Trump Officials Reverse Guidance Exempting Farms, Restaurants from Immigration Raids

Good.

   Theoretically, of course, this could cause economic harm. Well...actually, we should expect any such policies to cause some economic harm. The relevant question is: when all costs and benefits are taken into account, which policy is better?

   This question seems to me to be a bit like the tariff question. Some people want to focus purely on the immediate economic harm without asking about further implications or economic benefits. I'm (tentatively) on the side of those who say: I'm willing to pay more for food if it means cutting down on illegal immigration. You'd have to be a bit thick to think that we can take any such major action without any costs... (Similarly: I'm willing to pay more for gew-gaws from Amazon in order to not be dependent on China for defense-relevant technology and manufactured goods.)

   A lot of this does come down to the question: what are the harms of mass illegal immigration? Of course the left does not want to recognize any harms...

   Me, I'd be a lot less concerned if illegal immigration was more randomly distributed across home countries/regions--and regions of the USA. It's a huge problem, IMO, that we're getting such a mass of illegals (a) from the same basic region, (b) from the Third World (where skills are lesser and crime is higher), and (c) they tend to collect mainly in the same region of the country (the Southwest, obvs.). We already see the effects of this with the LA deportation riots--the Southwest United States is, more or less, being colonized by Latin America. It should be obvious why this is bad. If it isn't obvious, you should probably think more about it.

   Look, like basically everybody, I'm all for reasonable levels of legal immigration--that should go without saying. One reason to control the flow of immigration is to raise the odds of assimilation. Just basically transporting a mass of unassimilated immigrants to some area of the country is a blueprint for disaster. As conservatives like to say: import the Third World, become the Third World. This stands opposed to what conservatives know as "magic dirt theory:" as soon as people step foot into the U.S., they become full-blown 'Mericans. Progressives semi-believe that because they are blank slatists...though they also semi-believe that it would be better if U.S. culture were destroyed/transformed into something different...a multicultural utopia... As is so often the case, progressivism overall is in a kind of superposition of doxastic states: half This won't harm the country!, half: This country deserves to be destroyed! (Obviously the former prevails among more normal Democrats. The latter, though, is prominently represented in the vanguard of the left).

   This might all work out alright anyway. Europe's situation is worse because it's importing a less-assimilable, more hostile and alien mass of immigrants. We're basically importing a bunch of Catholics. I'm all for studying the problem and, say, increasing the number of legal immigrants if we find out for sure that we're not doing the kind of harm I fear. But, as for now, given what we currently know, we have to say no. We're gambling with the very existence and nature of the USA. And that's an extremely stupid thing to do.

   I think a lot of the disagreement between right and left comes down to this: the left is willing to gamble everything on its utopian daydreams. Conservatives are not.