kontextmaschine:

One important thing to understand about America is that before recent overland waves from the south, arriving immigrants tended to be fairly well off, relatively. We were an ocean away from our main font in Europe (and also for the historical sidebar of West Coast Asian immigration), and arrivals were definitionally those with the means – which often included support from source country communities they might later try to repay with remittances or support of further migration – to get here.

Huddled masses, wretched refuse at Ellis Island, yeah, yeah. That was a reflection of general post-peasant immigrant lowliness that we still were getting the cream from. Those who couldn’t swing making it here after the failure of the 1848 uprisings, or Russian pogroms, or advancing Nazis ended up in Liverpool, or Berlin, or Treblinka.

Irish Famine refugees, taking “coffin ships” known for shoddy conditions, were some of the worst we saw, but that was just testament to the general condition of the Irish people at the time that those were still the lucky

Suggesting that even if we do not make the southern border impermeable, to the extent we raise cost of passage we filter in the manner we’re calibrated around