I am looking back at my statements. I have never claimed that there were never issues with immigration or that all were welcomed with open arms. Indeed the exact same verbage used to day against Mexicans was used against other groups at other times. However - despite the attempts at restrictions, etc - huge numbers of poor and relatively undeducated people came into the country and many made a life for themselves that was better then where they came from.
The "verbage" used against Mexicans today and other groups of yesterday largely has a point. Excepting the nonsense about "inferior races" and such, immigrants are today are as poor, as uneducated, and as liable to disease, crime, and exploitation as those of history.
Your argument that we should permit immigrants because they came here and made a better life for themselves is dishonest. First of all, it is hardly true: many went back home because they hated it here, and most of the rest remained in the same kind of squalor and exploitation they were trying to escape. And second, it's also self-defeating -- that immigration is of benefit to immigrants is immaterial; we don't enact policies for
their benefit but for our own.
And no, immigrants did not continue to come here en masse despite restrictions. Immigration plummeted in the 1920s when the first mass-restrictions were enacted. I have no idea of the effectiveness of ethnic-specific laws but I'm not terribly interested in defending them, anyway.
So point out please where I am rewriting history?
Again, you're saying immigrants made America great. I have seen absolutely no evidence that this country wouldn't have been great if immigration had ended after the American revolution.
Beyond that, I assumed you were being intellectually dishonest about our past with mass immigration because I have a hard time believing anyone can advocate it straight-facedly knowing about it, as you say you do. Why would any nation deliberately inflict such a wound on itself?