We’re a long way from only banning documented war criminals.
What about the other way around? What if no immigration was allowed, except for a few of the President’s hand-picked buddies? Is that a ban? What if only conservative white Western Europeans with doctorates and a million dollars in savings are allowed? Is that a ban on immigration? Where do you draw the line between a ban and “regulation”?
My rule of thumb would be if “everyone is allowed to immigrate except X, Y and Z” that’s “regulation”. If “nobody is allowed to immigrate except A, B and C” that’s a ban. We’re much closer to the latter situation, as I understand it.
And the US is admittedly one of the most accepting of immigrants, even with those bans. The rest of the world is worse. “If you don’t love it, leave it” is a baldfaced lie. Moving is illegal, or otherwise made impossible, for most people across most of the world. That’s a ban in my book.
Agreed. “Immigration” is another word for moving. People move all the time, for their own varied reasons. We’ve all done it. Whether from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, or state to state, even if we haven’t emigrated to another country.
A foreign government coordinating the movement of millions for their own political ends is not immigration in any way or form.
It’d be tough for immigration to be so great that it completely changes the country, but it often is enough to change a specific region. There are many places in the US that immigrants from a country settle in and that area may have a majority of those immigrants. Places like the southern border states with southern American immigrants, southern Florida with Cuban immigrants, places on the west coast with Asian immigrants, pockets of major cities with high concentrations of immigrants from the same country, etc. The area often changes politically, culturally, and religiously to the immigrant’s culture. Long term it all works out, but the people in that area who are not immigrants may not be happy about the change.
As an analogy, consider how there may be a population shift in the US due to climate change. People who live in the Southwest may move to other states due to excessive heat and lack of water. It’s certainly fine for them to find other places to live, but people in liberal states probably won’t appreciate how their state will likely become more conservative in the process. When conservative people from Arizona, Utah, and Texas move to a place like Oregon, they’ll influence the culture and politics to be more conservative by voting for more conservative candidates and running as conservatives in local and state elections. After a few decades it will all get sorted out, but during the transition there will likely be a lot of upset liberals who would wish there was a way to keep the conservatives from moving to their area.
If we were talking 30 years ago, with open borders, yes, a huge number of Chinese immigrants would have voluntarily come into Taiwan.
And I don’t see what is objectionable about the argument that “Open borders might work if it’s big nations absorbing influx from small nations, but potentially nation-ending if it’s small countries absorbing influx from big hostile countries.” That’s what octopus was alluding to, and quite reasonable.
What has never occurred? Mass migration that has fundamentally changed a place? Look under your own feet and recognize that, if you are in the USA or Canada or Israel or Australia or many other places then you are on land that was settled, by immigrants, often to the exclusion, forced relocation, or genocide of the previous inhabitants. Posting a snippet of another poster’s words makes your post no less myopic.
The United States is not the world and history didn’t start in 2026 AD.