This is sad, you really think Trump is anti-immigrant? If you paid half a moment of attention you would know he is anti-ILLEGAL immigrant which is perfectly reasonable in a sovereign country with immigration laws.
Maybe that's fine with you. I don't think it sits well with a lot of people.
Realize as well that immigration status is a precarious thing, and it's not always clear who is here legally and who is not. Many people spend a long time in administrative limbo. I was in the US for seven years before I learned I was "legal".
Like many things, immigration is less clear-cut when you look at it in detail. I encourage you to do that, whether or not you end up agreeing with me.
You are casually dismissing the group of people who are the main focus of controversy: people who arrived as children and have been here all their lives. They have never known the country they would be deported to. They are Americans by lived experience. They broke no laws.
I am simply not comfortable deporting those people. It brings us no benefit whatsoever.
> I have followed this election closely and I have yet to hear a single thing that leads me to think he is going to deport legal citizens of any background whatsoever
If you have a "deportation force" that operates on the kind of scale he claims to want at the speed he wants, you are obviously going to deport some citizens. It happened during Operation Wetback and there is no reason to think it would not happen again. People just don't always have their papers in order, and the immigration courts are backed up for years.
I do know that I would be hard-pressed to come up with a more expensive, pointless, and futile way to attempt to restrict illegal immigration than building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, though.
Meanwhile: since 2000, the number of by-land unauthorized immigrants to the US has plummeted, with the share of unauthorized immigrants who simply overstay visas approaching 50%.
"The wall" isn't bad policy because it's inhumane. I care deeply about not deporting unauthorized immigrants but not even a little about the social impact of a big ugly wall in our big ugly southwest states.
"The wall" is bad policy because it's an extremely expensive make-work project that won't actually meaningfully reduce unauthorized immigration. It doesn't matter how high the wall is. Even the unauthorized immigrants who get here on land aren't running across open field land borders. The policy is a con, meant to appeal to a popular misconception of who unauthorized immigrants in this country are and how they got here.
You are like 2-3 Google searches away from verifying for yourself how stupid this particular use of funds is regardless of your opinions about immigration.
Again: it's annoying that we'd consider investing billions of dollars in a make-work project that really serves as nothing but a giant monument to racism --- couldn't we just paint the statue of liberty white, or something? --- but the real issue with the wall isn't moral, it's that it's a gigantic waste of money. It won't even prevent unauthorized immigration over our southern border, because that's not how unauthorized immigration works.
You know what would also be symbolic? A solid gold trash can, burning money 24/7.