seawasp | (Reply)

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I'd add to this that one really big wrinkle to the immigration wrangle is that it isn't - and has never been - purely a domestic issue. It's a situation in which many of the variables are international in origin, and thereby one that we can't truly "solve" purely by our own efforts on the domestic front.

Put simply, the reason that so many people in other parts of the world want to come to the USA is that we've created (at least the perception of) being the one best nation in the world for people looking for better living conditions and less oppressive government. Or at least we had that image before Trump took office again, but we'll get back there in a minute.

As long as that image holds, we're always going to have a lot of people from all over the world trying to relocate here because we're the Land Of Opportunity[tm]. By ourselves, we can't "fix" that situation; we don't have enough available resources to make the whole rest of the world as nice a place to live as we are. Nor, at least in the short term, do we have sufficient resources and/or sufficient political will on our own to absorb the sheer number of people who are already coming in, let alone the numbers we're likely to attract if we throw the doors all the way open. From a population density standpoint, the US is probably just not, in the long term, big enough to take in the percentage of the planet's population that would like to live here.

There are, arguably, two major ways to address this. One, which we've been pursuing to varying degrees since the end of WWII, is to do what we can to bring the rest of the world up to our economic and political standards. That's not a short-term project, and we're a long way yet from achieving that goal.

The other approach, which Trump has arguably been pursuing vigorously since taking office again, is far simpler.: He's doing his best to make the US a less attractive destination for outsiders, by making life here look as frustrating, expensive, and unattractive as possible, so as to dissuade non-citizens from showing up on our doorstep (and encourage as many current residents as possible to go live elsewhere and thereby become somebody else's problem).

In the short run, I agree that more open borders and saner drug policy are good ideas. But at the end of the day, there's a population-distribution component to this discussion that I think may outweigh the impulse for us to become the world's single viable destination for the oppressed.