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Just a reminder to all the anti-immigrant people out there.. this is what the USA once stood for:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
@freemo Large groups of people in the US being nationalist/anti-immigration isn't really a new thing. There used to be serious hate for Irish and Italian immigrants.
@swiley You will always find groups of people who hate this or that. But the fact is the founding of America was pro-immigration and at the time it was so much the overwhelming majority that it had the support of the people to codify that as a fundamental principle. Over time that eroded away, but our roots are quite clear, at the beginning we were, as a nation, overwhelmingly pro-immigration.
Remember the anti-irish stuff you mention came much later in the 19th century, well after our founding.
While the wording on the statue of liberty is of course more about poetics than being a quotation of the literal law it isnt really disconnected as much as you might think.
The USA had 100% open borders allowing **anyone** to immigrate to the USA without any restrictions and with complete access to naturalizations for the first 100 years of its existence. It wasn't until 1875, a century later, that the first law was put in place that limited immigration in any sense, and also the first law that limited it based on country of origin.
@freemo @2ck @swiley I understand that having 100% open borders under the founding of the "new world", particularly the USA made sense at the time. There was a 3 month minimum journey where you risked scurvy and other forms of malnutrition just to come to "the land of opportunity". The key being "opportunity", in that there was an emphasis on libertarian freedom that people could be self-determined and carve out a niche for themselves so long as they worked hard enough.
However, much has changed in the last 245 years. Journeys to the US take ~18 hours at most from nearly anywhere in the world, and "birth" tourism (from Chinese women for example) has been used to secure citizenship for their children without any of the investment required other than a $600 plane ticket and a week or two in the US. These children are then taken back and raised in China for the first ~7-10 years of their lives, to absorb Chinese values, culture, and norms, until the family decides to cash in on the value of their child's citizenship in the US. In other words, there's no "skin in the game" for people who leverage the system in this way, and I think it creates some perverse incentives which are regularly abused.
I am by no means anti-immigrant, my family immigrated a few generations ago, and my uncle and his family are Chinese immigrants. However, with the current political climate, ease of travel, and many on the left wing of US society willing to allow anyone in at any time for any reason while foregoing naturalization, I can't see how completely open borders will be a benefit to most of the people who choose to immigrate.
I think if we get rid of birthright citizenship, that may be a step in the right direction. In other words, if one parent is a citizen, the children are citizens, or if you stay a certain number of years after the child is born they're a citizen (kind of like a probationary period). However, if the child is going to be whisked back to their parent's home country right after they're born, only to return to cash in on what the US has to offer without going through the naturalization process that occurs from being raised in the region, I think that family is skipping the queue. Worse yet, they're stepping on other families who risk everything to make sure they and their children have a better life in the US than the country they've chosen to flee.
To conclude, I agree that immigration is good (in controlled circumstances nowadays), and can provide people with opportunities and safety that they may not have in their own countries. I think it increases diversity of thought and opinion, and allows for society to flourish as norms and ideas collide to create vibrant new innovations. However, I think there needs to be some semblance of fairness in the process, and skipping the queue on people trying to get in legally or legitimately shouldn't be tolerated. I think there needs to be a way to prioritize people and families who can contribute the most, and who need it the most, so that we can maintain our culture and try to lift everyone who decides to immigrate up in the process. And to be honest, I don't think a completely laissez-faire strategy is the way to accomplish that.
