[chrchang523]

I'm guessing that they are, like much of the public, primarily against unrestricted low-skill immigration. (edit: it appears that they also object to some skilled-immigration restrictions present in the US and not present in Canada/Australia/etc.; I can certainly sympathize with that as well.) Probably for the same reason that, if one had the skills to have a good chance of being hired at a top tech company, one would want those companies to maintain a high hiring bar even though that makes it more difficult for them to get hired: it greatly increases the chance that, if they do get in the door, it's actually worthwhile.

Note that all the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you could also count NZ) switched to race-blind points-based systems decades ago, and since then have provided at least as much per capita opportunity to foreigners as the US has with much less internal political strife. The US is the corrupted outlier.

[oblio]

The US immigration problems are just virtue of having huge borders, especially land borders, with developing countries.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand are all quite far away from developing countries and access is much harder and much more expensive. Australia, which is somewhat close to Indonesia has adopted some... unsavory methods to mitigate this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...

So it's not purely the points based immigration system that differentiates between the 2 situations.

[chrchang523]

Yes, like most other countries, Australia does a reasonable job of enforcing its immigration laws. As you note, Australia actually isn't so geographically isolated that this is a trivial problem; and just like other forms of high-stakes law enforcement, some implementation details look unpleasant, especially when one ignores the downsides of the alternatives.

But Australia is ultimately near the top when it comes to how much sustainable opportunity it offers per capita to foreigners (and nonwhite foreigners in particular, despite past "White Australia" history, if you care about that). It is reasonable to try to do better, but that's pretty much impossible for the US until the people can again trust the government to adequately enforce whatever laws are ultimately decided on.

(I think Canada is the country in the best position to try to do significantly better today. And not coincidentally, it is a country I plausibly may emigrate to if things unravel further in the US.)