[_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.