> But they aren’t going to those other developed countries
Canada is also in the midst of an immigration crisis. Western Europe has been debating how to deal with a steady stream of "refugees" for as long as I can remember being conscious of the news.
This is a remarkably shortsighted position and ignores the many, many other factors at play, e.g. the US's relatively high wealth / currency stability.
It almost seems like a collusion among the developed countries to allow in so many immigrants. Canada allowing in almost a million students, mostly from India. USA had basically an open border to the south, probably around 10 million. I'm not sure about Europe.
They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.
I don't really think it's "collusion" so much as it's a question of incentives. Most Western countries want cheap/captive labor, and immigration policy is one way to achieve that with a very long historical precedent. (Much of the Western US railroads were originally built by a predominantly Chinese immigrant workforce; earlier, the colonies relied heavily on Irish laborers as well.)
How much of our labor is comprised of immigrants, documented or otherwise? We've seen what happens when we make it difficult or impossible for cheap labor to make it into farm fields with Brexit: fruit rots on trees and farmers lose piles of money and grocery stores go without berries for the season.
Similarly, what will happen when cheap labor for hotels, construction, landscaping, or manufacturing dries up?
To be clear, I think the status quo is also bad: those jobs trend towards being exploitative, and immigrants are easier to exploit than native populations (generally speaking), my point is that there's been historical economic incentive at the population level to encourage immigration.
> They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.
Realistically something as complex as "immigration policy" is not going to boil down to a single straightforward cause. Similarly, while it certainly was "deeply unpopular" with certain portions of the population, it's absolutely popular with other portions. At a minimum there's been strong humanitarian arguments that resonate with many people, at least in Europe: what else are you going to do with thousands of people fleeing a warzone?
Similarly, the American Dream is so widely known for the promise of being able to make a life there regardless of where you come from. I vividly remember my civics textbooks in US gradeschool being proud of our immigrant heritage and how much newcomers had contributed and achieved there.
Additionally, this is one of those cases where there's counterintuitive forces: restricting immigration leads to a larger undocumented population [1]. If the state's goal is to drive down the number of undocumented immigrants, then it's incentivized in part to make it easier to legally cross the border.
Canada is also in the midst of an immigration crisis. Western Europe has been debating how to deal with a steady stream of "refugees" for as long as I can remember being conscious of the news.
This is a remarkably shortsighted position and ignores the many, many other factors at play, e.g. the US's relatively high wealth / currency stability.