Supply and Demand

"Now obviously 'more immigrants = more prosperity' isn't a completely accurate blanket rule.  You don't want to let in criminals.  There are probably a lot of very nice Salvadoran great-grandmas out there who despite being fine people are at this point too old to be making meaningful economic contributions.  But the default assumption should be that if an able-bodied, law-abiding person wants to move here to get a job that'd be mutually beneficial.  Our politicians talk, constantly, about how the United States is "the greatest country on earth" but they're oddly reluctant to pursue the policy implications of the fact that millions of people around the world agree with them about that.  We treat the desire to migrate here with suspicion, as a problem we need to solve with better guards and biometric identity verification systems rather than as something that should be taken at face value." - Matthew Yglesias, Oct. 4, 2012.