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Comment by BuyMyBitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Lovely sentiment but it doesn’t translate to actual immigration policy.

And, chances are, these two presidents were probably talking about white immigrants, given the racism and slavery of the time. Are you familiar with James Madison’s policies with Native Americans? He privately thought they couldn’t be civilized and wanted white immigrants to eventually mix with and displace them into irrelevance.

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It translates to immigration policy. Plenty of people support freedom of immigration (note, immigration is not naturalization), a policy of letting people freely come to the US to live and work (as opposed to quotas, work permits, work requirements, residency restrictions, etc.).

The "immigration not naturalization" people fall into two camps: [1] People who want cheap low-skilled labor but don't want that "labor" to have any political power. [2] People who are lying about the "not naturalization" part.

I suppose that there are also folks who don't realize which group they're in.

I don't really get this line of reasoning. If the Founding Fathers were in favor of immigration, but in practice their immigration policy was racist, shouldn't the conclusion be that if we want to adhere to the spirit of their policies that we ought to favor immigration but discard the outmoded racist views?

For better or worse, that's exactly what happened, so Madison's policy appears to have been quite effective.

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