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Perhaps legal immigration is but immigration overall is very high.


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We have record high immigration.

The argument being made conflates illegal and legal immigration. American legal immigration continues to exceed one million annually, easily dwarfing any other country.

Except you don't look at regulations to judge whether immigration is high. You look at the numbers for actual inflows of people and compare to the past. Certainly for eg. the UK the numbers for recent years are sky high compared to decades ago, so to claim that "immigration is restricted look at the requirements" is to ignore empirical reality.

It's mostly highly skilled immigration. V diff from the US where most immigration is low skilled.

"Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, at just over 37,000,000 legal immigrants"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_St...


The US has had extraordinarily high mass immigration (both legal and illegal) for decades.

Immigration is a reality, it always has been. There is no broad support for cutting off legal immigration, it's uncontrolled immigration that most people object to.

The US has always had huge levels of immigration and probably always will.


It’s been my experience the US is against illegal immigration and abuse of things like H1-B but not immigration itself.

The US has the most immigrants than any other country by almost 5x at 48 million.


But unfortunately increasingly less so from the poorer countries.

What is the evidence for this? The United States has had high rates of legally approved immigration since 1964, second only to the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in rate of immigration as a percentage of already arrived population.


When you say the US isn’t immigrant friendly, I think your focusing on concerns about the impact of very high immigration that has surfaced in recent years among certain groups and media, rather practical resistance to immigration.

“The United States is home to the highest number of immigrants in the world. An estimated 50.6 million people in the United States—a bit more than 15% of the total population of 331.4 million—were born in a foreign country. The number of immigrants in the U.S. has increased by at least 400% since 1965. The population of immigrants in the United States is incredibly diverse, with nearly every country in the world represented among U.S.”

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...


Yes, the bar has been going higher ever since (we might even say prohibitively so), however we know that not all immigrants go to the US through official means.

It's a different kind of high-pass filter (not meaning necessarily that's easier).


The USA currently has the its highest immigrant ratio in ~100yrs: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

I’m not sure about that compared to other countries, but I’m also not sure why it’d be desirable to have a higher percentage. Seems like it’d be extremely risky to an existing society to even hit something like 33%


Immigration is not only still possible, but booming. The number of immigrants living in the US is 12.9% - which is close to an all-time high from about a hundred years ago (14% or so).

Source: http://cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-populat...


Absolute numbers seems legitimate. The US per capita immigration rate is largely the result of the high absolute number of immigrants taken in over US history.

The US gets more legal immigrants from Asia maybe. Total immigrants I seriously doubt that

That is not really the case. The last poll I saw said 78% of Americans are fine with some immigration.

The exact amount of immigrants and the requirements to come here legally is less uniform in acceptance.

The biggest issue is between legal and illegal immigration.


1 out of 8 people in the US are immigrants. That's the highest it's ever been in recent history. And more than enough to have a big effect on the economy.

From an immigration perspective, yes.

There's a lot of immigration from Latin America though.
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