>Borders should be much more open

I don't disagree! I think the US ought to have open borders with Canada, for example, with immediate work rights for anyone who has been a citizen for, say, 18 years.

In an ideal world we would be able to institute the Wall Street Journal's longtime mantra of "We shall have open borders". But that cannot happen without corresponding changes to domestic welfare policies, among other things.

>I have the opposite opinion. Borders should be much more open, and people should stop whining so much about immigration. Nearly everyone -- aside from the relatively small number of Native peoples -- in the US is an immigrant, or the descendant of immigrants. We are all here because our ancestors forced their way here, killing and destroying wherever they went.

Sorry, you are going to have to do better than this sort of "We live in a society"-level rhetoric. If Burundi tomorrow invades the US with superior military forces and every Burundian moves here, I may not like it but that's how things have worked for the entirety of human history minus the last few decades.

>On top of that, the US's restrictive immigration system has existed for an even shorter time; when my great-grandparents immigrated about 115 years ago, all that was required was they enter through an official port of entry and truthfully declare who they were and where they were from.

Those stories always omit the details. Every single person who came through Ellis Island

* had passed a medical inspection

* had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same

* was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal

I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.

PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.

>Meanwhile, today, adults who were brought here by their parents as toddlers ("illegally" -- like a 2 year old has the capacity to do something illegal) can't even get legal residency or citizenship. If that's not hopelessly broken, I don't know what is.

The parents of those toddlers broke the law, for themselves and for children they brought along. That does not mean that the toddlers themselves are criminals. That also does not mean that they are entitled to the legal and financial rewards of US residency, either. Or that a president can with the stroke of a pen but without the concurrence of Congress create an entire legal infrastructure permitting their legal residency, one which the subsequent president somehow cannot dismantle in the same way. I hope that some process can be devised to grant such people legal US residency, but it has to occur through a law duly passed by Congress, and in the context of other changes; especially, but not only, a strengthening of the southern border and crackdowns on visa overstays.

>The funny thing is that we're talking about this in the context of someone suggesting that OP "hacked" a broken system to get a visa. But it sounds like the O-1 system is pretty functional and is working as designed.

As I said elsewhere, I don't disagree with this either! My disagreement was and is with the reply by hn_throwaway_99 to the original post stating that someone being able to use the O-1 system in this way is proof that the US immigration system is "hopelessly broken", by which of course he means "Requiring such steps is outrageous and unfair". I would love a system in which everyone entering the US had to comply with the O-1 or some equivalent thereof.