'Snakes and Vermin' Support Donald Trump's Immigration Policy NYT Columnist: American ‘Snakes and Vermin’ Support Donald Trump’s Immigration Policy Americans who oppose large-scale immigration are “snakes and vermin,” says one of the most moderate columnists at the New York Times. The glib dismissal of ordinary Americans came from columnist Tom Edsall who has been warning progressives since 2016 they should listen to the concerns of ordinary Americans. But Edsall has apparently cracked under the stress of defending his fellow Americans from his radically “woke” elite peers, and he claimed on December 11: [Donald] Trump’s genius in 2016 lay in his willingness — indeed, his eagerness — to openly and aggressively unleash the forces of racial and ethnic hostility that Republican elites had quietly capitalized upon for decades. Trump will be a formidable candidate next year because he is prepared to look under the rocks of the American belief system and see the snakes and vermin that have camped there in the dark. Edsall’s crack-up is understandable: He shares the belief mass migration has little impact on the distribution of wealth, opportunities, or economic security in the United States. That view is commonplace among socially isolated journalists and academics, so Edsall ends up quoting academics who wrote: Given the modest economic impacts of immigration estimated in most studies, the depth of anti-immigrant sentiment is puzzling. The impact of mass migration is primarily psychological, says another academic cited by Edsall: Driving the opposition to immigration, [U.K. professor Eric] Kaufmann writes, are voters “whose psychological makeup inclines them to see difference as disorder and change as loss.” This is not “about competition for jobs or services,” according to Kaufmann, “but instead mainly about majority-ethnic and what I term ‘ethno-traditional’ national identities. Conservative voters feel that these are being unsettled by the rapid ethnic shifts sweeping across western countries https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2019/12/16/nyt-columnist-american-snakes-and-vermin-support-donald-trumps-immigration-policy/