> But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly

> But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration? Each of us certainly has our cultural preferences. Your own preference — in essence, your value-weighting of the various factors in play – is by no means irrational. But we can question whether you've realistically assessed the likely cost and effort required to restrict global migration in today's world. (That's why in a previous comment I cited Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest about the well-intentioned but, ultimately, catastrophically-naïve policy decisions that got the U.S. into Vietnam in the 1960s.) If King Canute were alive today, he'd likely smile knowingly at our conundrum; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide. "The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of 'trying to stop the tide' of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite."