With the recent exception of COVID, there has not been a significant reduction of even legal immigration during the periods when the supposedly "anti-immigration" party was in power.
Legal immigration to the US has been at around 1.1 million/year for the last 20 years [1]. What are we to make of the fact that after 4 years of a notoriously anti-immigrant presidency, "one of the largest cuts in legal immigration in history" is a temporary, barely 10% reduction? It seems like immigration stays high no matter who you vote for.
Can you provide a source for that? I tried finding information showing a decrease in legal immigration, but couldn't find any statistics that were current.
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.
Some context is needed. 670k net migration last year, continuing the steady rise since 1995. We aren't stopping immigration. Every government since the mid 90s has been pro immigration in reality. The love to campaign one way and do something different
Oh ok, so just anti-immigration? Not anti-immigration and working class?
Your anecdotal evidence is not very useful in a reasonable discussion, and it might be more interesting to have a data based discussion (if you have some data).
Wanting control over who comes in and who goes out is not “anti-immigrant rhetoric”, If those countries had sudden surges, you’d see them change, just look at the Venezuela/Colombia border to see how a surge will change opinion anc behavior.
Chile is also cracking down on illegal entries now that they’re more prevalent. No country will have unrestricted immigration, otherwise why not form a union with neighbors?
Actually, today's report has not immigration up to within 2000 of the highest ever recorded. I guess those who vote with their feet disagrees with your assessment.
The overwhelming majority of people who still claim in 2018 that "anti-immigrant zealots never provide any evidence" are either knowingly lying (disengaging and pretending not to remember when they do encounter an intelligent objector) or have Bayesian priors amounting to religious zealotry which make it impossible for them to recognize evidence for what it is.
"Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function."
It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.
There have always been limits to immigration. Almost no one is saying no immigration. Needs change. What the country needs now might not be the same as 150 years ago.
There is still some of that alignment in the U.S., but it’s not the dominant one currently. Wealthier & business-oriented conservatives tend to be pro-immigration, e.g. the influential conservative think-tank Cato Institute is solidly pro-immigration [1,2]. But the more nativist Trump-style conservatives clearly have more power than them post-2016. On the left, the AFL-CIO labor federation has historically been skeptical of immigration (and free trade) for basically the same reasons the businesspeople support them (belief that it will push down wages). Though the labor movement is somewhat more supportive of immigration in recent years.
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