[_heimdall]

Sure, though we shouldn't hold up the poetry or the statue as a symbol of our country then.

There is a lot of what went into America that would be (or has been) lost by completely abandoning the idea though. Maybe its worth it, that's not for any one person to decide, but its a huge change and there's always the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

[robertlagrant]

It is still a symbol of the country. Settling the US was a meat grinder, and you basically turned up and sank or swam. You weren't ever a cost back then; you were an asset.

Now with all the various welfare programmes you can easily become a cost, although of course that's only a proportion of the people coming in, just as it's only a proportion of the people born in the country. But it's silly to equate what happened back then with what's happening now. And it's unfair to hold the US to this standard and not any other country. Particularly when the US takes in more (legal) immigrants than any other country each year.

[_heimdall]

Totally agree on the challenge with welfare programs. To me that's more a sign that welfare programs were never going to be sustainable though. We still haven't found a way to secure our borders, without that welfare is a blank check.

I don't hold other countries to a standard only because I have no say in how the are run. I would actually prefer to see countries freely allowing immigration and emigration, but I'm not going to say anyone else has to or even should.

What's often lost, in my opinion, with regards to the statue is that the whole point was that anyone should be able to move here if they want to give it a shot and none should be able to take away that right from anyone else.

[robertlagrant]

That might be the point of the statue; I don't know. But equally the point of the pyramids might've been to ensure the world venerated the Pharoahs for eternity, and that's not happening today. I don't see why a landmark would have legal force.

[_heimdall]

To be fair the society that idolized those pharaohs is long gone though. It'd be a different story with the statue of liberty if the US was gone.

Landmarks don't have to have legal force. My only point here, that I'm almost certainly over complicating or muddying, is that the statue is still held as a symbol of our country but we seem to fundamentally disagree with what the statue stood for in the first place.

It seems disingenuous but that alone isn't a huge deal. My concern personally is that I do still believe in what the statue stood for, and I think most people arguing immigration miss the fundamental question of should one person be allowed to stop another from choosing to live here and make a life for themselves. The argument usually jumps straight to how to limit it, not whether one should have the right to limit it.

[robertlagrant]

No one disagrees with what it stood for; in fact, the US is still the world leader in immigration. But that doesn't mean illegal immigration is okay. If we want to play statue originalists for a second, the fact that the statue stands as an invitation shows it believes that an invitation is required to enter someone else's country.

[_heimdall]

Interesting, I don't actually read the poem on the statue as an invitation so much as an ideal that an invitation isn't needed since everyone is welcomed.

Illegal immigration is a whole bag of worms since it only comes down to what laws we choose to write. Our immigration policies today are much more strict than they were historically (with a possible caveat for wartime years). Where it once was legal as long as you went through a port of entry and provided basic info, today its a multi year process tied to merit and limited by caps on total immigration and country of origin. Both were legal if you followed the rules of the day, but the rules are drastically more strict today.