"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.
Many such cases.
On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.
I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.
There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.
To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.
Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.
To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.
Where is the contradiction here?
The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"
People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.
A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.