[toast0]

25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.

"They should follow the rules, like I did"

Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.

Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.

[somenameforme]

The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form.

Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

[saghm]

> history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself

Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.

[somenameforme]

The problem you run into here is that each time there was a sufficiently large threshold of immigration growth, the government did respond by sharply curbing immigration. So we don't really know how things would have turned out without that. And that was also during times of significantly higher fertility rates, so higher rates of immigration would have had a relatively smaller impact on society. There were also much higher rates of self employment (a quick search suggests ~50% in 1900), so there'd be less concern over the job market and instead even a benefit to be gained from more consumers and even laborers - the same reasons that corporations tend to support immigration in contemporary times.

So in modern times the situation is quite a bit more different and relatively unprecedented, at least if we continue along with anything like the former status quo. But I'd wager that the former status quo is probably dead, even after the current administration leaves office. The DNC is showing good predict market rates for a win in 2028 and I'd wager that they'll run on a much more moderate platform for immigration, far away from both Trump and Biden.

[peyton]

What would you say to somebody who simply feels their quality of life has been lowered (vs. somebody “spouting essentially identical arguments”)?

[saghm]

I would need more details to understand what they mean by that

[adjejmxbdjdn]

People aren’t, and will not, have as many kids going forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor countries.

Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.

[somenameforme]

Fertility is one of the best examples of a self correcting problem. Fertility causes populations to contract dramatically faster than most appreciate. The formula for the change between generations is a factor of fertility_rate/2. So if a country has a fertility rate of 1 (which is where many countries are trending, if not already lower than), then each successive generation will be 50% smaller.

A generation is proportional to the the practical fertility window of a given era, so somewhere around 20 years. The deaths (and subsequent population change) will lag behind generations by about 50 years, but become largely unavoidable because female fertility collapses rapidly after ~40. And so when there is a shared fertility rate amongst a population, each ~20 years the population will change by the fertility factor.

So you end up bleeding people fast once the death phase kicks in - you're talking about losing 50% of your population each 20 years. This is why places like Japan will still look to today as the 'good ole days'. They're currently only losing about 11% of their population per 20 years, but with a fertility rate of 1.2 they'll trend towards losing around 40% per 20 years.

-----

Anyhow, the point of this all is that there simply are not enough people in the world to make up for this sort of loss. And that's if you're willing to accept an adult male with no education and who may not even speak the language, which isn't exactly the foundation of a great society. When you speak of wanting skilled English speakers, both male and female, then yeah - it's really not happening.

So countries will be left to increase their fertility rates or die. Though even that statement kind of misrepresents what happens. Rather the higher fertility subpopulations within society will gradually come to dominate those societies. So in some manner speaking, perhaps the Bible was write and the meek will come to inherit the Earth. An America made of Amish? Pretty funny to imagine, but not really out of domain of possibility at all. Fertility is going to radically reshape the face of Earth and it's difficult to predict what that will look like other than very different.

[SoftTalker]

The Boomers are retired except for a few who don't know what else to do so they keep working. I'm GenX and looking at retirement in a couple of years.

[thatmf]

Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one.

Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.

Many such cases.

[malfist]

My abortion was also the only moral abortion

[PaulHoule]

I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)

On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.

I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.

There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.

To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.

Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.