common set of views by simply getting a degree. If this is true then it's not called education, it's called brainwashing.
> The "uneducated" argument is beyond played out now.
You cannot equivocate on this point. When considered in the aggregate, leave voters are less educated than remainers. You can read whatever you want into that, but to say it's "played out" sounds like you're disputing it.
> One does not become "enlightened" and align some common set of views by simply getting a degree.
Nobody said anything about enlightenment or aligning around a common set of views simply by getting a degree.
> If this is true then it's not called education, it's called brainwashing.
Actually, no, it's probably called education. It's impossible to quantify, but it's axiomatic that traversing through to most classical forms of higher education has the effect of opening one's eyes to a broader range of viewpoints and beliefs than one might have previously been exposed to.
Education isn't about specific points of view or pieces of information, but about philosophy, critical thinking, and communication. For the many thousands of Brexit voters who feel duped by the economic aftermath and winding-back on promises made by the leave side, a little education on critical thinking and the outright, literal lies of the media they consume would probably have led to them voting differently, and feeling happier about it.
Regardless, nostrademons' point still stands. Over 50% of US farm workers are undocumented immigrants[1], and 1 in 10 farm workers in California are undocumented migrant workers[2]. That's a very sizable chunk of the labor pool.
Ann Coulter is the defacto Trump advisor on immigration and she can't hide her preference for either only or predominantly white immigration and if that untenable for some reason, just limit it to absolute minimum.
So, it is not just about illegal immigration, this is just a red herring for what it really is at stake here.
