This is incoherent but I guess what he’s saying is that his rich buddies and farmers in red states are complaining about him deporting all their workers and so he’s now promising that they won’t bother those workers just the “bad” ones. But in the same breath he seems to be saying that the people “applying for the jobs” are bad ones they want to deport because they are criminals.
In the old days a president who was cracking down on immigration would at least have paid lip service to the illegality of hiring undocumented labor but not this one. People with money are immune from the rule of law — just like he is.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is telling ICE to arrest every person that looks like they might be foreign and deport them before the courts can do anything about it. So, I don’t know how this goes. I suspect that he’s going to issue an order to leave the strawberry pickers and the maids and gardeners alone (he employs a bunch of them himself) and just go after the others. But then the construction industry will complain and the factory owners will complain and the restaurant owners will complain. BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL DEPENDENT ON IMMIGRANT LABOR AND HAVE BEEN FOR DECADES!!!!
Everyone understood this tacit agreement that we have undocumented workers supporting our economy, with all the downsides and the upsides low wage pressure vs their payment of taxes and contributions to Medicare and Social Security benefiting the system (but not them) — but completely necessary to keep our country thriving. It’s always been push-pull and it rises in salience depending on the political atmosphere and the state of the economy.
This has been the way it is in America as long as I can remember. Trump however is using this as part of his plan to wreak vengeance on his political enemies and break blue America. I think he believes that the rest of us are too soft to really resist. I think it’s a tipping point and we’re now going to see if he is right.
By the way, there will no help from Republicans. It is up to us.