You don't think his rhetoric against undocumented immigrants is racist?
If you enforce the law, they should be deported. Now they probably have very good reasons for immigrating, but the fact remains that they broke the law and our borders, and the job of the executive branch is to enforce the laws.
It's pretty racist to attack a whole contingent of people and make broad negative generalizations about them and qualify with a half-hearted caveat that 'some' are good people. He's quite clearly drawing a line between "you" (the white audience he was speaking to) and the Other (i.e. the Mexicans) personified as rapists and drug dealers.
It's pretty straightforward xenophobic, hyper jingoist nationalist rhetoric. You = us good Americans. They = the Other. He uses the car industry for Japan, a conservative talking point since the 80s. For Mexico he harps on immigration and calls them rapists. It's aggregate and subjectivity-denying. It's racist and dumb.
At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best". If you're a top professional you're not going to risk illegal immigration anywhere, generally speaking. This lines up with my and others' personal experience (I lived in Central America for nearly 2 decades).
He's talking to a roomful of Americans mentioning how America (referred to as us, you) is being beaten by other countries (they). It's pretty obvious. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't negate what Trump was implying - it's not like he's known for sound logical reasoning or even being able to approximate a grain of truth. If you seriously think he was referring to "legal Mexicans" in that speech (again, to a roomful of his white cronies in Midtown NYC) then I got a brooklyn bridge to sell you.
>At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best".
Is he accurate in saying that Mexicans only care about "beating" us at the border and that they are mostly rapists with only some, he "assumes", are good people? Come on.
Illegal immigration is easy to attack without being racist. Mixed marriage not so much.
Lynchings were instigated by an accusation of a crime - the perpetrators could claim they weren't racist, they were just keeping their communities safe! [1]
Japanese internment too had a non-racist pretext: people of Japanese descent were claimed to be disloyal citizens with greater allegiance to Japan (even after being born in the USA or becoming naturalized) than the USA. [2]
We know that the debate about undocumented immigrants isn't about to Europeans who overstay their tourist visas or Canadians sneaking across the border: it is about a single ethnic group (hispanic) who have come across the Mexican border. This means that 'undocumented' can easily be a euphemism for 'hispanic', allowing people to shift racist statements into ostensibly non-racist ones. While not all discussions of undocumented immigrants are racist, some certainly are a form of dog whistle [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics#United_St...
First, the two examples of racism you point out are decades old. Try to pay attention to current events.
We share a long, fairly badly secured land border with a country with significantly worse living and earning conditions than we enjoy. The fact that all those people trying to come to a better life share an ethnicity is not relevant at all.
If you want to see racism, see how British people treat Polish immigrants, even though the Poles have every right in the world to be there.
She was linked to Whitewater, was that because she was a woman?
She constantly defended Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435941/hillary-clinton....
She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.
She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?
Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.
What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?
How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?
If a man did all these things, and were running for POTUS, they'd get raked over the coals, just like Clinton is. What's your point?
Also, Clinton has made it a point to argue for "the right to be believed" for sexual assault victims. And she went to bat for her husband before that statement to cast doubt on his accusers? http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/hillarys-site-edits-sexual-assa...
What a two-faced person who should not be president.
Is this an incorrect reading of the sentiment here? And more importantly, should I assume that anyone against the H1B program feels so because of racial animus?
I doubt Trump has those same feelings however, as he hires H1B works at his own club in Palm Beach instead of Americans. If he was morally opposed to the program, I doubt he would do that.
I brought it up because he talks about it in a way to scapegoat foreigners, appealing to the darker angels of people who have racist tendencies and are looking for someone to blame. I find such a tactic reprehensible, and I personally do not draw a distinction between someone who acts on racist feelings and someone who makes racist appeals to those who act on racist feelings.
Being labelled a racist is a pretty serious charge for most people who don't have wealth or power and actually have to live and work with a diverse group of people. I would hate to be called a racist due to being against the current way the H1B program is administered just because Trump is against it as well.
Again, I'm sure that's not actually what you meant, but it points to the importance of using very clear language when leveling these kind of accusations.