https://reason.com/blog/2018/01/12/of-course-most-immigrants-come-from-shth

Big Daddy is in trouble again, this time for allegedly calling Haiti and most African nations "#badword#hole countries." President Donald Trump denies the specific phrase, but let's give him a pass on this one, because he's right in the largest sense possible: Most immigrants who come to America do indeed come from places they'd rather not live or work. By definition. Whether their homelands are technically #badword#holes or something less offensive to contemporary ears isn't really a question. People come here because they think it's going to be better than where they're from.

(snip)

Oh, and one more thing: The wretched refuse washing up on the East Coast had it easy compared to the Asians flooding the West Coast. The very first broad-based (which is to say racist) immigration restrictions were leveled against Chinese migrants in 1882. Back then, euphemisms were less common so a complete ban on Chinese people coming here to work was simply called The Chinese Exclusion Act. Anti-Chinese animus was virulent enough that it underwrote the single-biggest mass lynching in American history, which took place in Los Angeles in 1871. It was followed by less overt but no less sweeping legislation to keep Japanese out. Long before they became "model minorities," Asians were barred from coming here. They persisted, though, and America is a better place for their willingness to route around racism and attempts to keep them out.

So it's the worst sort of anachronism to pretend that past immigrants were welcomed here because they've become model Americans since their ancestors first showed their undersized and sloping brows, over-sized noses and lips, and dark and slanted eyes.

And it bears restating, over and over again: The point of America is not where you're from, it's what you do when you show up here. And we know exactly what immigrants, whether legal or not, do when they get here. They pay taxes, including Social Security taxes that they have no chance of ever seeing again. They commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born counterparts. They "are responsible for significant economic growth." They start businesses at higher rates and use welfare at lower rates than their made-in-the-U.S.A. analogues. They fight our nation's wars.

Trump is right to stress that people originally granted "temporary protected status" cannot and should not expect to have that status constantly extended. He's right, too, that Congress should fix the issue of "dreamers"-of kids brought here illegally as minors or born to illegals-once and for all via legislation. But he and all the nativists are wrong in thinking that America, this great, bruising, hulk of a nation, would be better off with fewer immigrants from fewer #badword#holes (the Republican Party is calling for a 50 percent reduction in legal immigration). It's the people fleeing #badword#holes who have helped to make this country great. And isn't that what Trump promised us back in 2016?