Yeah but now we're getting into the land of international relations. This is becoming awfully abstract from the original topic.

Also I think you're missing some nuance here, which is that the people arguing in favor of this would indeed do a lot more to admit emigrants/refugees here, it's just that they aren't in power and don't run the government. So they can't be hypocrites for advocating for something they genuinely would do if only they were able to.

Would they really? How many of these people do you think would be happy to open their homes, or at least their neighborhoods, to a substantial number of poor, unskilled, uneducated and culturally alien people? The world would work a lot better if we all learned to ignore opinions when they come from people with no skin in the game.

Yeah, I really do think many of them actually would. For example, I'm Jewish, so I know what happens when the US turns its back on refugees fleeing genocide.

But they're not in power and they aren't making the immigration decisions, hence it's not happening.

Fair enough, we disagree on that but I have no data to back my intuition up. Thanks for the civil discussion.