> so long as politicians are telling people that we can't afford the welfare state some people are going to be resentful that any immigrant gets a single penny.
But if you're an immigrant, and especially an undocumented one, you're not entitled to welfare, are you?
which holds true in one case that the "left" lost the fight over immigration when the phrase "illegal immigrant" became widespread.
The presence of illegal immigrants in our economy has numerous hidden effects: hire a Mexican as a farm hand and you'll get a talented agricultural professional who will save some money so he can start up his own farm back home. You can try to hire an American but you'll have to pay a lot more money than Burger King because Burger King is an easier job -- almost any US citizen will have little experience or aptitude for the work and will see it as a dead end job.
Similarly, illegal immigrants greatly help the economics of the hospitality, landscaping, and many other industries in California.
The first thing voters hear when they here about this is "illegal" and a little pulse of energy travels in their brain to "illegal = bad" and their attitudes are already set.
In principle some normalization of immigration law to take "illegal" out of it would dramatically change the way people think about it. Once you got that electrical short circuit between "illegal" and "bad" out of the way we could have a totally different conversation. It wouldn't be the end of the Republican Party but it would cause a crisis for them and force them to develop new ideology in many areas.
Much like the "right", he "left" (the corporate-linked wings that hold power in Washington) doesn't want to bring up the subject of any serious reform of immigration in the US because it opens up this big can of worms because many people are winners or losers or believe they are winners or losers from this situation and since it is all illegal and "undocumented" we've got no data about what the real impacts are.
