The USA attracts immigrants because, more than most countries, it rewards merit and forgives failure, it attempts to see all people as equal before the law and it is one of the best nations in the world at absorbing newcomers.
Comparisons matter. If you compare the USA to perfection we come up short. There is lots that we need to work on. But if you compare the USA today to the USA 60 years ago we are improving. If you compare the USA to other countries in the world with regard to rewarding merit, equality before the law and absorbing newcomers we do remarkably well. But most importantly if we focused on opening the paths to immigration and allowed people to make their own choices we would grow and the world would prosper.
When people study history one or two hundred years from now. They will remember this era for two things: positively, because we began to explore space and negatively because we opposed most migration. Today we look at the idea of slavery as an abomination but in 1830 slavery was common and support for abolition was rare. The same is true for free migration. Today everybody sees a reason why we can’t allow free migration so they are opposed to even moving in that direction. History may see us the way we look at slaveholders.
Ethics change don’t get on the wrong side if you want to be remembered well by history.
China has 1.2 billion people. The USA has about 330 million. We have about one quarter the population of China. For many reasons that I think are obvious, but which I will explain below the fold, size matters for nations.
If we want to stay one of the leading nations of the world we need to grow a lot. Controlled, organized and rapid immigration is the only available means to accomplish this.
So Paradox Two is that we profess to want to complete with China. The only way to do that is to grow our population through immigration and yet we limit legal immigration to less than one third of one percent of our population each year. Millions of people from around the world would move here and help us complete with China and we won’t let them.
