Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Your argument about trade-offs can't even be addressed currently because we have absolutely NO IDEA who or how many are arriving.

I think immigration is a net positive for the US, but I also think we need to secure the southern border to a better extent.

I don't think it can be completely secure, ever, no matter what. 

Having people turn themselves in and request asylum and being turned loose into the hinterlands without the ability to work legally is a disaster, in my view.  We see plenty of city mayors agreeing with that.

Some of this can be influenced with Presidential verbiage, symbolic steps and words.  Some needs new legislation.  Some needs current laws being enforced to a better degree.  (If an illegal is connected to a crime and convicted, I think he should be summarily turned over to ICE and removed.)

But we were talking about hypotheticals. "Town with 100 people and 5 murders vs 1000 people and 10 murders." That doesn't even mention the economic value of the new arrivals but you said things like 'ZERO immigrant crime is the answer' and that if the 1000 with 10 murders meant 900 new arrivals including 5 murders, you'd prefer that not be the case.

What I'm getting at is that you're embedding your belief about immigration into the outcome. You aren't trying to balance economic benefit vs the cost of increased crime, because you don't believe immigration is an economic benefit. (Or at least, not the way immigration has happened in the US.)

Some of us will do a cost/benefit analysis. You don't do that because you believe it's a cost/cost analysis, and there's no benefit.

• We didn't have a welfare state. There was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no AFDC, no Food Stamps, etc. Back then we didn't have to screen out free riders because there were not a lot of free rides.
• Assimilation was the agreed upon policy of the vast majority of the population INCLUDING the immigrants. We taught English at schools and didn't provide ESL or any government documents in other languages. The goal of more-or-less everyone was for the immigrants to assimilate and become "Americans" like the rest of us, not for them to be foreign in perpetuity. This is no longer true.
• In the aforementioned earlier time immigrants were less likely to become a block of "foreigners" because we were importing a multitude of differing cultures. Today a very high percentage share a common language and general culture. In the 1890's a Norwegian and a Ukrainian working together at a Steel Mill communicated with each other in English out of Necessity because neither could understand the other's native tongue. That isn't true for Central and South American immigrants today because all except the Brasilians speak the same language already.
• The economy of that time had an insatiable appetite for unskilled laborers. The value of a strong back was much higher then relative to the value of a strong mind.

Of course there are benefits.

There are also costs.

With respect to unskilled immigrants, the costs clearly outweigh the benefits. If you disagree, we can have that discussion.

America does get a lot of highly skilled immigrants and I'm not really addressing them. That is a tougher question. I'm mainly addressing the unskilled immigrants because they clearly do NOT provide enough benefit to outweigh their costs.

You cannot be over 45 years old to move to New Zealand. And

[img width=500 height=328.996]https://i.imgur.com/lMnJgO2.png[/img]

I don't think the rich are characterized by just a few examples.