| LurkerJ said: I don't understand why you some of you is accusing white voters of being dumb, sexist, or simply voting to Trump out of anger. They are aware of his personal baggage, ffs that was most of Hillary's campaign about, "LOOK HOW HORRIBLE AND RUDE TRUMP IS", and guess what? they don't care. More immigrants = more supply = lower wages. It's that simple. Especially for the working and middle class.
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Just as an aside, probably not the best idea to claim that its wrong to call someone dumb and then use "is accusing" in the same sentence.
Anyway, now that I'm done taking advantage of harmless spelling errors, I feel the need to call out a few things in the three posts above.
Firstly, Sanders was talking about trade deals, and created his "cult," long before Trump did. Sanders' announced his candidacy nearly a full two months before Trump did, and arguably started reeling in his cult long beforehand as a senator. You can argue that Trump make remarks about immigration before Sanders became a "mainstream" candidate, but that's another point altogether.
Secondly, the blanket statement of "Americans don't want more immigration" is misleading at best. Some Americans don't want that. 46% don't, according to a Rasmussen poll from August (and those were the most favorable numbers for that position I could find), compared with 47% that do.
Thirdly, issues like abortion and gay marriage very much impact significant portions of the country; roughly 3% or so of Americans for homosexual marriage and any woman (as well as some men) who are sexually active and without the resources/wishes to care for a child. The number of Americans' whose jobs are genuinely impacted by illegal immigration/trade deals is relatively minute; immigrants rarely compete for jobs that even lower class Americans would take and trade deals largely affect manufacturing, and the share of manufacturing jobs in the industry has consistently been on the decline from about 48% in 1948, to 35% in 1960, to 24% in 1980, to 13% in 2000, to the 8% it is now. The manufacturing sector has been shrinking in the United States over the past half century regardless, and as technology allows for manufacturing jobs to become more and more replaceable, that will only shrink more and more. Point in all of this is that immigration/manufacturing jobs don't really affect all that many Americans in the first place; but people are convinced they do nonetheless, and, more importantly, they're convinced that these jobs will somehow return if stricter trade laws are put in place.
And this really is Clinton's biggest failure in my opinion (besides an idiotic attempt to rig her own primary). Clinton goes after Trump for his various controversies, but rarely for his policy positions (except to try and solidify support within her own group, mentioning how he's pro life, anti gun control, terrible for Democrat policies, etc.). It's very easy to debunk the claim that higher trade restrictions would lead to a significant amount of jobs, because recently, due to rising wages and much higher land costs in China, a number of Chinese companies have begun to open factories in the United States. These factories are heavily automated, however, and hardly created any jobs at all.
Like it or not, America's become a service based economy, and service based economies tend to benefit greatly from fewer trade barriers since they export almost nothing. Increasing trade barriers, meanwhile, does raise costs on goods that most of us take for granted, such as clothing, packaging, anything with plastic, and technology. It remains to be seen what the effects of Trump's economic policies are, but it'd be difficult to imagine them drastically impacting the average American since so few of them are really directed at the sectors where the vast majority of Americans work.
