[ido]

That's not the point we were discussing, you were saying that just allowing anyone ("any Russian" for our example) to come will be a negative thing because it will bring a lot of people who would just leech off of the social welfare system.

My rebuttal is that this is very similar to what happened in Israel, a large and fairly random ("have some degree of Jewish decent") group of people were allowed to immigrate with very little hassle & it ended up being positive for all involved (except maybe the country they left).

The population of a country already much more densely populated than the US grew by 65% in 20 years[1], so this is not a case of it only working because not many people wanted to immigrate.

To summarize: my opinion is not that there should be 0 filtering, but that there should be less filtering than there is today, and that increasing the amount people coming over would benefit countries like the US and Canada.

[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

[anovikov]

Canada is already a country of immigrants. If they lower entry barriers, won't next generation of Canadians be of less quality than the current one? Of course there will be more of them, but do they NEED more people, especially at the expense of quality? Maybe about the current size is right for them - they are in no immediate threat of say, territorial losses to some foreign power, or any other threat arising from low population (for Israel situation is the opposite: It needs as many Jews and as few non-jews as possible, due to being rounded with enemies, so it's OK if these are any Jews you can find, and even allow some flexibility about who is a Jew).

Canada came to where it is now (a nice place, with places like Toronto or Montreal near top of world's liveability index) exactly due to that: they have been very picky about people who they let in.

Somehow people fight for lowering immigration barriers thinking they are a discrimination of some sort and yet nobody thinks that say, entry exams to college are a discrimination. But these are essentially same thing: allow everyone into a good college and in a few years you'll get a shitty college (because both good professors will leave to avoid teaching idiots, and good students will not enroll for same reason).