Good thing I said "in a manner closer to" that era, which leaves ample room for the assumption that a modernized version of the more permissive system is implied, not a direct return to antiquated policy.

But that would be a good-faith assumption, so I understand why you didn't make it.

> I'm not anti immigrant just anti illegal immigration. Big difference.

I clearly laid out my position that both the current panic over high “illegal crossings”, and the general discord over undocumented people in the US during the previous decades, are purposefully manufactured political crises sustained by the same people who avoid improving the situation. It’s not a coincidence that as immigration expanded to include all racial groups, it suddenly became much harder to immigrate legally in the second half of the 20th century & after.

I think instead of this broken system, the US should be open to all immigrants in a manner closer to when my Irish and Italian ancestors immigrated legally with ease during the racist Exclusion Era.

> Over a million people crossed the border illegally last year is that ok?

With the context of what I said above, and given the other option is your authoritarian notion of a militarized border & strict enforcement without huge fixes to the system first, yes I am essentially okay with the crossings. Our nation has always had large inflows of immigrants. What has changed is our ineptitude at providing efficient means of legal immigration at scale. The dysfunction serves a cynical purpose.

Our immigration system is broken and all significant compromises reached to fix it (usually by a bipartisan working group of US Senators) are shot down by anti-immigrant conservatives. They prefer the status-quo, which allows ample fearmongering during campaign season and limited immigrant quotas, over any systemic changes involving less chaos and more immigrants.

This nation was built by immigrants. We need to fix our system to more smoothly and humanely integrate the next generations of Americans into our society, not piss away huge amounts of money and effort in a failing bid to keep them out.

The US immigration system turning legal vs illegal immigrants against each other is by design. There's no reason the system has to be so broken that millions feel like coming illegally, living on the margins, and risking deportation is a more feasible option than attempting one of the purposefully cumbersome, overly bureaucratic routes.

Anti-immigrant Americans and their elected officials understand that they can probably never close off the US to immigration entirely, due to our nation's history. But they're more than happy to never compromise in order to fix the system, and they definitely love the animosity the systemic dysfunction sparks between different immigrant groups, their families, and their communities. It quite literally helps keep xenophobic politicians in office, or gives them a cultural wedge issue to use in campaigning even if their jurisdiction is nowhere near the border.

Edit: phrasing