I suspect some of the reasons you and the person responding to you are not quite seeing eye to eye is that "immigration" has wrapped up both legal and illegal i

I suspect some of the reasons you and the person responding to you are not quite seeing eye to eye is that "immigration" has wrapped up both legal and illegal immigration. It's possible the US is relatively open to legal immigration compared to some countries while also being particularly egregious in it's handling of illegal immigration. Even beyond than that, there are multiple facets of both legal and illegal immigration. Maybe the US both accepts larger numbers of immigrants legally but is also more intolerant of certain kinds of applicants than others. When dealing with huge issues, I think it's deceptively easy to simplify the issue more than you realize. I know I've ended up in arguments where after far too much effort I realized we both actually more or less agreed with each other, but were simply focusing on different aspects of a larger issue.