> immigration should be slow enough that they can be thoroughly assimilated before they change American culture

I support your idea. Would you agree that all immigrants that arrived in America after, let's say, 1493, have to leave America and apply for citizenship?

If you don't agree, can you propose another immigration year after which you'd have to leave America again? Would you agree on 1783?

How are they supposed to assimilate if they have to leave the country to apply?

> ...They recognize that individual immigrants can be fine but the large-scale flow of immigrants can create undesirable changes

You should also consider the other side of the equation, which is that immigration is the only thing that's keeping the US workforce and total population growing.

The size of the workforce and overall population has real economic, fiscal and quality of life impacts that every American feels on a daily basis and there's a very strong argument to be made that if your interest is in maintaining US wealth and "strength" globally, you don't want to become Japan, South Korea, Italy or Germany.

This is not to say that immigration policy should be made thoughtlessly or recklessly, but I rarely see the staunchest immigration opponents mentioning the stark demographic reality that faces the country.

What a bunch of misleading and gross noise.

Nobody above said people who disagree with them are irrational.

Nobody said immigration should happen faster than anyone can assimilate.

They said preventing people from applying for green cards while on an existing visa will make it much much harder to immigrate legally.

If you think immigrants need more time to assimilate so they don't change your culture but you still think immigration is good then it seems like you'd be against this change. On the other hand if you want to limit immigration to just the wealthy this sounds like exactly the matching policy.

Also, Trump winning the naturalized citizen vote doesn't mean naturalized citizens all think the same way. Even if they all did think the US was perfect and their country of origin was garbage that STILL doesn't mean they think other people from their country are bad, obviously. Being at risk from your government or thinking your government needs to change doesn't imply you think other citizens from your culture are bad.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted.

> Saying “you wouldn’t want America to become more like the place you left” is a compelling message to many immigrants.

There is a very very large Indian community that echoes this sentiment (which you can see in very large expat FB groups) and wants to close the doors. They are extremely vocal and supportive of closing immigration, because their children now have to compete with the continuous influx.

Its just humans being human. Everyone wants to look after their own interests and there are lots of special interest groups, each with their own interests.

I cannot understand why people downvote otherwise civilized posts they disagree with, so I'll upvote.

That said, you are impressively wrong. If someone doesn't agree with me because they choose to believe obviously false or made-up data, that is being irrational.

Is it rational to suppress large-scale studies of vaccination? If someone says "I am against vaccination because there are no large-scale studies", is that rational?