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Well, you'll reap what you sow. The whole reason Trump is doing all these things by EO is because he urgently needs a crisis during which he can be the strongman. Given that the USA is in fine shape (despite fearmongering to the contrary) his first order of battle is to provide said crisis.

Putin could not have picked a better guy to lead his 'divide and conquer' strategy, give it a few weeks, months or years and then come back to read your comment here and try not to feel very foolish.

I wish you best of luck with the aftermath of all this, one thing is for sure: America will not be any 'greater' than it was before Trump became president and mostly likely will be a lot less great. America's enemies will be that much stronger by having diminished their main foe.

If I'd be living in Ukraine, Lithuania or Latvia I'd be quite worried about what happens next.

I would argue that our economy is not in fine shape. Millennials make 20 percent less than boomers did at the same part of life. Wages are stagnant, especially among laborers, lower class, and those in rural areas. Growing inequality combined with a higher cost of living means that the rich and highly populated areas are doing fabulously while the quality of life for the rest is declining.

Edit: spelling

The quality of life for the 'rest' is declining but none of these executive orders have even begun to address that problem.

The world is changing and no amount of wishing is going to change it back, the only way to survive change at that level is to adapt rather than to complain and wish for yesterday to return. It may sound harsh but it won't and any attempt to force yesterday to return is simply going to set back the country as a whole relative to the rest of the world.

Given that America more than most plucked the fruits of this whole globalization thing it is really strange to see it wanting to turn back the clock now, and I fear that the resulting set-back will be paid disproportionally by those laborers, 'lower classes' (let's say the poor) and people in rural areas.

Not that Trump will eat one oyster less.

> The quality of life for the 'rest' is declining but none of these executive orders have even begun to address that problem.

What about the restarting of the keystone XL pipeline? With the added bonus of having the project built with US steel?

> What about the restarting of the keystone XL pipeline? With the added bonus of having the project built with US steel?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-pipeline-transca...

Yes, god forbid we'd have some humanity.

And I didn't notice America picking up its share of the refugees from countries where America wages war before this EO so I'm not really sure what you're getting at.

The previous world war caused millions of people to be uprooted from their homes and to depend on the charity and hospitality of places that did not 'share their values' and yet it worked out fine in the long run.

You need only look at the banlieues of Paris, full of second and third generation Middle Easterners who hate France and hate French values to prove my point.

Those are not representative of Europe or even of France.

And you could even doubt to what extent the situation there is accurately described by the word 'full', plenty of people there do not hate France and do not hate the French (if only because they are French themselves...).

> Those are not representative of Europe or even of France.

He wasn't claiming they were, he was saying they are representative of themselves. Do you disagree?

Nah, he was claiming that proves his "point", which includes "Europeans feeling foolish", as if that monolith exists anywhere but around synapses that use crayons; do you disagree?

Is Algeria in the Middle East?

And what a great country it is. Causing in war in Iraq, Afghanistan, supporting the civil war in Syria and then leaving it to Europe to deal with the refugees.

I guess you must be really proud of your country now.

One of the reasons Trump is popular is that there's a belief he'll prioritize American interests and refrain from waging extraneous wars on behalf of global interests.

The proxy war in Syria is ridiculous. Having a president who isn't interested in antagonizing Russia is good.

European here. I am extremely proud of every single refugee we have taken into our countries.

I don't feel foolish, I feel like a decent human being. How about you? You feel smart with Trump and his 'alternative facts' being in charge? :)

> having taken in millions of refugees

The IOM and UNHCR estimates say that Europe took 1M refugees and migrants until December 2015. That's the highest it has received in a year. So, the claim of "MillionS" of refugees is a pure exaggeration.

What baffles me is why there is so much fear of a country with a GDP less than that of California alone.

Any time you hear Russia being invoked as a reason to do or not do something, you are being manipulated by fearmongering.

"Immigration is about serving Anerica's interests, not the interests of those who would come here."

Tell that to the Native Americans. Also unless you are one of them, at some point, your parents or their parents or ..., almost certainly got here not through something that was not in the interest of "serving America's interests".

But now that you got yours, ...

In the real world, there are winners and losers. People show up in a new place and challenge the current inhabitant's claim to possession. It's always been that way. There's no point fretting over a war that was lost 8-10 generations back. Today, the descendants of the European settlers have as much if not more rightful claim to the land as the descendants of the Aboriginal Americans.

All power eventually reduces down to force. If you have the ability to enforce your possession, congratulations, it's your land. This may not comport with the fairy tales that even grown-ups cling to today, but it's how the real world of scarcity, competition, and meritocracy works.

Immigration is good, but if there wasn't an interest in ensuring that immigration policy benefited the host nation, immigration policy wouldn't be a thing. No foreign national is owed access to any country.

Some immigrants are productive and beneficial to the host nation, and some aren't. Immigration policy attempts to filter the wheat from the chaff and to ensure that in aggregate, the citizens of the host nation are benefited, not negatively impacted, by the incoming foreign nationals. That's not a controversial statement -- it's the entire theory of immigration policy in the first place.

The ones who were engaged in tribal wars of conquest with each other before Europeans ever showed up?

That seems like a dodge to me. Let's stick with the point you tried to make: Was the immigration of everyone else done only in their best interest? (clearly not, since they were almost all killed). Or was instead done in the interest of others?

Could you clearly delineate the point for me when it became okay to change immigration policy from the former to the latter? Was it right after your ancestors got here, or sometime before?

Was it before or after we put the big statue in ny harbor memorializing the former?

It's possible for immigration to be good at some times and bad at others based on changing factors like the economy, supply and demand for labor, population, international relations, etc.

I'm not going to take a position on whether we should be allowing more or less immigration now, but it feels to me like you're trying to trap OP in a logical contradiction that just isn't there.

That wasn't immigration. That was the dislocation of one people by another. 90% of Indians died shortly after first contact because of smallpox, which moved faster than the Europeans themselves did.

And of course, if the Indians had their informed choice, they would never have wanted Europeans to come.

But they didn't have the power to do anything about it. This world doesn't care about right and wrong, only weak and strong.

Edit:

Actually you're dead wrong. There was no immigration essentially from the start of the republic until the late 1800s, and again almost none between 1920 and 1950. And until the 60s, it was only from European societies for the most part.

I notice, again, that you've decided to focus only on the one rhetorical flourish, and not answer any of the questions to which the answer clearly is "actually, our immigration policy has never been like that in the history of the country, and the only reason i'm here is because of that. But it's time to turn it off because i've already got mine".

> "actually, our immigration policy has never been like that in the history of the country, and the only reason i'm here is because of that. But it's time to turn it off because i've already got mine".

You've hit the nail of the head and that part "I've got mine", is really what it is.

It's time to turn off immigration from countries that have cultures that actively conflict with western culture and it's values.

As a homosexual, I don't want immigration from countries where 90% of the population think it's completely rational to jail and execute people for being gay.

There was plenty of German immigration between 1810 and the civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans#19th_century

Also, I have no idea why you think it relevant that they were European. Certainly Ben Franklin didn't: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy-.... At the time of actual immigration, the majority opinion was not that Italians, Poles or Jews were desirable immigrants.

I'm confused. It sounds like you're suggesting that the Native Americans would have done better if they had been led by someone like Trump. Would that be a fair characterization?

The point is that America's policy has never been what he claims. It's never been "immigration exists to serve america's interest".

If it had been, most people in the US today would likely not be here.

As for done better, no, that's the other point.

The europeans still would have killed them anyway, no matter who was leading them.

In the same way that if they really really wanted to, the terrorists would just kill us anyway, and immigration policy wouldn't change a damn thing.

Immigration does serve America's interests, you just define them wrong.

First, there is the interest of those Americans who are already here, but whose families will not be able to join them.

Second, there are the interests of Americans who are "illegal", but have never known any other home than the United States because they were brought here at age 2 or 3, whose sole allegiance is to America, but who are deported in adulthood because of our immigration laws.

Third, there are the Americans who, like myself, were born here and are citizens, but remember that they only exist because their ancestors were granted the freedom to escape persecution in the old world.

What interest can you cite that will outweigh any of those interests?

Compare and contrast the security nightmare created by the Second Amendment with the security nightmare created by taking refugees and other immigrants.

Hundreds of people are killed by guns each week. There's been a couple of refugees who did anything violent in a decade.

But sure, let's be afraid of something as vague as people from the Middle East.

Hi from the UK. In case you're interested, your description of our country is actually wildly inaccurate.