One party is tepid on making things better while the other is obsessed with making them worse.

Immigration is a football wedge issue that cannot and will not be addressed.

The solution is already known, stricter enforcement of penalties for employers of undocumented workers. But that would actually fuck a sizable portion of the economy, as these workers are vital to a lot of low-wage labor (harvesting and food processing in particular).

Instead the plants and the feds play a game where the authorities give advance notice of ICE raids, and take a couple people and the employers face insignificant penalties.

As with any other mass behavior, adjusting it requires altering the economic incentives. People come here for higher wages, they come here illegally because the legal method is expensive, arbitrary, and time-consuming, and the opportunities open to illegal migrants are still enticing enough. Stopping illegal migrants requires removing those opportunities.

That might make some shareholders a penny less wealthy though, so we can't have it. We'll just keep arguing about this for the next 500 years and accomplish nothing, just be sure to vote for US because the other side wants to do the BAD THING on immigration.

The problem with the Dems is that the big tent means nobody actually understands what the "how" would end up looking like on that.

There's racism to it without a doubt, but just going open borders like the progressives lean more to would also be VERY BAD for the US.

Not because of the corrupting influence of immigrants or whatever, but because doing that instantly makes everyone in the world very angry at America for brain draining all of them into oblivion.

Modhi would be absolutely losing his shit and making comparisons to the time we parked nuclear warheads off India's shores (Kissinger shit) if we let all those Indian Geniuses TED Talks moan and groan about just waltz right in, and the European Union would be having a field day with the US department of state over all their tech workers jumping ship for better paying jobs in the States.

That's not to say there wouldn't be advantages to such an effect, internationally humiliating Russia and China by hoovering up workers and intellectuals that would have otherwise been put to work against our national interests, would be a ballzy display of "fuck you" to both, but for everyone else, it's basically hostile foreign policy to not organize the rules case by case via diplomatic understanding.