Mostly the clips I've heard from Trump Supporters, speaking to Trump supporters, and Trump's own plans which are so vague that their support is purely emotional.
I've had the opposite experience. People are so polarized against Trump that they haven't bothered (or outright refuse) to learn about his actual policies. They just parrot "Trump is xenophobic! Trump is racist!" etc. without any real meat to their argument. I've learned the vast majority of people who hate Trump argue from emotion, not logic. No one here could even produce a single racist statement Trump made and the 'xenophobia' claim makes no sense either. Trump has only ever spoken about illegal immigration and has made a point that legal immigration is welcome. It's not xenophobic to filter out who can live in your country.
But he does say he'll ban Muslims and he did say that Mexico is sending us rapists and murders.
But, yes, we do argue from emotion alot. After all, Donald Trump is a very emotional guy and holds a grudge. Though his threats of lawsuits don't usually end up happening so that's at least something.
Take the wall he wants to build.
There's already a wall. Several of them in various locations with varying degrees of security. So he's proposing to build ANOTHER wall. And have Mexico pay for it. He makes no mention of how or what kind or where the wall will be or how it'll be monitored. I mean, we have a long and (in some places) deadly border with Mexico. Just patrolling it is going to take hundreds of people if not thousands.
There's a fence and it's mostly garbage and placed very terribly along the border. Trump has cited the wall the Israeli's built many times. It cost roughly 1.8 million dollars per mile and that's the "8 billion dollar" estimate comes from. When Trump says we'll "make Mexico pay for it" he doesn't literally mean Mexico will write us a check. Mexico receives billions of dollars in foreign aid. They're about to receive 8 billion dollars less.
Walls are generally a psychological barrier and not necessarily a functional one. Simply hearing about Trump being elected will probably deter a lot of would-be illegal aliens, whereas things like sanctuary cities and free education increase their movement.
I looked at the fence Israel is building.
First off, it started in 2002.
It got about 62% finished by 2012 and has nearly no progress by 2014. In late 2014, it was defunded as it did nothing to prevent the suicide bombings it was built do prevent. Instead, other, more political avenues have been more effective.
Also, the wall was planned to be 430 miles in length.
The US-Mexico border is closer to 2,000 miles.
Finally, 90% of said fence is , to quote wikipedia:
- A ditch and a pyramid shaped stack of six coils of barbed wire on the eastern side of the structure, barbed wire only on the western side.
- A path enabling the patrol of IDF forces on both sides of the structure.
- An intrusion- detection fence, in the center, with sensors to warn of any incursion.
- Smoothed strip of sand that runs parallel to the fence, to detect footprints.
So basically chain link fence, barbed wire, a walking path, some kind of sensor, and sand.
Now it's a mighty pointy fence but if it took Israel 10 years to build only 200ish miles of fence and they had people actually dying, exactly how will Donald Trump build a fence 10 times as long in 8 years? (assuming 2 terms)