Well your analogy is not a good one :). The contract offered by America to Immigrants is not: come here and get this pile of money! Its always been: come here and you get an opportunity to work hard and possibly make a pile of money.

The money was my analogy to that opportunity. Admittedly it's ambiguous.

> I've never understood how it qualifies as hypocrisy to take an opportunity (e.g. get into a country), then shut other people out. If you found a pile of money in the street, is it hypocrisy to shut other people out?

The resource 'a pile of money' is something an individual or a small group of people can hoard and exhaust. Something the size of a continent not so much so yes, that's hypocrisy.

America could easily operate on 25% of the landmass that it currently occupies (and it would probably be a much wealthier country, but that's another subject entirely).

Most of it is empty space anyway (and this even goes for countries that appear at first sight to be densely populated such as the country where I currently reside, the Netherlands).