Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
People are decent when it comes to the personal. If you introduce systems and abstractions, they grow colder. Objectively, allowing immigration is one of the easiest ways we have to improve the lives of multitudes. That's easier to swallow if you personally empathize with immigrants. Contesting demonization of immigrants (seriously, to the tune of 'wetback darkie ISIS cartel smallpox lepers here to destroy our way of life!!!') and at least maintaining the current immigration framework in America are one readily available facets of keeping the decency machine running. Are you convinced the improvements of the past century are both impossible and ephemeral? They will be if we don't defy the Trumpian vision of nations locking their citizens in, shutting foreigners out, and riding roughshod over both in the name of "freedom" while the aristocrats pick our bones...

The American Dream is believing that America can one day become what it has claimed to always have been.
I agree that most people are decent when it comes to those that they care about, and this quickly drops the further away they get - since Christmas is a time to shower one's children with expensive gifts, not help people starving elsewhere.

Immigration to improve the lives of the multitudes is as short term as giving food to someone and saying "problem solved!" First off, the West is struggling with taking on a minute fraction of the potential numbers; those helped are often the ones most able to travel, not the ones most in need. Secondly, the birth rate in these countries means that all the people leaving creates a temporary reduction in population at best. It solves nothing.

People generally are OK with immigrants that assimilate. It is difficult to hate people when you have no idea who they are. Ethnicity, religion and especially culture create divides. And two out of the three can alter to shift to their new reality - and the third decreases with inter-generational breeding.

What were the improvements of the last century? That the USA finally decided to stop treating people of African descent as third class citizens and upgraded them to second class? The limited immigration allowed to the west? Globally, I think it likely that freedom of movement was theoretically better in the British Empire (no need to curtail it - who could afford it?) Improvements have been mainly about freedom of trade, and increasingly the automation of practically everything making things cheaper and more available to all.

Trump is definitely ignorant about most things, and is probably of average intelligence. But he is very aware that his base (as such a term is rarely as well deserved) can be worried about immigrants whilst in many cases being second or third gen themselves and vote for a man who has twice married one. But for them it seems "foreigners" is no way as near as important as skin colour - I imagine there'd be no concern about thousands if not millions of white Western Europeans - as long as they were wealthy - coming over. If having a very limited amount of immigration allows Americans to delude themselves that this is decent, then so be it.

Wealth disparity is increasing rapidly, and movement of people or no isn't going to alter that.