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One of the worst problems with the immigration debate is that a long, intense, and largely successful effort was made to redefine the sensible moderate position as extremist. This leads to cognitive dissonance on an epic scale.
Most average people, Republicans and Democrats alike, are in favor of healthy legal immigration but want illegal activity stopped. Virtually everything they tell pollsters boils down to those twin imperatives.
This does not seem like a terribly ideological proposition to most people. It seems like common sense. Everything they say is desirable about rational legal immigration becomes impossible if the border is not secure. They don't think the law should be a cynical game.
But information warfare has been waged against the American people on a titanic scale when it comes to immigration policy. It might be the longest-running information war campaign since the end of the Cold War. Every single aspect of the debate has been propagandized.
The result is that our political class is almost literally speaking a different language than ordinary people when they discuss immigration. Every important word has been redefined to mean something besides its commonly understood meaning.
This allows the political class to make reasonable-sounding statements that actually mean something entirely different than what their constituents hear. Likewise, the elite hear what they want to hear when the public demands reasonable action.
The psychological impact of this dissonance is enormous. It took generations of dedicated effort to hammer "immigrant," "refugee," and "illegal alien" into synonyms. Most people KNOW they aren't, but the relentless brainwashing breaks down their ability to reason.
Here again, the immigration debate was ahead of the curve as an information war campaign. Altering thought by redefining terms is commonplace in America now, perhaps because the effort to redefine border security as "xenophobia" was so successful.
Among the public, the "center" of the immigration debate is still largely where it has always been, but among the political class and media the "moderate" position has been dragged to the fringe. The elite holds casual opinions most citizens view as lunacy when stated plainly.
Unfortunately, the political/media class in American now influences the public far more than the reverse is true, *especially* on the immigration issue. The elite controls the language and speaks plainly about nothing.
The result is the current crisis, where Repub and Dem voters are at each other's throats over an issue where they largely agree in principle... if only they could talk to each other without walking through an intellectually ravaged information warfare battlefield. /end
