I'm super liberal, to the point that I believe in open borders (there was a Weeds maybe a year or two ago that had some stat that borders have a brutal cost to

I'm super liberal, to the point that I believe in open borders (there was a Weeds maybe a year or two ago that had some stat that borders have a brutal cost to humanity; can't find it now, but this paper [0] gets at the gist; a good quote is "the estimated net gains from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles the income level in less-developed countries"), but it's pretty clear that the answer is that our immigration policy serves two purposes: - The right gets to turn out its base with xenophobic demagoguery - Neoliberals get to keep shoveling human capital into their furnaces (Uber drivers, Doordash delivery people, tradespeople, warehouse workers, etc.) which displaces low-income Americans, propping up a sclerotic, corrupt economic system while (and thus) putting more pressure on an already teetering (also corrupt) political system Unsurprisingly, Americans don't like this. Either they're getting directly ginned up, or they directly lost a job, or they see the downstream effects. I think it's easy to look at places and people who don't want anymore immigration as xenophobic or racist, and there's some truth to that, but an even bigger truth is that Americans generally want to help, but most of them can't. A wide majority (between 50-60%) have made so little in the last few years they paid no federal income tax [1]. It is hard to run a pluralistic society, they ask a lot of their citizens, and most people in the US are doing pretty badly. [0]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w183... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242138/percentages-of-us-households-that-pay-no-income-tax-by-income-level/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242138/percentages-of-us...