For a century or more, to gain entry into the US, you had to either have sufficient means to live here for years (such as money to buy a farm and get through the first year), have a relative pledge to take care of you if you couldn’t make a living, or had a job already with whatever skills you had.
Seriously dude, I don’t know where you get your opinions, but there just isn’t much basis in fact here. For hundreds of years, America was begging immigrants to come over. They were all essentially “legal” immigrants because there were almost no restrictions.
From the southern border, there were no limits on the number of immigrants until 1965:
Indeed, before 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions. The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3407978/#:~:tex….
Before this criminalization of crossing the southern border, most of the immigrants were seasonal, coming to work the crops in California and the South. After it became illegal to cross the border, many of them didn’t want to risk crossing back each year and started staying in the USA full time.
Undocumented, border runners, folks escaping ‘poverty’ with not even 3rd grade education.
There is a major point lost in the talking points about how “these people are criminals because they broke the law when they illegally crossed the border.” The reality is that we have made it nearly impossible to legally immigrate from the South. We stick them in detention camps where “immigration officers” tell them to sign papers if they want to get out of the camp. If the immigrants can’t read English and have no counsel (which most don’t) they do not realize that the papers say they have no right to asylum. This is just one example of the perverted nature of our border control system.
Meanwhile, there are all kinds of industries which need the labor. I remember a few years back there was a governor in Georgia who enacted a punitive policy designed to make illegal immigrants to “self deport.” He had to do a quick U-turn on the policy when the Peach growers told him they were critically short of labor and could not harvest that year’s crop.
You think they are going to found high tech companies, really? Gimme a break.
The adults probably won’t, but some of their kids and grandkids probably will. That is the point of the OP. It’s the most basic American story.
