Saying the US is doing something right because people want to immigrate there is setting the bar very low.

Those billions would happily go to any Developed country, and per capita, the US doesn’t have particularly high immigration (Australia is the highest)

You'll find it's a lot more difficult to immigrate to those other developed countries

I had two to the US, and have had them for three other countries.

That tells you something.

Canada is also in the midst of an immigration crisis. Western Europe has been debating how to deal with a steady stream of "refugees" for as long as I can remember being conscious of the news.

This is a remarkably shortsighted position and ignores the many, many other factors at play, e.g. the US's relatively high wealth / currency stability.

They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.

I don't really think it's "collusion" so much as it's a question of incentives. Most Western countries want cheap/captive labor, and immigration policy is one way to achieve that with a very long historical precedent. (Much of the Western US railroads were originally built by a predominantly Chinese immigrant workforce; earlier, the colonies relied heavily on Irish laborers as well.)

How much of our labor is comprised of immigrants, documented or otherwise? We've seen what happens when we make it difficult or impossible for cheap labor to make it into farm fields with Brexit: fruit rots on trees and farmers lose piles of money and grocery stores go without berries for the season.

Similarly, what will happen when cheap labor for hotels, construction, landscaping, or manufacturing dries up?

To be clear, I think the status quo is also bad: those jobs trend towards being exploitative, and immigrants are easier to exploit than native populations (generally speaking), my point is that there's been historical economic incentive at the population level to encourage immigration.

> They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.

Realistically something as complex as "immigration policy" is not going to boil down to a single straightforward cause. Similarly, while it certainly was "deeply unpopular" with certain portions of the population, it's absolutely popular with other portions. At a minimum there's been strong humanitarian arguments that resonate with many people, at least in Europe: what else are you going to do with thousands of people fleeing a warzone?

Similarly, the American Dream is so widely known for the promise of being able to make a life there regardless of where you come from. I vividly remember my civics textbooks in US gradeschool being proud of our immigrant heritage and how much newcomers had contributed and achieved there.

Additionally, this is one of those cases where there's counterintuitive forces: restricting immigration leads to a larger undocumented population [1]. If the state's goal is to drive down the number of undocumented immigrants, then it's incentivized in part to make it easier to legally cross the border.

[1]: https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2024/offering-...

As I said, Australias immigration rate is higher than the USs

I too believe that contrails are mind control.

And you can ignore the 2009 US-backed honduras coup and everything back to the 1953 coup against Árbenz if you want, and take my tongue in cheek reference to the murder of JFK as evidence that I'm a crank- I'm used to that, even if very rarely have I heard the folks making those assertions make a plausible and informed case of what did happen to JFK.

But still, even if you ignore me because I am crank, you're not going to get beyond a simple, likely-racist, and probably wrong understanding of US immigration without understanding long-term US foreign policy in South and Central America.