How ironic that the “progressive” European welfare states have highly restricted immigration and America naturalizes more new citizens each year than the rest of the world combined. The US also allows illegal aliens de facto residence assuming they haven’t committed a significant crime. We even provide free education. If those illegal aliens have a child in the US, we give that child citizenship and subsequently make the child’s family eligible for welfare benefits in the interests of helping the American citizen child.

I was a legal resident of France and two of my children were born there and they didn’t get French citizenship, nor even automatic permanent residence.

It is impossible to have open borders, provide amnesty for 20+ million illegal aliens, birthright citizenship while simultaneously having European style welfare. There is a very good reason EU immigration is so hard, the system would collapse if US style immigration liberalization existed.

You can’t have nearly open borders and free everything.

As far as a previous poster said about Americans and our empathy problem —- it is interesting that Republicans give to charity at a vastly higher rates than Democrats [1] and American charitable giving is vastly higher than the rest of the world. More of the donations for the Notre Dame restoration are coming from Americans than even the French. The US funds UN humanitarian orgs at profoundly higher levels than any other country. The US funded the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe from a war we didn’t even start. Where’s the European version of the Marshall Plan for former colonies of Africa? It seems like European countries are rather selfish when it comes to helping others while American is quite generous with foreign aid. Perhaps Europeans have an empathy problem? Or maybe a fiscal one?

Suggesting that Americans don’t have empathy isn’t entirely accurate. Many of us just don’t want the government doing what private charity should do. I don’t want Congress deciding what causes are “worthy” — using human misery as a means for buying votes. I’m sorry for people who have bad luck, but where is their family? Their church? Their local community? How is someone outside of my community or family circle my problem? And, the US does have welfare programs. Medicaid exists and serves the poor. I know, I once was on Medicaid for a year. Food stamps also exist: I know, I used that program in New Jersey for about 6 months. I am not sure what else we should be providing as a government. Government isn’t a charity and nor should it be. Certainly it should provide a minimal safety net to ensure people aren’t starving in the streets, but charity is really about the local community, local organizations, and local priorities. And giving to charity should be voluntary, not compelled at the point of a gun like taxes are. I highly resent someone that has been unemployed for literally years while I took whatever shitty jobs I could find to stay off the street. I also resent people that never cared about buying health insurance (for example the young and healthy that tend to avoid buying insurance,) then they get a critical illness and go bankrupt and blame “the system” when they chose not to buy cheap disability or health insurance while they had the chance, instead buying plenty of the proverbial avocado toast or #yolo-ing through social media while the rest of us were, as they say, “adulting.”

The other problem I have is when people claim that medical bills “bankrupted” them. Do we know what that means? That means they didn’t have to pay any of that money back. The debts were discharged by bankruptcy. It doesn’t mean they go to debtors prison, nor does it mean they even lose their primary residence. It just means their credit is ruined for a few years. That just means they can’t borrow money for a few years; they aren’t thrown into some Dickens novel and forced to beg on the street for more porridge. It means all of their debts are discharged and they get to start over and rebuild. I am pretty sure that most people don’t know what bankruptcy actually means, they just throw the word around like it’s some kind of bomb, hoping that enough people are scared and horrified by it that they agree to raise taxes in such a way to prevent people from ever failing — but then also never succeeding. America is a place we’re you can start over, you can rebuild, and bankruptcy isn’t some life sentence dooming you to poverty. In fact, it’s possible to have multiple bankruptcies and still become president of the United States.