"Rights" is not the point. You're correct that a country doesn't have to welcome you.
However, the US has been a prosperous country because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world. They immigrate, build inside the US and for the US, and the US economy grows. This is how the past several decades have worked, and restricting legal immigration would basically destroy this country, its economy, and everything that makes it a great place to live.
I'm a citizen of the US, and I 100% want more smart and hard-working people from around the world to come here and set up shop.
This is not true. It’s a pernicious lie that the United States has always been doors open, and this falsity makes discussing this topic increasingly impossible because it’s like there’s two different realities that aren’t reconcilable. The US became the economic powerhouse and world power it did during the most restrictive period of its immigration history. The amount of immigration over the last 30 years, and especially over the last decade, is completely unusual and unprecedented. I can go to neighborhoods in the city I grew up in where I played baseball as a kid and it is quite literally completely foreign. A lot of people, and you seem to be one of them, think that America’s immigration system is a cosmic vacuum cleaner that scoops up would-be Einsteins from around the planet and plops them in US cities where they churn out unicorns between writing an opera and running a 10k. This isn’t the case.
The percent of the US population that is foreign-born is about the same as it was before 1920.
To use your vocabulary, it is a pernicious lie to pretend that America's success from WWI through the WWII recoveries was due to immigration policies, rather than other major countries having their infrastructure destroyed and being forced to use the US as a key supplier due to rather large wars.
(and that's ignoring that US population had booms in there that meant that even though immigration was persisting, there was just a big increase in domestic births).
Though if we're going to adopt those immigration policies, perhaps we should also adopt the tax strategies, corporate regulation, and worker unions that accompanied that growth.
I'm quite fine with that. I drove through an Armenian neighborhood of LA and stopped for a meal at a restaurant whose name I could not comprehend and it was really, fucking tasty. Zhengyalov Hatz in Glendale, if anyone is wondering.
But yeah, this is the kind of stuff that makes the US awesome. "Would-be Einsteins" are far from the only flavor hard-working people who I absolutely welcome.
Cato is doing their usual thing here where they lie by omission.
>These foreigners, if not properly disposed of, will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.[1]
-Thomas Jefferson
The Founders had a conception of immigration that is completely at odds with the free for all that exists today, and Cato is partially responsible for people incorrectly thinking that the US was “literally built on the idea of immigration”.
Did you roll a dice and pick one or are you actually familiar with Navajo history or something and that’s why you tried to use this retort as a way to imply you’re not allowed to have opinions on American immigration policy unless you’re from a Native American tribe?
> because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world
"From around the world" more like the "world tour" definition
They were welcoming mostly Europeans. First from WASP countries, then for more southern/eastern ones. And then from East Asia (I'll save the rant about the word "Asian" for another time)
Every piece of data shows some groups excel while some groups lag behind
(of course I haven't forgotten about other groups of people that came to the US but most of those didn't come willingly)
I didn't say it's a good policy. I just said it's not some moral failing to not allow immigration. The implication of all these criticisms of the Republican administration's policy on immigration is that if they oppose immigration, they're racist. I find this to be a very manipulative form of emotional blackmail that abuses the racism allegation.
The current Republican regime’s only pro-immigration policy is white South Africans. Your knee jerk defense to a point no one made is inconsistent with the facts
I'd have more sympathy for that view if it were straightforward regulations being passed that placed strict and objective limits on the process. However what we have in practice appears to be a campaign to spread fear and uncertainty via underhanded regulations while feigning ignorance.
It is a moral failing when many times the immigrants coming to the US are coming from countries destabilized by our direct or indirect involvement. Reaping the benefits of our colonization while washing our hands of any of the consequences is morally wrong.
I don't know how you would possibly quantify the U.S. impact on the stability of other countries. The historical default has been extreme instability. It's only in the last 200 years or so that nation-states as we know them have existed in most of the world. Before that, a lot of the world was ruled by warlords, petty kings, and empires fighting over territory.
So treating instability in these countries as mainly the result of U.S. involvement seems overly simplistic. Many U.S. interventions have contributed to instability, but many forms of U.S. involvement have also contributed to stability. Not to mention the enormous amounts of economic resources that come from the U.S. and enrich other countries through trade, investment, and remittances.
You can make a humanitarian case for immigration without reducing the causal history to "the U.S. destabilized these countries, so the U.S. owes them entry". The history is much messier than that.
I'm not sure that immigration policy is relevant to libertarianism because a nation in some sense is like private property. So one could argue that the people of a country have a collective right to restrict who enters their borders. Transversing a nation's airspace would be a different story. I think if a nation blocked other nations from using its airspace for transversal it would be a violation of other people's rights, by abusing, essentially, private property exclusivity.
That's just a way to rationalize policies that are obviously anti-liberty. Is the Texas/Mexico border my property? Really? All of it? And isn't abuse of private property anti-liberty anyway? You literally just said it is.
Countries do prevent other countries from using their airspace, by the way.
Preventing people from encroaching on your nation is fundamentally no different than preventing people from trespassing on your property. It's not anti-liberty, since we don't have an inherent right to any land on earth. That right to occupy a piece of land, to the extent that it exists, emerges through homesteading and the principle of First Possession.
As for U.S. territory, yes, you can make a case that it's the collective property of American citizens who then decide how the property will be governed through their elected representatives. How is that anti-liberty?
However, the US has been a prosperous country because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world. They immigrate, build inside the US and for the US, and the US economy grows. This is how the past several decades have worked, and restricting legal immigration would basically destroy this country, its economy, and everything that makes it a great place to live.
I'm a citizen of the US, and I 100% want more smart and hard-working people from around the world to come here and set up shop.