Immigration

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Created: 2025-01-31

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For the United States, founded by European settlers on the premise that outsiders were essential to the nation’s prosperity, the problem for much of its early history was a scarcity of people. Its settlers acquired vast stretches of land through genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants, then populated and worked that land with migrants, indentured servants and enslaved people. For a century, almost any free person who could manage to reach the United States could stay there.

a belief that the only way to protect the future is to make it more like the mythic past, to build something old. But this approach, as we will see, has never been a formula for human flourishing.