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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Only illegal migrants aren't covered, legal ones are. If you make it available to everyone regardless of their legality to be on the soil you open up a whole bunch of other issues

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Canada largely avoids this problem by not allowing a subset of illegal people to exist in the country. Canadians are polite, but working in canada without some sort of legal status is far harder than in the US. They have lots of immigrants, but vanishingly few illegal ones in comparison to the US.

Like what?

Like giving people an incentive to illegally come to your country ? If there are no difference between coming legally or illegally the choice is easy.

Like I could just book a one way flight to LA and become a US citizen because reasons ?

Like how most of our ancestors got here, you mean?

Well, not since ~1882.

https://www.uscis.gov/about-us/our-history/overview-of-ins-h...

That said, overstaying tourist visas (aka just hopping on a plane and then not going back) is a very popular form of illegal immigration into the US.

You can either provide social benefits to your country's poor or you can have open borders. If you try to do both at once, you're providing social benefits to the world's poor, and the amount of benefits you can provide from a given tax base falls through the floor.

How was the wellfare at that point? :-)

Your ancestors genocided the whole continent, if anything that argument is against what you advocate. We're not in the 1700s, people can travel more easily, information travels instantly, what worked 300 years ago doesn't necessarily works now.

I'm all for helping people but you cannot import the world's misery and expect it to be smooth, first because it doesn't solve anything, second because it just doesn't work from a simple demographic point of view.

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