I think unrestricted travel on the planet should be a basic human right. There is something seriously wrong with someone telling another person he/she must not move from a certain place.
I'm sure you can find some oddball exception like Obama's undocumented Auntie Z who lives high on the hog in some palatial public housing unit in Boston, but these indict stupid entitlement programs more than lax immigration.
I'm not claiming that limiting entitlements to immigrants is in any way unfair. If they don't like the deal they can move back home. I do object to this topic as a specious support for the "War on Immigration".
>>>> but these indict stupid entitlement programs more than lax immigration.
That's my whole point - entitlement programs and free immigration can not coexist. We will have to choose one or the other. Most welfare states choose the former.
>>>> I do object to this topic as a specious support for the "War on Immigration".
There's no such thing. Thousands of people legally immigrate to US each year, and there's no serious politician that opposes immigration as such.
Why on Earth would we do that? Stupid entitlement programs coupled with expanded immigration might be problematic, but there is no moral principle that states we must have stupid entitlement programs. It's not as though we drop entitlements from airplanes; people have to sign up for them using real official documents. It wouldn't be difficult to say e.g. "no Section 8 housing for people on a work visa". If you don't like entitlements then free immigration would be a good argument to use in recruiting nativists to your side.
Immigration for a wide range of potential Americans we'd be wise to welcome is far more difficult now than it was fifteen years ago. That is why it's a "War on": the prison, LEO union, and armaments lobbyists only get paid when they make our authoritarian oppression more extreme than it already is. Cf. the Wars on Drugs, Terror, etc.
>>>> It wouldn't be difficult to say e.g. "no Section 8 housing for people on a work visa"
It would be. Section 8 is introduced because people feel that poor people that can not afford housing need to be helped. If you don't help poor people that can not afford housing, there's no point of having Section 8, so once these people are here, there always will be a push to provide them with the same benefits - for exactly the same reasons we provide other people with the same benefits. Poor people do not need shelter less because of visa status, and do not suffer less. If you do not want to tolerate such suffering in America - you would have to provide the benefits.
>>>> Immigration for a wide range of potential Americans we'd be wise to welcome is far more difficult now than it was fifteen years ago
Could you back it up with some data? As somebody who recently went though an immigration process and who have read a lot of immigration forums tracking what happens in the process, I got the impression the matters are actually improving lately (and they were not very good not because of some conspiracy but because of huge inefficient bureaucracy, which were made slightly more efficient in later years). In any case, I am seeing every day dozens of people who successfully immigrated in recent years. In what aspect it is "far more difficult now"?
That being said, the EU introduced the free movement of labor, so it's going at least in the right direction :)
As a practical matter, I actually prefer that they check my passport before an international flight, just as a last reminder. Certainly wouldn't want to fly all the way to Japan thinking that I had my passport, then, whoops!