I have lived outside the United States (in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country) for a large percentage of my adult life, so I am very open to the perspe

I have lived outside the United States (in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country) for a large percentage of my adult life, so I am very open to the perspective of people from other countries. And as I have done my own crossing of international borders, I see that each country sets its own rules about who crosses with what kind of paperwork. Unrestricted discretion of border control officers is the general rule of international law, alas, despite a period of history (before when any of us were born) when it was routine for most people to be allowed to travel freely to most civilized countries. I don't imagine what people feel like when I can observe what people feel like. What I observe is that a lot more people on Hacker News and elsewhere desire to visit the United States and to settle in the United States[1] than decide never to go to the United States at all. That's a fact of the world that I have to deal with without emotion or name-calling but just by thinking about what policy implications that fact has. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-immigration-numbers-perucca http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-i... http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destination-for-worlds-migrants/ http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destinati...