It’s tough to be a migrant these days. It wasn’t always that way, at least in North America. The people we call Native Americans were migrants from Siberia populating an empty continent. They were in turn dispossessed en masse by hordes of migrants from Europe, first by the diseases they brought with them against which the natives had no immunity, and then by force of arms.
These new migrants to America had the benefit of “open borders” until 1921. All they needed was to acquire a boat ticket and pass a cursory health check at Ellis Island. In that year, immigration quotas were imposed that strictly limited the inflow from eastern and southern Europe, mostly Catholics and Jews, considered undesirable by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. Blacks and Asians continued to be excluded entirely.
Today’s world, and certainly our country, is even more crowded and complicated. Those who are comfortably settled don’t want to make room for more migrants. So restrictions are increasingly imposed in an attempt to keep them out.
