Some readers interpreted my previous article on immigration as hostile to immigrants. As I said in the first article, I worked with some professionals from India (and Nepal, China, etc.) I had a US-born co-worker who became hostile towards these Indians. I did not. The ones I got to know were decent people I would not want to hurt. However, I don't see why it should have been necessary for them to come practically halfway around the world to have a good life. To be far from their families and friends, and everything they'd known before. There's something wrong with that.
US immigration and work visas today comes in two forms. Official immigration is to a large extent a matter of big business picking and choosing which skilled workers to poach from developing nations. One comment I got to the first article claimed that studies showed this was beneficial to poor nations. I'm skeptical of that. But whether it's true or not isn't the real point. The process is designed to enrich big corporations, and others may or may not gain from it as well. That's not how it should be. Let's determine what course is best for the prosperity of the world's 99% and build whatever appropriate immigration system may be required around that.
Unofficial immigration has a greater proportion of lower-pay workers. They're tempted to come here in order to move up from extremely bad living conditions to bad living conditions. A decent human should have compassion for them. Yet, we need to have compassion not only for the millions who came here to move up to bad conditions, but also for the billions who remain in the poor countries in extremely bad conditions. To seek a solution only for the millions is not enough.
Big business may be willing to grant legal status to unofficial immigrants, but they will resist changing the conditions that drive people to leave their homes and families. To big business, those other countries are sources of cheap labor, whether in the form of immigrants or in moving operations overseas. It's not profitable for them to support a long-term global perspective for the prosperity of the world's 99%. But that's where our compassion should take us.