alt Hacker News25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor of pulling the ladder up.
"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
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Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one.
Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.
Many such cases.
I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)
On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.
I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.
There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.
To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.
Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.
The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form.
Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...