Thinking back to the one debate he had with Harris, Trump blathered nonstop about immigration. He talks about it like a wave of moorish invaders sweeping across the land, pillaging. This is obviously a powerful Image if you can get people to believe it. And in some areas people have been feeling like American culture is giving way to Mexican culture as the population in their home towns shifts, so Trump’s rhetoric taps into something that was already there. And if we’re honest, border policy is a weird zone where many of the laws don’t make intuitive sense. America talks out of both sides of its mouth on the issue, historically. A lot of people are here illegally whom we depend on utterly to staff our economy. So their presence is in some way sanctioned, tolerated, but not fully legitimized in law. When someone comes along and articulates one clear direction on it, it sounds like someone is speaking clearly for the first time. Even if that direction is stupid, hateful, xenophobic, and economically unviable.