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America is one of the least dense countries in the world. It is a net exporter of food. The US is about three times larger than India in size.
"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.
The lifeboat metaphor is the ultimate "their is a fixed pie of resources" perspective. And if I believed that "fixed pie" story to be true I'd agree on immigration restrictions. But it's objectively not true and I'd have to lobotomize all the parts of my brain that know anything about economics to believe it.
I don't want strangers and foreigners in my space, regardless of how dense it's already populated. That space is the inheritance of my great grandchildren, and I'm not willing to give it away in a profligate manner, for any reason.
Go live in a treehouse in the woods and own all the land around you. Why should you get to dictate who is in public spaces? Strangers are a necessary part of civilization. People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.
China, Japan and South Korea say otherwise. You can't just throw out vague platitudes like that like they are iron laws. Countries exist that have figured out (or preserved the knowledge) how to take the goods off the market, and leave the people that made them.
All weak cultures that have barely survived the dominance and ascendancy of US culture. They have barely survived by keeping out all foreign borns, and then just copying the parts of our culture that they can. I don't want to emulate such weak cultures.
Bro, the US culture swallowed the contents of a double-barreled shotgun in front of my eyes. The "only" thing Japanese culture has to do to survive is increase their birthrates. I don't see American culture surviving without secession and/or massive social upheaval.
I truly and honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
I don't know how else to put it: the American culture from the time I was a kid is simply gone. I can see no plausible way of it coming back, though I can imagine it's remnant cutting the dead weight loose, and partially surviving in that way.
I find your triumphalism absurd, literally the tail end of the Monthy Pythons "Black Knight" skit.
American culture always dies and is reborn with each new generation. That is part of why it is great. It doesn't have to stay the same century after century like other stale cultures. Opera and Ballet is dead, but singing and dancing aren't. When I hear "american culture is dead" its like hearing that "no one listens to music" or "no one makes music anymore". A specific time period of American culture might no longer be in active production, but expecting or requiring that feels very old world and anti-american to me.
I find the doomsaying equally absurd. If american culture isn't dominant and ascendant then what the hell am I watching, listening to, and reading all the time? As an American I usually have to go inconveniently out of my way just to consume foreign art.
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The US has been a net importer of food for a few years now (starting just before COVID)
Most of that unused space is useless for living; the rest is off-limits for various reasons which aren't changing.
Then we need to sell off all the parks. And I don't need to tell you who does most of the farming.
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The big areas where the resources are pretty fixed are university admission slots (especially prestige universities) and homes within commuting range of our most productive cities. I think it's fairfir Americans to view a society where they have more cheaper, crappier goods and can't afford a home or a shot at a good degree to be worse than one where goods are more expensive but they can all afford to live where they choose and their student loans are more manageable.
Those problems exist without immigration. They are in fact active policy choices on the part of cities and universities respectively.
Yes, they do, and so it's better to deal with those problems inside the family rather than inviting in a bunch of strangers to make it worse.
You haven't acknowledged that part of the reason for the problem is the last sixty-two years of immigration policy, either.
I ain't gotta "acknowledge" anything. And y'all ain't my family. Most Americans are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. And that was true 63 years ago as well.
If there is to be a cutoff point I select the civil war. Not because I want to say people coming afterwards are unwelcome, but because people coming afterwards shouldn't think of themselves as the "founding stock". If America is to be a blood and soil nation it is not for the whites it is for the English, their descendants, the descendants of the Dutch in New York, and the descendants of the enslaved.
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