> Except the real issues are immigration and globalization.

The US is a country of immigrants, and has been so since it's inception.

H1Bs are not about limiting immigration at all. They are about having a workforce without basic rights and bestow corporations with the power of uprooting an employee's life and banishing them from the land if he even dares stepping out of line.

The axes hanging over the regular folk's head, such as corporate control over access to healthcare, is not enough to completely control the workforce. They still feel they need more control. That's why mechanisms like H1Bs exist, and why illegal immigrants are still widely employed and the ruling regime punishes workers but always protects the employers who insist in hiring them almost exclusively.

> The US is a country of immigrants, and has been so since it's inception.

As JD aptly put it, that’s wrong,[1] but, regardless, so what? America is first and foremost, a democratic republic. Sentimental 20th century notions designed to assimilate the last wave of mass immigration have no binding power on the electorate. Americans are entitled to decide that they’re done with immigration, and it’s the civil service’s job to put that into effect.

[1] The US is a nation created British settlers. Once that society was created, immigrants moved into it. There’s a fundamental difference between immigrants and settlers. https://youtu.be/ZpbYtZ5La8U?si=5gdZ-MGamBwZ4djb. Italian Americans speak English and live within a system of laws and civic customs inherited from a thousand years of English tradition and history. But English Americans don’t speak Iroquois or adhere to an Iroquois legal system or traditions.

> As JD aptly put it, that’s wrong (...)

That's a mind-numbing stupid take which is rejected by the faintest cursory ancestry analysis of the US population. The 2020 census alone points out that there is as many german americans as English americans, and I'm not seeing racist anti-immigration rants targeting germans. They are the predominant ethnic group in the Northeast and Midwest regions. If not by immigration then how do you explain their presence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Americans

For a clue, check where Trump's grandfather was from and how he ended up in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump

The total number of european americans don't even reach 40% of the population, which is nothing new.

So if not from immigration then how do you explain that fact?

There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society. Thats the distinction between the settler population (British people and African slaves, with a relatively small proportion of Dutch, Spanish, and French) and the immigrant population (everyone else).

America is a country that happens to have a lot of people of immigrant ancestry. That’s an incidental feature. Because it’s a physically large country that was for a long time relatively unsettled. But that doesn’t define the country. There isn’t anything that commits the country to any particular policy re: immigration. In fact, the massive German, Irish, and Italian immigration of the 19th century led to a decades-long restriction of immigration staring in the 1920s, where the foreign born population dropped from 15% (similar to now) to under 5% by 1970.

> There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society.

Irrelevant. The disputed fact was that America was not a country of immigrants. The idiotic assertion raised in the parent post is a refresh of the argument that the Mayflower landed settlers and not immigrants, which is nonsense due to the fact that the bulk of the population of the US are undoubtedly immigrants.

Does that define the country, or is it an incidental fact about the country? By that logic you could say America is a nation of white people (definitionally, rather than merely incidentally) to justify a different immigration policy.

> Does that make America “a nation of immigrants?”

The vast majority of Americans are immigrants.

> Is it a defining characteristic or an incidental one?

Is this even a question? Again, the vast majority of Americans are immigrants.

> I wouldn’t say that’s a defining characteristic that should define our future immigration policies.

You can try to move the goalpost as far as you'd like and blow as many ignorant and ill-informed xenophobic dog whistles as you'd care to blow. You cannot outrun the fact that the US is a nation of immigrants.

I simply read your post to make it make sense. That is, you’re saying “America is a nation of immigrants” to refer to some articulated principle—like free speech or property rights—that should compel the electorate to adhere to some policy going forward.

If by “nation of immigrants” you mean merely the fact that most Americans have immigrant ancestry, your original post makes no sense. Why would that incidental fact have any bearing on what America’s immigration policy should be going forward? Mere accidents of history don't compel a democratic republic to maintain any particular course.