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>"I've long been embarrassed that US immigration law so often errs on the side of xenophobia and cruelty."

The United States has some of the most generous and charitable immigration policies of all countries on Earth. The problem is that the sheer number of people trying to immigrate means that it appears cruel for turning so many people down. Particularly when people don't look into just how restrictive other developed nations are with their own policies.

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> The United States has some of the most generous and charitable immigration policies of all countries on Earth.

Depends on who is immigrating, doesn't it? The Diversity Visa Lottery is outstanding, true. However, I consider Germany's Blue Card superior to H-1B: you can get a visa in a few weeks once you have a contract and a BS degree. For H-1B, not only you have lots of paperwork and processing time, you also have to win the spring quota lottery. Unless you work for a university, they have separate quota.

This is correct. Most European countries have much more stringent immigration policies. Switzerland is a great example, where the process is longer and also they checks to see whether an applicant has indeed assimilated well, are a lot better.

Western nations need to adopt more stringent immigration policies and also be much more rigorous in testing how well the applicants have assimilated. Most of the current 1st gen. immigrants hardly make any effort to assimilate.

Modern US culture holds that assimilation is an evil to be avoided. The old metaphor of the "melting pot" has been tossed out in favor of a "salad bowl". Assimilation is the opposite of diversity, and since diversity is good, assimilation is bad.

This attitude is going about as well as you'd expect.

Europe is seeing the "benefits" of this policy, Canada will soon be next. The "geniuses" supporting all this do not realize is that this is how you destroy the culture that your ancestors built, screw up social harmony among different groups, and how your fuel the rise of people joining alt-right movements.

No it doesn't. Simply asserting this statement does not make it so. Modern US culture is very much anti undocumented immigration, but that is something completely different. No one is pushing to cut the 1 million green cards issues a year, and that would be happening is what you claim was even remotely true.

You're going to have to help me out - I don't see any connection between my comment and your response.

Culture may be opposed to it, but Federal policy is very much in favor of undocumented immigration.

> Most European countries have much more stringent immigration policies

Depends on your definition of stringent. You picked the one outlier - Switzerland - where apparently your canton gets to vote on whether you become a citizen. Or something crazy like that, idk.

Most European nations I'm familiar with let you become a permanent resident after residing legally for a certain number of years, and passing a language test. Then citizenship after some more years and more tests.

Is the US very different from that? Unless you're born in India or China...in which case, you might have an easier time in Europe.

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