Comment by pembrook

While I don't agree with the haphazard and seemingly random policy changes coming from the US lately -- this is a bad take.

You do realize that discrimination by citizenship is conducted by basically every government on earth in the context of visas and tourism and residency?

In fact, what made the US so bizarre up until about 1914 was that they were the only major country that effectively had open borders. There was no welfare state to take advantage of back then, and you literally did have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

This only started to shift after the US began constructing its welfare state (welfare state expansion correlates with increasingly closed immigration policy, hence where we find ourselves today).