No Stupid Questions

Oh we've been fighting about this for centuries

Once we stopped needing cheap labor to build the railroads and mine ore and occupy native lands and farm crops and roof houses and paint walls and run the cash register at the gas station. Actually we still need immigrants for some of that in order to sustain the level of growth required to fund our retirement plans and do the jobs that we would rather not do for wages that we would rather not work for. It looks like Republicans are hoping to fuel that growth internally through reproduction among existing citizens (under the theory that kids will work for lower wages), while the democrats want to rely on immigrants. That's my theory anyway.

The Statue of Liberty wasn't something commissioned by the USA. It was just how one French guy saw us. The New Colossus is not law, it's a poem.

We've never really been proud of immigration. The only President with a reasonable take on immigrants was Teddy Roosevelt - and his belief was that the only path forward is full assimilation.

This was done to keep our Catholic roots in check. I'm no longer a Catholic-aligned guy as a result. My producer was Catholic-aligned and Jesuit-associated for his entire life until he started making changes he felt was right with his higher power.

They became anti-immigrant once they had kids and saw other people arriving to the boat. My sister in law's family are refugees from El Salvador. Now they are all raging Trumpers, despite half of them not being naturalized yet.

Distraction is the point.

So it turns out that the Statue of Liberty never represented the opinions of all Americans to begin with

Somewhere after the Great War. No idea why though.

Once we took everything from the natives fully to the west coast we stopped being keen on it.

Because immigrants don’t participate in politics. They are too busy to do actual work that creates value for the country instead of voting or being social butterflies and running campaigns.

They have always been anti-immigrant. Gor the longest time they simply tolerated it, but no more.

As for the the statue of liberty, a, it was built by the French not Americans, b, I can also happily say that I pride myself on being a great person, while in truth being a terrible peraon.

Whenever hate can be used to divide the masses. We must be divided lest we decide that a system that protects unethically gained wealth is unethical, even if it protects ethically gained wealth.

I have a take no one else has talked about. I think much of the recent hate is down to there being too many damned people, and suddenly it seems a lot of them are brown.

Young me honestly wasn't quite sure what Hispanic meant because there weren't any around. LOL, imagine my culture shock when I moved to Chicago! Then I came down to Florida, and once again, no Hispanics. They were so rare it was kinda freaky. Then Hurricane Ivan flattened us, loads of immigrants showed up to build and never left.

Now people are looking around and seeing America on the first downward trajectory since the Great Depression. They're casting about to lay blame. Know what's different? Well lookee here, millions of new brown people that weren't here before!

I don't think liberals understand just how many immigrants came across the southern border in the last 20 years. When I brought up that there was indeed a crisis at the border during the Biden admin, I got beat up here and on reddit. Y'all can stick your fingers in your collective ear, but shitloads of people were piling up to get it. It was a humanitarian crisis.

Not saying the hate is logical, but I can at least understand where it's coming from. It's a little more nuanced that screaming RACIST at everyone.

Easier communication. Thousands of people each living far apart had no way to amplify each other. Immigrants were mostly centered around cities, thus the rural divide.

When said immigration switched from primarily being Europeans emigrating from a post WW2 Europe, and instead became primarily brown folk coming from all the countries that the U.S. itself bombed to shit.

It's not immigration that they hate. It's brown immigration.

Never forget that.