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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

What is and isn't legal immigration is always a moving target. A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here.

The idea of closed borders, immigration caps, etc is relatively modern and driven more by the fact that social entitlement programs cost money than a fear of dangerous people coming here.

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Modern civilization has entitlements, if we get rid of entitlements, sure we can have open borders. We just can’t do both or the system collapses.

Agreed. That's where the question is really interesting, and important, though. If we can only have one or the other, and if a majority of Americans view our southern border as an untenable situation, can we maintain our entitlement programs?

Entitlement programs only work if we can secure our borders. If we can't secure our borders it seems to be clear that we can't have the entitlement programs.

Why are some societies worse off than others, to the point where someone would need to move countries take their entitlements? Might it have something to do with what the entitled countries did to the ones that are worse off?

Even if we accept this point as fact, which I think is maybe, partially true in some cases, it’s such a ridiculous argument. Do you think the average American is going to think that because their 3-10x generation ancestors, who might not even have existed in this country, might have been assholes to the 3-10x generation ancestors of these immigrants today, that they are now unable to have an opinion on how their government handles immigration and entitlements?

That doesn’t force upon the US any responsibility at all to deal with it

The original immigration laws were explicitly racist. They were long before the entitlement programs existed.

I don't know enough about the specific racial factors in our older immigration laws, I'll take your word for it, but there isn't anything linking the two. We could have open borders without entitlement programs or racist immigration laws.

> A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here.

Unless you were coming off a boat from Africa. Lets not forget that slavery defined a large section of American history.

I didn't say that anyone getting off a boat was doing it willingly. There are a ton of problems in US history related to slavery, not least of which how our founding fathers handled slavery while attempted to build a nation based on freedom and individual rights.

That's separate from the core topic here though. The slave trade and all the problems that go along with it do not change the fact that our borders were open for a majority of our history.

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