  urlLink Storey claims that "everyone in the United States, save a few thousand abused survivors of the Native American genocide, only has citizenship as a result of that "generosity", doesn't it make it somewhat arbitrary to claim that such generosity can now be revoked & limited to such a great degree?
America's alleged founding principle was freedom, not safety. " here's a list of large segments of american population that didn't come here through "generosity. " 1) AFRICAN AMERICANS.-- forced here through slavery. 2) People claiming political assylum-- many immigrants from about 1920 on, especially from africa are political dissidents. note that in my earlier posts on immigration i excluded political asslyum people. note that i include the small but significant group of Jews that came to the U.S. to escape the holocaust in this group. 3) Anyone who can trace his ancestry back to the Revolutionary war: they fought a war to be here. they won. to the victors go the spoils. (this last one does eek a little of "might makes right" but that's the type of world we live in. why is Texas american soil, or hawaii, or california for that matter. . . why does israel have a claim to Jerusalem?
because fighting, and winning a war over territory does give some right to it. whether or not it should is a different story. ) but i think my comments earlier really does respond to storey's key point, that we don't have the 'right' to widthdraw our 'generousity' in letting immigrants in. So some extent i agree, we draw much of our strength from diversity, and at the very least, immigrants tend to be hardworking, productive, active, members of society. but, and i've cut and pasted this from my comments to sepdawg's comments below, however, there are people whose first action upon entering the united states is to avoid the system by entering illegally. We have no evidence that these people will be productive members of soceity, the only thing we know of them is that they've avoided the established immigration procedures.
i think that's a discisive point. being a citizen is more than just material benefit-- otherwise we'd all just flock to the country that has the highest standard of living (which is, i believe Luxemburg, although i may be mistaken-- its definately some wierd european aristocracy-ruled city-state). Being a citizen is also about giving tacit agreement to the rules of that society. by the same token, we allow emmigration-- people within our country who disagree with the system of american government are free to withdraw their approval and find a country which is more to their liking.
Its not that we shouldn't let anyone in, but if the choice is between the people who go through the system and the people who arrive illegally, we have to favor those who do all the right things. 
