The Conundrum of Immigration

 We occupy this ground, we draw these boundaries and we say who can set foot on this ground and who can stay. 
Comanches living in the Great Plains had no such concepts of ownership of geographic territory. They were nomads, which meant they packed up their tepees and moved on, following the buffalo and they did not think, as far as we can say, in terms of ownership of land.
Europeans, with kings, built forts and kings "granted" land to strong men who controlled who lived in their realms. These European kings even "granted" land in North America, and those men, like Calvert and Baltimore, then "owned" what would later become entire American states. Napoleon "owned" the entire continent from the Mississippi to California.
The United States planted a flag on the moon, which might be thought of as claiming a sort of ownership. 
In some sense all this "ownership" of land is a bit bizarre. Birds, dogs, deer, fox don't recognize these ownership rights. They poop wherever they want.
But the idea of a "country" does involve drawing lines, boundaries. Your brother may have drawn a line down the back seat of the car (in the days cars had seats which were not "bucket" seats) and if you crossed that line, you had invaded his space.

But one of the central ideas of nationhood has to do with who "belongs," who is permitted to simply live and sleep in a territory.

Of course, once you live in a place, you may act to avail yourself of the "grid" which other people, which the government ruling there, has constructed--water, power, schools, healthcare, police protection from men with guns. And the people living there claim the "right" to rule on who gets in on this bounty of space and services.

So, we have immigration laws. 

Look at the children photographed here, from Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century. 
Would you want to deny these people a place in the club?

But, how about these folks?

 And how about these?

If you found yourself subtly drawn a little more to the cute little blonde Dutch kids, but less to the people who look less like you, then you begin to see the problem.

In 1939, Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State sent back a ship called S S St. Louis to Germany with over 900 souls aboard and they all died in concentration camps. The passengers were Jews fleeing Hitler and the Third Reich.

Cordell Hull 

In 1940, Hull's Assistant Secretary of State, Breckenridge Long, a fair haired boy, a Princeton graduate, upper class type,  tried to send back the SS Quanza but Eleanor Roosevelt (who was a genteel antisemite in her youth) intervened and over a hundred Jews were saved.

Long sent a memo to his underlings at the State Department describing how to prevent more Jews from getting into the United States, as Wikipedia recounts:

 "We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas."^[2] Ultimately, the effect of the immigration policies set by Long's department was that, during American involvement in the war, Ninety percent of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German and Italian control were never filled. If they had been, an additional 190,000 people could have escaped the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. ^[3]

In November 1943, when the House was considering two bills that would have established a separate government agency charged with assisting the rescue of Jewish refugees, Long gave secret testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee saying that the majority of 580,000 refugees admitted from Europe were Jewish, and that such legislation would be a rebuke of the State Department in wartime.

Breckenridge Long 

So, at the extremes of behavior--when we are sending people back to certain death or dismemberment--we can see the villainy. 

But, what about when we send people back to Honduras, or places where life is violent, short and brutish? What about sending people back to the famine and Shariah law in Somali?   

On the other hand, China has a billion people. That's 1,000 million. We have 300 million. Suppose 10% of the people living in China decided to come live in the USA--that's 100 million people. That would mean 25% of all people living in the USA would speak Chinese. How would we cope with a 25% increase in our population, people who don't even speak English?

So, do we have the "right" to turn people away from our shores?
If so, how do we make those choices?

It all seems very clear to some people. Rush Limbaugh has no doubts. Neither does John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or any Republican.

But, as Bertrand Russell once observed:  "The trouble with the world is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."