Political Memes

I think it would be obvious after 4 decades of Neoliberalism that you can't deregulate your way into prosperity and in fact the very opposite happens: you end up with consumers constantly swindled, widely sold products that cause long term problems like cancer, all manner of systemic problems having grown uncontrollably (most notably Negative Externalities) and lots of markets turned into cartels and monopolies (with prices up, quality down and improvement stopped) - enshitification is the product of deregulation, as is the housing market bubble, the internet access local monopolies in large parts of the US (and associated high prices for shit service compared to the rest of the World) and a lot of other things.

"Small government" is a content-free slogan rather than a solution: absolutely, in some areas there is too much "government" (for example, the oversized military spend), yet in others there is too little (a National Health Service would literally make Healthcare in the US consume half of what it does in GDP terms so "big government" there would actually be the smart solution business-wise). It's a problem of how Government is managed, which is a hard thing to do and solve and were the devil is in the details, not just a simple sounding "solution" of "just make it smaller" that sounds good but solves nothing.

Migration is a complex problem. I think that legal immigrants should be treated as guests because they were literally invited in, but that does not extend to illegal ones.

Immigration (as an economic strategy of a country) can indeed be a problem, especially if it's done too fast and with low integration because whilst immigrants bring themselves as workers, they also bring their needs for products and services and that's more works that needs to be done or in other words, more jobs - so when they arrive they are workers competing for jobs but over time they also cause more jobs to be created because they too are consumers buying products and services which have to be produced by even more workers - whilst the low integration is a problem because of cultural clashes between the immigrants and the locals (maybe more of a problem in Europe than the US) because people coming from different countries don't have the same assumptions as the locals on how on is supposed to behave in certain situations (some being small details and other much bigger) and hence can behave in ways that other see as weird or even anti-social, which in large numbers generates conflict. With time living in a new country an immigrant will adjust to be a lot more like the locals, but if the influx of immigrants is too many in too little time there are too many clashes with those freshly immigrated who haven't learned to behave more like the locals and people in a host country end up feeling that immigrants are unpleasant people , even bad people.

Immigration (the legal kind, approved by Governments) is being used to paper-over flaws in the way a country is being managed (for example, in my own country politicians caused massive house price inflation and other problems, mainly affecting young adults, so the end result is lower birth rates and hence an aging population, which is then made up with immigration, and this is so extreme that in this country literally half of university graduates leave the country and then they're replaced with immigrants with much lower educational levels) plus it's massively good for the wealthy (both because it increases worker competition for jobs when they arrive and because it eventually pushes up the size of the Economy as a whole, and whilst normal people's prosperity relates to the size of the Economy per-capita, the wealthy are the ones taking slices from the whole of the Economy so for them and them only, growing the Economy by adding more people is a gain), so problematic Immigration is really a consequence of problems at a political level (and that includes Corruption) - the country is not being managed for the good of most people and high Immigration is both part of that directly (it makes the Wealthy wealthier) and indirectly because it's used to paper over problems caused by that political mismanagement (like in my country young adults leaving or having fewer children because life is way too expensive for them here and salaries are low, so then immigrants are imported because there is a lack of workers).

Immigrants themselves, however (as I say, the legal kind, hence people like you and me who were invited and changed their whole lives and invested time and effort in the country they came to) shouldn't be treated as the problem - they're just people doing their lives the best they can in a perfectly legit way. Look at the Politicians for the people to blame for Immigration reaching problematic levels.

Anyways, the more general point I'm making is that a lot of the problems you see have been created by very much local people in positions of power doing what's best for themselves and for those who will pay them (and most definitely politicians in the US are Corrupt as fuck), and afterwards scapegoating the problems they themselves caused on something or somebody else and the easiest target there is are the most powerless people in the country (who don't even have a right to vote) - immigrants.