Quote:
Originally Posted by bc42gb43
We are a nation of immigrants. Closing the doors in the face of those who want a better life for themselves and their families goes against one of the most important things that made us great!
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Listen, you cannot have immigration and socialism at the same time. You cannot have open immigration to free healthcare and welfare. You can't even have open-immigration to a federally mandated minimum wage. If you had completely free immigration to these things, this country would be completely swamped.
If you want open-immigration like it was in the past. You need to revert the state of this country to the times of the past.
Lets pretend you wanted to come to America today from Mexico, what do you have to do? Well, you would have to apply for some kind of VISA, most likely either a work visa or a tourist visa. Without either of these, you cannot step foot in America. You cannot legally work in this country without permission from the US government. You cannot visit your family who lives here without permission from the US government.
So if you aren't highly educated, if you don't have lots of money, or you aren't married to an American citizen, you are basically never going to even see the inside of the United States unless you sneak in.
Now lets pretend you wanted to come to America 150 years ago, how would you do it? You would just come to America. The individual states either let you stay, or they kicked you out. There were thousands upon thousands of people that lived in the states that were just "free men", mostly coming as laborers or as indentured servants. And would live here for years and years before they become citizens(and many never became citizens).
But what did citizenship do back then? The states were basically sovereign nations, and they passed their own laws dealing with citizens and non-citizens. If a state had laws that basically made citizens and non-citizens equal, then there was never actually any purpose to become a citizen of that state. The only purpose for citizenship 150 years ago, was that citizenship in one state effectively made you a citizen of all the states. Allowing you to move from one state to another legally, allowing you equal protection to all other citizens in each of the states. So citizenship itself was only necessary if you wanted to go from one state to another. And that is why the federal government was given control over the naturalization process, because an American citizen was basically given access to all the states. And the idea was to allow California to largely control its own immigration, and for Texas to control its immigration, and Arizona to control its immigration, by allowing each to decide who was allowed to stay and who had to go.
If we still had the same type of immigration and governmental structure of 150 years ago. There would be no federal government entity called "INS". The states would be enforcing immigration, the states would be responsible for expelling non-citizens. And at any time every single state could allow as many non-citizens(illegal immigrants) in their state as they wanted. But those non-citizens living in California could simply not move to other states, unless they became actual citizens of this country. Which could only happen if they met the criteria set forth by the Congress(similar to how it is now).
And let me repeat, you cannot have open-immigration to welfare and free healthcare. But as I said before, the states could allow as many foreigners to live in their states as they want. They could even create a sort of psuedo-citizenship for the immigrants that didn't meet federal requirements for US citizenship but are living and working in their state, to provide them with benefits. That way if California wanted to provide all its non-citizens free educations, free healthcare, and welfare, it could. It could also choose to only provide those things to certain non-citizens. Or it might choose to only provide those things to actual American citizens.
The problem is, the only way to stay in this country is to become a citizen of this country. And that allows you to go anywhere you want in this country. And under our current system, if California wants to allow more immigrants. Then those uneducated, poor, non-english speaking people might end up in Iowa, and the federal government would require Iowa to take care of them, by our generous welfare system. And because of our federal income tax, corporate tax, etc. Certain states(like New York) might be forced to basically subsidize the generous California welfare system.
If you de-federalized our country, we would all be much better off.
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