You thought this was your country. Turns out, its not.
He said, oh don’t limit a certain date and say no more because what if your parents were barred in a certain past year. I apologized for being bigoted. No one can select their lineage and date of fully legal arrival.
My 1860s immigrant great grandparents came from England,Scotland and Ireland, plus other side from Croatia. But an Algonquin also, from here. I was named after a great great uncle who arrived from Scotland in time to enlist to fight with Michigan unit in the Civil War. The unit was in battle within weeks.
I have the background to be a chauvinist and bigot and to say this is my country but I must realize it was luck and destiny,not my choice to be born here.
Then they'd have been barred. But they weren't barred. And they were probably checked for diseases before coming in. And they probably couldn't get welfare. And they probably worked, and learned English if they didn't already know it, or made sure their kids learned it. And depending on when they came here, there might have been a big old frontier to be built up at that time. Things are very different now.
Yeah, some of us are glad our ancestors got here. But that doesn't mean we have to continue to let everybody in, forever and ever. Just because you made it onto the Titanic's lifeboat doesn't mean you have to keep letting more and more people into the lifeboat until the whole lifeboat sinks and everybody on it dies.