Immigration hawks only: What made you tough on immigration and when did you become tough?

[Former President tack50]

Ok, I am not a conservative at all, though I still think immigration is one of the issues I lean more conservative on (even if I am still on the left or the center at worse), so I will bite.

Basically in my opinion there is only so many immigrants a nation can take and assimilate and I think there is not being enough assimilation of the new arrivals. We are doing ok, but we are not doing good enough.

There is also the fact that, at least in Europe, immigrants are doing worse in almost all metrics. So immigrant groups tend to use more welfare and commit more crimes than the native born population for instance. So while they may be technically a net gain for the economy in the abstract; they are probably a net loss or no net change for public finances and regardless I do not think it is worthwhile tradeoff in the end.

That does not mean I want to stop all immigration or anything, in fact I think the current laws are fine; they should just be very strictly enforced and we should be a lot tougher on illegal immigrants.

I will also note that some nationalities tend to have a much easier time integrating and immigrating than others. Some of that is admittedly racism but some of that is also fundamental cultural differences.

As for when I became tough (well, relatively tough for a leftist I suppose; I am still to the left of most conservatives on immigration), I suppose it was some time in 2017 or 2018. Ironically I did not care much about the refugee crisis of 2017 and barely paid attention at the time, though the recent spike on crime rates is probably what turned me.