I find reducing immigration to be useful in trying to get the new immigrants assimilated as past generations did as the currently new immigrants are not assimilated and there are fellow white Americans who believe they shouldn't. That this is a melting pot.
The whole point of a melting pot is that everything mixes together into something that resembles a homogeneous mixture that carries some of the essences of all that was mixed in. I reckon that liberals especially are so removed from actual ethnic strife (ironically because they've themselves hardly stepped out of their ethnically and culturally homogeneous bubbles) that they think the strongest effect of mass immigration is a couple more taco trucks in their towns or a few more Chinese take-outs helmed by some Vietnamese family, and fail to realize that not properly integrating the people we immigrate not only makes it more difficult for them to advocate for their own interests, eventually in their
own communities, but that it actively prevents immigrants from feeling secure in the country-- even when they become citizens. American customs becomes a mere mask they wear for the public, even when their home country becomes the country they only visit. And their children may integrate into American society just fine, or they may simply not feel the struggle of living in two distinct cultures.
They may, on the other hand, be driven to some sense of mad by the fact that they have to act or otherwise feel two different ways because they interface with two distinct cultures (ignoring that the American cultural identity was damaged if not demolished by the countercultural movement in the 60s) in full force. And whether it be because they realize they can command more by claiming their foreign heritage, or because they feel rejected by American culture, or because they don't even recognize an American culture in the first place, they become varingly culturally sequestered from the country they live in as they
identify with the culture of their parents. Of course, if they don't have a living experience of the culture (as in, they've never
lived in said motherland as a
permanent resident), then their cultural expressions amount to superficialities that would make Elizabeth "Chief Shitting Bull" Warren blush as she forcibly relinquishes the .09% of nonwhite heritage she has.
The latter is far more likely to happen, I figure, in a cultural enclave where the shame of being "too American" is imposed on some level by not only the parents, but by various members of the community that apply soft shaming that burrows in the head easily-- as opposed to hard shaming that would leave them more wont to "rebel" if they can.
The more this goes on, the more I realize that the current iteration of liberalism/leftism/whatever has been selling poison in sugar bags.
They set up immigrants to be economically and socioculturally disenfranchised as they throw open the gates so they can come in en masse and create cultural enclaves where they have less pressure and incentive to become fluent in the national language instead of being more forced to learn to mingle in a culturally homogeneous society with barely any retreat-- and I'm aware English is not the
official language, but it really doesn't have to be for it to be
the language of the country since it has always been our most common language as well as the original language of our founding documents and
laws.
They're outright okay with
illegal immigrants suffering amplified effects of the aforementioned, in addition to being directly vulnerable to exploitation by employers that'll pay them bottom dollar (the rest of the money goes to the ongoing bribe to not report them to ICE) and the people they marry in order to make a better case for why they shouldn't be deported in case they get caught.
They are okay with risking the poor integration of these people's
children, in part because they themselves do not recognize an American identity, but merely recognize that they live in a country named "the United States of America" and thus are "American" by
default.
They implicitly refuse them a national/cultural identity (and of course they can't help them grasp the culture of their parents), they have no means of properly beholding the cultural identity of their parents because they're still largely raised outside the home by virtue of daycares/schools, and they're left with crafting a poor facsimile of the latter for utilitarian purposes if they can't reach security in self-identity.
Meanwhile, the economically poor citizens of any and every race are crowded out of the job market by the immigrants being brought in because of the employer benefits in doing so (again, cheap labor, or cheap labor in exchange for not being ratted out to the ICE), which
raises animosity between these groups-- groups that, by the way, haven't had any problem with outgroup discrimination like white Americans currently do. African-Americans have historically had tensions with African immigrants because of the job market favoring them, but many Africans have poor opinions about African-Americans because they find them to be uncultured hoodlums. Latino/Black relations are varyingly tense. African-American/Caribbean African tensions, Asian/Black (who cares which kind), Black (again, who cares which kind)/Jewish, White/
any of these ethnicities...
and vice versa.
It's not as if modern conservatism/rightism/whatever is much better. Modern conservatives-- at least the older ones-- aren't paying attention to this issue and are afraid of being called racist if they point out that preserving cultural homogeneity is essential for societal stability. The right-wing/alt-right are completely idiotic because they think that establishing a "white identity"-- instead of campaigning for a homogeneous
cultural identity
like before-- is a remotely reasonable solution in a society already strongly heterogeneous. They're not interested in actual workability, they're not even interested in graduality. It is in fact awful that a significant portion of people that actually care about this latent crisis on the right can only manage to intellectually fluff themselves with deceitful rhetoric and unworkable solutions and piss everyone off in the process.