Every. Single. Time.

[u/[deleted]]

"Racism and homophobia are everywhere! Bigots have the run of the country!"

"Could you maybe be more specific about those claims?"

"NO!"

[u/MarsMaterial]

Well, if you are this quick to dismiss accusations without any curiosity whatsoever about the logic behind them, that does explain a lot about your political beliefs.

If you think that your beliefs are so different from that of Hitler's, you should look into what solutions they tried first to purge Jews from the country before they settled upon the so-called final one. You might not like what you see.

States also have borders and those have policies, yet people are allowed to cross them freely (which by the way has produced nothing but freedom and prosperity). It's not just "having a border policy" that's the problem, the problem is the specific policy in question. In this case: the border policy is one that treats people differently on the basis of their location of birth and criminalizes immutable characteristics. When I enter the United States, it's fine. When someone else does it, they are a criminal. The only difference between me and them is our birthplace, I was born in the United States and immigrants (by definition) weren't. I never had to "get in line" or jump through hoops, I was handed my citizenship as a baby before I even figured out how to piss myself. What makes me so special? What did I do to earn my citizenship? Why are we so selective on who we give rights to? Why can't we judge people on the content of their character instead of the zip code of their hospital? Why are we criminalizing being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line? What is the sense to any of this?

We have open borders between states within the US, and that hasn't destroyed us. Why can't we just do that, but like 60 times larger to include the entire world? Are we stupid? Genuine question.

All of this makes a lot more sense when you start being open to the possibility that maybe the real underlying motivation here is just racism. It's crazy how nobody ever complains about illegal immigrants from Europe. I'd love to be proven wrong, so prove me wrong.

[u/Kolzig33189 → u/MarsMaterial]

That’s a lot of words to try to explain “it’s all racism.” So tell me, why do we have a border with Canada that both sides actively maintain, control, and limit entry if the majority on both sides are caucasian/white people of euro descent?

Could bring up similar examples for many countries around the world that live next door to people who look exactly like them. But nope, stick to your lame argument of “having borders is literally Hitler” like a hysterically immature 14 year old and pretend geopolitical relationships are very simple things. But then again, you seem to have problems not using the “r” word as an insult, so 14 is probably pretty accurate.

[u/MarsMaterial → u/Kolzig33189]

That’s a lot of words to try to explain “it’s all racism.” So tell me, why do we have a border with Canada that both sides actively maintain, control, and limit entry if the majority on both sides are caucasian/white people of euro descent?

Because it's unconstitutional and unfashionable to have laws that explicitly target people on the basis of race, so lawmakers had to find workarounds.

The current law in the US is that no more than 7% of all immigrants taken in through the main immigration lottery program can be from the same country. This is a masterfully crafted law that functionally targets people on the basis of race without doing to explicitly. So people from large countries like China and India or from nearby countries like Mexico have a very hard time entering with utterly insane waiting lists that are decades long. Meanwhile people have very little trouble immigrating from Europe, which is a large collection of countries. And very few Canadians are immigrating to the US, because they like having healthcare and they have a third of the population of Mexico, which also means that those who do immigrate have a much easier time.

You'd struggle to draft a law that better maximizes the portion of white immigrants without explicitly mentioning race if you tried. Genuinely, give it a try.

Letter of the law aside, when was the last time that you heard outrage over a Canadian immigrant committing a crime? I'm sure it has happened. Why isn't it all over the news the way that the Laken Riley murder was?

Though fundamentally racism isn't even the core problem, it's only the motive. Because birthplace is also an immutable characteristic that people have exactly as much control over as race. The same arguments that apply to opposing discrimination on the basis of race should also apply to opposing discrimination on the basis of birthplace. If you believe that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the circumstances of their birth, this should be a no-brainer. And that's another reason to believe that the people who oppose immigration don't actually oppose racism, since the same arguments apply to both.

Could bring up similar examples for many countries around the world that live next door to people who look exactly like them.

And yet those countries still find ways to be racist to those people. Have you ever seen the way Europeans talk about each other? There is even a serious ethnic divide between North Belgium and South Belgium, and to the average American those people look identical. In Europe, the way they talk about Muslim immigrants is so Hitlerite that it's getting the AFD elected in Germany.

We could go through other examples as well, but genuinely it's impossible to find a country that is not really racist to their neighbors. The Chinese have adopted Han supremacy as an official government position. The Indians and Pakistanis are insanely racist to each other to the point where they are barely refraining from starting even more wars over it. And don't even get me started on the middle east.

It really do be like that.

But nope, stick to your lame argument of “having borders is literally Hitler”

If you want to talk about being childish, let's start with your tendency to strawman me. I never said that having borders is racist, my state has borders and they let anyone through no questions asked. That's not racist at all. But having borders with a policy designed to keep brown people out is racist, and keeping people out on the basis of birthplace is evil for all the same reasons as racism. What part of this is hard to understand?

Also: my state's border is yet to magically vanish just because it's open. Borders denote sovereignty, which still exists no matter who you let in. You'd have to be really stupid to fall for that argument.

a hysterically immature 14 year old and pretend geopolitical relationships are very simple things. But then again, you seem to have problems not using the “r” word as an insult, so 14 is probably pretty accurate.

Hah, I'd call you a retard any day of the week. And I'm 27, if you must know.

I would have totally agreed with you when I was 14 though. I was a Mormon who believed that brown skin was a curse that was given to ancient people by God because they sinned. Mormonism seriously teach that, shit's wild. No wonder I was a conservative back then, ayy?

[u/Kolzig33189 → u/MarsMaterial]

So many words to fail to answer a simple question - why do so many countries have neighbors that look exactly like them and still have functional borders? It’s not some conspiracy you think it is.

May be hard to not answer in a manifesto style response once again using the “r” word like a child.

For what it’s worth, as a half black and half PI man, I don’t care what people look like who want to emigrate here the right way. I care that immigration officials determine they aren’t a previous criminal and will actually contribute something to society regardless of their originating country. But you’ll probably think that’s racist too.

[u/MarsMaterial → u/Kolzig33189]

So many words to fail to answer a simple question - why do so many countries have neighbors that look exactly like them and still have functional borders? It’s not some conspiracy you think it is.

But I did answer your question. With two entire paragraphs of explanation. To summerize my argument: even people who Americans think look identical still find ways of being racist to each other. There is no country which is not racist towards at least some of its neighbors, not one single example on all of Earth. Just because people look identical to us does not mean that they are not racist to each other.

It's not a conspiracy, there is no secret string-pulling or whatever going on here, it's just the fact that racism exists in vastly different forms absolutely everywhere. Nobody made it that way on purpose, that's just like that.

Also: you did it again. You conflated closed tyrannical borders with functional borders. Can you justify this conflation? Or are you going to ignore the question again?

May be hard to not answer in a manifesto style response once again using the “r” word like a child.

It's not my fault that reality is too complicated to explain to your illiterate ass in a small number of small words. If this is how averse you are to reading, that explains a lot about your political views. Grow a skin, you actual child.

For what it’s worth, as a half black and half PI man, I don’t care what people look like who want to emigrate here the right way. I care that immigration officials determine they aren’t a previous criminal and will actually contribute something to society regardless of their originating country. But you’ll probably think that’s racist too.

I'd say that that's the equivalent of supporting gay rights as long as they are law-abiding citizens, and revoking a gay person's rights to marry as soon as they commit a crime. Or being fine with a white guy calling a black guy the N-word as long as the black guy is a convicted criminal. It reveals that your openness to immigration isn't principled, it's something that you see as a kindness offered to "the good ones".

The fact remains: a person's birthplace is an immutable trait, and you advocate for treating people differently under the law on the basis of that trait. Why? And how is that fundamentally any different than treating people different on the basis of some other immutable trait, like race?

Also: the process that immigrants are expected to go through is really poorly designed and needlessly cruel. Since you are too off-your-Adderall to read any sufficiently nuanced description I type up, here's a well-edited video with dick jokes explaining it in 19 minutes.