But that's the problem. In WWII, we were taking in the best and the brightest other countries had to give and those people came here wanting to be Americans. Today, we're taking in the dregs of other countries and they don't want to be Americans, they want American money. They want to be foreigners living in America. They're here to take us for all they can get before they leave again. Our WWII scientists gave more than they got in return. That isn't the case anymore. The people who came to Ellis Island wanted to be American and adopt American values and views. That's not the case with new immigrants. You can make the case that diversity helped in the past. It isn't doing anything positive now.
There are many factors behind your comparison. One is that most travel before WWII was by boat. People couldn't just hop on planes and come here. Also there wasn't lucrative industry or service jobs awaiting them. It was mostly hard labor as that's all that we offered them. Many of them lived in dire poverty unless they had wealthy relatives already here. In some respects that hasn't changed.
The other huge factor is that we now live in a globalized world. People are blaming immigrants for being lazy while middle class Americans are suffering from an utterly stagnant economy that has little upward mobility. The reason is globalization. Rather than expecting immigrants to come here and work for next to nothing like WWII, the companies here simply outsourced to places like China or Bangladesh, taking all our domestic jobs with them. The whole "buy American" mentality of the 50's and 60's went out the window as soon as trade deals opened up with the poorest nations to extract cheap labor. These companies have zero loyalty to America.
And lastly... the reasons for immigration have shifted. Globalization and the IMF have created such huge economic disparities and wastelands of civilization (like Syria) that people
have to immigrate because there's literally nothing left of their country or opportunity is nothing. We have globalized the extraction of resources and capital but people complain when humans themselves get globalized too. I mean what do you expect? We can't ravage a country to build our own and then expect them to not come to our door.
Really, the wealthy elites are sequestering all the money and leaving scraps for the rest of us to fight over, which includes the fight between American citizens and immigrants. There really is enough to go around but the elites have done the usual bait and switch of distracting the populace by blaming externalities like immigrants. And no I'm not some liberal commie who hates wealthy people. I'm not talking about run of the mill millionaires who run businesses, I'm talking about the top 10-20 richest families in the world who continue to sequester everything and play chess with humanity. I'm talking about the ones who created the Federal Reserve and gave trillion dollar bailouts to industry while expecting the public to accept austerity.
What we really need to do to regain control of our economy is bring the Federal Reserve under public control while fully auditing it simultaneously. We also need to go after the offshore accounts (like the Panama Papers showed us exist) to reclaim the trillions of dollars being hidden. And we need to decouple our government from big business influence because it's been a total disaster. Although immigrants
can be a drain on the system, their impact is marginal compared to the largest forces at work. It's basically akin to trying to put out a trash fire while a whole building is ablaze next door. Priorities.
If we plugged the biggest leaks and then went after immigrants, it might make more sense to me; but by then we probably wouldn't care because our economy would be above board again. Instead we let ourselves be baited with an immigration problem that has frankly always been there, even in prosperous times, because some super wealthy aristocrat types are getting nervous that people might be on to them as the reason the economy is not doing so well. Immigrants have always received the blame for the domestic policy failures of governments.
