Benjamin Marquez:
OK, immigration is a hot button issue, and the Democrats have to be extremely careful when it comes to immigration. For Republicans, the party line is that there needs to be more border enforcement, more deportations. That's the end of the story there. Democrats, and I tell my students this all the time, have a lot of balls to juggle and to keep in the air at the same time, and so they have to be more careful, and they cannot be branded as the party of open borders. And so if you are, if you want to regulate and control immigration, if you want to secure the borders, you have to endorse some kind of action that actually attempts to do that. I'm not sure they will actually work, but, you know, the Democrats cannot afford to be branded as advocating an open border: "Just come on in, and you're home free." So many, many people in the U.S., and public opinion polls show this, are concerned about the level of undocumented immigration, and significant numbers of Democrats are, and so you have to be careful not to alienate them by basically saying you're not going to try to control the border. So this is a tight spot that the Democrats find themselves in, and I'm not surprised that we're not hearing much about immigration as we did in prior presidential elections.

Nathan Denzin:
On the Republican side, they are calling for mass deportations now. It's their slogan. Is that a winning argument?

Benjamin Marquez:
It's a winning argument for their base. And practically speaking, I don't think many people have given serious thought to what it would take to deport 11 million people, or even a million people, or the consequences down the line, and that is the consequences for industries and owners of industries that typically support Republican Party candidates — in agriculture, in construction, in service industries, all of these areas where immigrants migrate and produce goods that the rest of the public consumes. I mean, who's going to process meat in this country? Who's going to work the dairy farms? Maybe half or more of all dairy farm workers in Wisconsin are Latino. And so, what, are you gonna deport them as well, and bring production to a grinding halt? Well, the consequences are not what you run on, but rather the issue itself that gets your base animated.