> not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah)
Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.
That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle
The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years, during which time many of our ancestors came here. The only reason we had any immigration laws to begin with was racism against Chinese people. Now we are making up other excuses for it, based on no evidence whatsoever.
> The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years,
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship by naturalisation to “free white persons” of “good moral character” - yes, it didn’t technically bar immigration from people who didn’t meet that criterion, but it reduced them to an underclass who were denied citizenship - and this was prior to the 14th Amendment, so there was no constitutional right to birthright citizenship even for their children born in the US.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (still on the books but long dormant until recently revived by Trump) gave the federal government the power to deport citizens of countries at war with the US - effectively banning them from immigrating. The Alien Friends Act of 1798 allowed the President to deport any foreigner based on the President’s subjective determination that they were “dangerous”- however, it expired in 1800 and was not renewed.
In the early years of US independence, there were state laws enabling deportation of immigrants - e.g. in 1794 Massachusetts responded to the “problem” of poor Irish immigrants with a state law authorising their deportation back to Ireland, and several were actually deported under this Act. While nowadays, state-level deportation laws would surely be struck down as intruding into an exclusive federal domain, the lack of broad federal deportation statutes for much of the 18th/19th centuries left open a (since closed) constitutional space in which state-level deportation laws could exist
Even prior to US independence, British law gave the colonial authorities the power to deport people they viewed as undesirable - rarely exercised, but it legally existed - and the main reason they rarely exercised it was they didn’t get many “undesirable” immigrants turning up
Note I’m not defending these laws - judged by today’s standards they were racist and deeply unfair - just pointing out that the “first 100 years” of the US wasn’t as “open borders” as you paint it as having been
And while no doubt historically (and even today) many immigration laws have been racist in their terms, motivation, or implementation - I don’t think the idea of having some restrictions on immigration is inherently racist. Almost every country on earth (even non-Western) nowadays has laws saying people convicted of very serious crimes cannot immigrate without special permission - is it “racist” if Botswana says to someone just released from serving a 20 year prison sentence for terrorism “sorry, we don’t want you”?
Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.
That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle