... and Trump is the only anti-immigration candidate.

My great grandfather and my grandfather came over from Germany in 1883. Before they got on a boat, they had to have someone in the States sponsor them, so that they would not need charity or live on the streets.

When they arrived, they were almost denied entrance. Great grandpap was a stone cutter in the summer, and a coal miner in the winter: he had developed lung issues associated with those jobs, but that can be hard to distinguish from tuberculosis.

The got to Chicago where their sponsors lived, and eventually got work with Great Northern Railroad. The got off in South Dakota and bought farm land. They did ok.

And what are we seeing with the current influx aliens? an uptick in tuberculosis.

and Trump is the only anti-immigration candidate

Yes, and I don't trust him to keep his word. He's a rent seeking crony capitalist. Loves himself some single payer socialized medicine, too.

There was also other barriers to our grand parents a big ocean, with the tech from 100 yrs ago meant weeks of travel on costly, and easily controlled ships.

The Republocrats and the media have been so successful at demogauging anyone who doesn't favor totally open boarders as racist, that nobody really knows what the national sense is. People who oppose it have learned to keep their mouths shut. But they are non-verbally expressing their thoughts by supporting candidates like Trump and Sanders (who both have fairly similar positions on immigration, although their target audiences are different). There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about immigration that have nothing to do with racism. And it's quite possible to be pro-immigration generally but oppose illegal immigration. In fact, if you believe in having a rational immigration policy, you pretty much have to oppose illegal immigration, because it destroys the possibility of being able to implement any kind of policy.

It is quite true that a lot of us in America are either immigrants or descended from immigrants. (Although, ultimately, you can say that about anyone anywhere in the world other than North Africa. Homo sapiens didn't evolve in Europe.) The big difference is assimilation. In the past, immigration policy was organized to encourage assimilation and ensure that the process had a chance to work. In some cases it took a while; sometimes it takes a generation or two.

What we have now is no immigration so much as it is invasion. The goal of the "immigrants", whether they think this way explicitly or not, is not to assimilate, but to conquer. It is to capture the territory and impose their own values on it. And quite frankly, a lot of their values suck. They get away with this because, thanks to open borders, they have created a critical mass that can maintain an underground culture and defy the values of the culture they live in. This is all happenening because we have surrendered all control over who comes in, how many, or how often, or where they go. The assimilation process has been overhwelmed; it is no longer functioning.

I oppose a total end to immigration. But I favor a morotorium, while we clean up the damage and get some sensible policy back in place. The border must be secured; an unsecured border with a country whose own government has no control over its territory is an obvious national security threat. Quite frankly, for the near future, I think it's going to have to be a job for the U.S. Army; there is no other organization with either the capability or the quality of leadership to do it. No immigration whatsoever for five years. During that time, we deport all illegals, and we work on getting a sensible immigration policy back in place. One that demands that prospective immigrants demonstrate their worth (or at least demonstrate that they do not have harmful intent). And one that treats all immigration applicants evenly, and doesn't establish arbitrary and capricious quotas for different groups. Once those things are done, we can start allowing immigrants back in at a sensible rate.

As an aside: In the pre-welfare days, immigration was largely driven by availability of employment. Until we get employment going again, we can't afford to take in immigrants. So an essential step in turning the immigration pipeline back on is to get the economy moving again.

Until we get employment going again, we can't afford to take in immigrants. So an essential step in turning the immigration pipeline back on is to get the economy moving again.
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And yet, somehow, conservatives regularly lump unemployed, childless Americans with well-off childfree people - and scold the poor ones for not having children while condemning poor Americans who do. (That is, they don't acknowledge that poverty very often IS the reason Americans abstain from parenthood.)

It is frustrating to hear people refer to illegal aliens as
"immigrants." The phrase illegal immigrant is a contradiction in terms. Immigration is the lawful entry into a country or nation.

These people are aliens, not immigrants, illegal or otherwise. People who enter this (or any country) illegally are not immigrants. They are illegal aliens. To call them immigrants is to grant them a status to which they are not entitled.

Being against the entry of illegal aliens does not make you anti-immigrant. It makes you a person who realizes we are a nation of laws. A nation that does not enforce it's laws is not a nation. It is an collection of anarchists

Why are we not talking about closing businesses that hire illegal immigrats?

There is a placard in the local Taco Bell which says that the Department of Homeland Security has to approve employment.

To make tacos!

You close one textile mill or WalMart because it has illegals in it, and all of a sudden you will find these jobs advertised out in the open.

Very few people went through Ellis Island.

One thing I know from researching me grandparents and greats and also those of my inlaws is that the man would come (with a sponsor through church or through those from your same town) and you couldn't enter with out a verifiable roof/sponsor here in the states or a person responsible at home should you become ill on the voyage. Then while the man stayed here.got a job, and could afford to pay the way for the wife and kids, THEN they would come. I found out one great grandpa was a teamster (who sponsored his citizenship along with his landlord) and another along with and inlaws grandfather were elevator operators (both sponsored for naturalization by the building managers). All brought the wife and kids over piecemeal (oldest who could travel alone and work came first). NO ONE EXPECTED or WANTED charity.

Everyone was well documented or I would know nothing about their entry at the turn of the century through the 20s. And they were poor. And they learned English. They in turn took in borders from the old country (some relatives, some through they knew at church) to make ends meet and sponsor the good people as others did for them.

PS: the immigrants formed their own credit unions to help eachother and they learned English!

I currently live in an area that between the world wars, half their region of Austria came here (the other half went to a town in Ohio and they still have reunion each summer) because they sponsored eachother and rented rooms.

Go to your Social Security office one day. See who is there and talk to security guards to get the scoop.

"And yet, somehow, conservatives regularly lump unemployed, childless Americans with well-off childfree people - and scold the poor ones for not having children while condemning poor Americans who do. (That is, they don't acknowledge that poverty very often IS the reason Americans abstain from parenthood.)"

I don't know what you are talking about... According to this table, about 40% of American children live in households with income of less than $50,000 per year. Nobody's telling poor people they can't have children. Very much the opposite.

Maybe I should have said "condemning Americans on welfare who do."

If well-off Americans had only one child per couple, while MANY of those who have trouble supporting even themselves refused to have kids (both scenarios happen pretty often), we'd become heavily dependent on the children of the poor to become law-abiding, tax-paying citizens - and politicians would have to spend a lot more time focusing on the problems of the poor than they want to - and probably more than they ever have before.

In truth, the entrance requirements for grandma and grandpa were pretty low - disease free and having a sponsor.

My own ancestors came through Philadelphia and joined the great German migration on the Carolina Highway to cheap land ready to be claimed in North Carolina.

The difference is that then one could be an unskilled or semi-skilled laborer and make a living in the US. Assembly lines only needed warm bodies and the family farm was not an anachronism. Land was cheap if you were willing to brave the elements and the hostile inhabitants to get to it and claim it.

Today, container freight has made the cost of shipping products from low labor cost countries negligible (where once shipping costs could be up to 75% of the final cost of a good, today they are less than 10%). We can no longer absorb the poor, the tired, the huddle masses. We're a modern economy. We need skilled labor.

We already have too much homegrown unskilled labor to absorb. Like our immigration system, our education system has not kept pace with the modernizing of our economy.

The second problem with out immigration system is assimilation (I think someone mentioned it earlier). Grandma and grandpa came to this country wanting to be Americans. Too many of today's immigrants (not all) come to this country with a chip on their shoulder, defying us to make them be Americans.

We need to speak a common language, share a common culture, share a common history (good and bad), and regard ourselves as one people.

The Roman Empire fell when too many barbarian tribes were admitted who did not want to be "Roman." They didn't regard Rome as an ideal worth defending, having not assimilated.

The premise is that the county is descending into idiocy because the educated are having 1-2 children, or none at all, while the less-educated (pro wrestling fans) are pumping them out by the dozens.

This is the way that was supposed to look:

If well-off Americans had only one child per couple, while MANY of those who have trouble supporting even themselves refused to have kids (both scenarios happen pretty often), ~ lenona

Check out the first fifteen minutes of the movie, Idiocracy.

The premise is that the county is descending into idiocy because the educated are having 1-2 children, or none at all, while the less-educated (pro wrestling fans) are pumping them out by the dozens.

CD,

What do you think the median household income in the US is? Less than half of the families in the US make $52k/year. Are you calling 50% of Americans poor?

Reminds me of a reporter who complained that 20% of Americans are still in the bottom quintile no matter what we do to eliminate poverty.

I've seen the movie, thank you. Don't know why it wasn't more popular when it first came out; it was funnier than I expected, and I almost never watch comedies (even free ones from the library) that aren't at least 30 years old - preferably 40 or more.

But I don't believe that that brain-dead world is inevitable. After all:

1) even dumb people are often capable of telling their doctors "please give me a foolproof contraceptive - we just can't afford more kids." Also, doctors often can and do convince dimwitted patients (the ones who WANT to use birth control but are too careless to do so on their own) to accept foolproof methods.

2) smart people have usually been the ones to succeed as rulers/politicians, even if they can't always get away with implementing smart ideas without getting kicked out of office. (But often, they do get away with it.)

3) As many teachers will happily tell you, money and brains don't necessarily go together - and plenty of rich kids, with or without brains, are just plain lazy in school because they can't imagine they might be poor someday.

And I'd love to ask all the pronatalists whether it REALLY would make any difference to them if they knew just how many of their favorite entertainers and historical figures of the last 100 years never had children, willingly or not. Does it diminish the marks they made on the world? Would their hypothetical kids have done half as well as they did at the same pursuits? Should semi-rotten fathers like Einstein and Gandhi be thought of as an excuse to breed if you KNOW you wouldn't do any better than they did at parenting? I think not.

Harvard professor, Michael Porter, demonstrates in The Competitive Advantage of Nations that nation-states need a growing population to achieve economic prosperity - up and coming generations pushing against the established generations and practices in the creative destruction necessary for economic development.

In the past, most nations accomplished this growth almost solely through birthrates. However, today's falling birthrates have left many nations with a less-than-replenishment population growth. Some European countries are trying to make that up with immigration, but are finding that admitting new immigrants without assimilating is leaving them with a hostile population in their midst.

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, making up for any deficiencies in its birthrate with assimilated immigrants. This high level of immigration gave it an edge over its European economic and military rivals. However, The US, too, is failing to assimilate its latest immigrants, leaving it in danger of becoming a Balkanized culture.