Anti-immigrant advocates are unaware of, or choose to ignore, the fact that it is virtually impossible for a poor person to immigrate to the USA legally. It costs tens of thousands of dollars and several years of waiting while the potential immigrant's children go hungry and live with the threat of violence.
Forget a poor person. In some cases it's not even possible for the middle class.
I am immigrating to probably one of the toughest countries to immigrate to, and I think the only one that's tougher is the United States.
The only reason this was possible for me is because I was able to absorb what could have potentially been an enormous financial loss. I could have been out for all that money and wound up being denied anyway, unable to recoup any of what I spent. They expect you to just blindly gamble. This whole process took me a year, and that is considering that I was able to meet the demands of the process immediately every step of the way. Not everyone is so lucky. If you have to work your way through it, it can easily take 2 years, or 3, or more.
Even some people of means would not have been able to take that risk. It splits up families all the time -- even middle class families -- in cases of cross-national relationships. And I see absolutely no reason why wealth should be the measure of one's fitness to be a good resident or citizen. It's stupid tribal, classist nonsense.
And immigrating to the US is even worse than what I just went through.
We give people citizenship simply for being born, but reject decent people perfectly able to support themselves and split up families across oceans or continents simply for not being wealthy. I see no valid reason to reject someone of good legal standing, self-supporting ability, and who speaks the language passably well. I see no reason a global world shouldn't encourage global citizenry. I see no reason to split children from one of their parents, possibly for years. I see no reason to cut off one's nose to spite their face, rejecting motivated young talent who want to come to this country and make it, simply because they haven't yet.
These people have no idea what it's like. It's just blind tribalism and fear of some kind of imaginary "other." The law is not always right, and does not always deserve to stand. This is one of those cases. Our laws are those of a previous century and they need to join the 21st. Blindly supporting stupid and harmful laws is intellectually lazy and mindless, lacking any sort of critical thinking, and is the death of progress for any society.