Immigration crackdown leads to multiple arrests in Santa Maria

You are running a very common rhetorical trick here. You collapse all immigration into one category, then accuse anyone who wants a functioning border of being part of a “cult.”

Most people are not against immigrants. They are against illegal immigration, which is a very different question. If the law is optional, the border is optional. At that point a country is not really a country, it is just a piece of land people drift across.

So let me ask you what you avoided asking yourself. How many people are allowed to ignore immigration law before you think it is a problem. If 13 million is acceptable, is 30 million acceptable. If not, why not. At what point does the principle “laws should be enforced” suddenly become a “maga fever dream.”

You throw out economic slogans about “net gain” and “80 billion a year” as if that settles anything. A rising GDP number does not mean the actual citizens at the bottom are better off. Cheap labor is great for people who hire it. It is not so great for the American or legal immigrant construction worker or farm worker whose wages are held down while schools, hospitals, and housing costs are pushed up.

And the crime argument is a dodge. Even if the rate were lower, the basic reality is simple. If someone is only in the country because the state chose not to enforce its own border, then every serious crime committed by that person was preventable. For the victim and their family, the “statistics” are irrelevant.

You also try to rescue your position by pathologizing everyone who disagrees with you. “Maga cult,” “fed lies,” “need someone to fear.” That is not an argument. That is a way of declaring that you are morally superior so you no longer have to answer any hard questions, such as whether citizens have the right to decide who joins their political community. If they do, how is that right exercised without meaningful enforcement and real consequences for illegal entry. If they do not, then why have a border at all.

You say we should “include hard working families” as if that is the whole story. Here is a different framing. A serious, adult policy would welcome legal immigrants in numbers the system can actually absorb, prioritize those who follow the rules and bring skills the country genuinely needs, and enforce the law consistently so that patience and obedience are rewarded, not punished.

That position is not xenophobic. It is exactly what every stable society throughout history has tried to do. You do not get to redefine basic sovereignty as bigotry just because it gives you a temporary feeling of moral superiority.