Same reason other groups have been blamed over the years. In Nazi Germany, the Jews were blamed for basically everything - the loss of the war, inequality, etc. MAGA is doing the same thing, but with immigrants.
Why? Blaming someone else for your problems is a lot easier than understanding what's actually going on and going after that. Amusingly, MAGA leaders are using it as a diversionary tactic as they put policies in place that benefit the wealthiest. Pitting the poor against one another prevents them from seeing what's actually happening.
Blaming someone else for your problems is a lot easier than understanding what’s actually going on
I would argue it isn't just a matter of making things "easy". Migration is a symptom of larger socio-economic and ecological changes.
Drug wars, crack downs on native rights and labor movements, climate-change induced economic collapse, and the wholesale destruction of local communities through industrial development have created a population of tens of millions of displaced people.
Even when you understand "what's going on" there's very little you can do about it. But one thing Americans can do and have gotten really good at is building big gated communities to keep poor people out while still exploiting their cheap labor.
The urge to arrest and deport large numbers of migrants is, at its root, the urge to build a more advanced and comprehensive gated community. One that can still exploit the labor of America's southern neighbors without sharing any of the infrastructure we've developed to make life pleasant in the states.
And the urge is deepened as the prior generation's investment in infrastructure shows visible signs of collapse. With fewer functioning highways, aquifers, generators, and public services, the American impulse is to start expelling the poorest among us in order to horde the balance.
Pitting the poor against one another prevents them from seeing what’s actually happening.
Pitting the middle class against the poor promises to guarantee another generation of relative prosperity. This is a kind of ultimatum issued by the very rich, and not unique to a particular party. You either get on the right side of immigration, or we take away your privileges and expel you, too.
The fight between Dems and Repubs is less about whether we do a mass expulsion (its easy to find homeless roundups in a dozen major blue cities from Houston to NYC to Chicago) and more about who we target for atrocity.
How do you get millions of people out of the country in a timely fashion.
They’d need some place to put all of them for sorting, some kind of camp where they could concentrate the population.
Likely they’d just be sitting around all day, but thanks to the 14th amendment, they can be put to work for free.
And it would take forever to get all these people over the border, and they could just come right back over. They’d need some kind of long term solution, something final to prevent more immigrants from coming over.
I’m confused why these people are most concerned about immigrants more than anything else.
Spend a few hours on the right-wing news circuit and you'll discover everything from serial murder to economic downturns to my favorite candidate losing the election to the price of milk is directly related to Illegal Immigrants Breaking The Law. They're all voting. They're sneaking into the country to do horrible crimes. They're destroying everything about this country that's noble and honest and good. They are dismantling the English language. They dress stupid. They're doing Michael Bay style action movie heists and car chases. They're impregnating your daughter right this instant and that's why she won't return your phone calls.
And they are all working at the behest of a (((shadowy evil organization))) of far-left communist radicals who have been plotting for the last 500 years to destroy American, end Christianity, and force white people into slavery under the yoke of Chinese Muslim College Leftist Atheist Satanist Pedophiles.
If you're not worried about immigrants, you hate America.
You wanna know why? Because they are a group that can't defend themselves. Fascists need enemies. If it is not immigrants, it is the "transexuals and gays". They need a "Snowball" that is the source of every woe.
They are their problems. Not like they can admit that though. If you eliminate all the immigrants then they will just target another group. Just like they already are. The root cause of their problems is and always has been themselves and they are too stupid to see it.
They don’t care about solving problems. They care about having something to get angry and complain about. And as a bonus they can virtue signal to each other about how they really do hate the people they’re supposed to hate.