Ben, the original immigration law (816) provided free ship, housing and transportation to the country side where land was for free too.
My great grandfather was provided for free with a shotgun, an axe and a paper in russian that said, whatever you cut (jungle), the land is yours (in Misiones).
Exactly. They wanted to get the land settled and were willing to provide as many goodies as they could to induce people to move.
See comment below.
Ben, Europe was the most developed continent then, they wanted people to develop the country.
Precisely. Which is a very different thing indeed to having people come to already developed country, with the express - and often stated - intent of using the safety net the country has put in place for its existing citizens, subsidized by its current taxpayers.
Again, camberiu said it the best: A welfare state and open borders are mutually exclusive. Every person receiving government help is taking money provided by his fellow citizens. Those citizens get to decide how generous to be with their social assistance.
It is perfectly reasonable for a society to wish to help its vulnerable members, but to not wish to extend that to the population of the entire world. It is the reverse which is unreasonable.
You asserted that foreigners are guest that misbehave while statistics establishes that they are a lot more honest than natives.
I did no such thing. I am not familiar with the relevant statistics, and therefore can make no assertion either way. But there are in any event a few corollaries:
1. The same as with social assistance, applies to crime. It is perfectly reasonable for a country to accept that it has to deal with its own criminals, and but not want to deal with foreign ones. That means country's tolerance for crime is by definition much higher with its existing citizens than with immigrants.
How the numbers compare does not really matter; a country does not have to accept a given percentage of criminal immigrants just because it has some percentage of criminals of its own. Right?
2. It is absolutely possible to identify specific subsets of the immigrant population as being responsible for a disproportionate amount of the crime. Disproportionate both relative to the local population, and other immigrant groups. To stick to generalities (for example crime rates of all immigrants) is to be dogmatic, and for a government to do so is to shirk its responsibility.
If more people coming from Miami tend to be involved with crime than people from Colombia, it is a perfectly normal thing to scrutinize more closely the people coming from Miami.
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What I
did say, is to draw a distinction between a time when the main goal was getting the land settled (and - let's not forget this - getting the indigenous population under control), and a time when the land is more than settled, and there is a substantial amount of people who are coming to take advantage of the welfare state, subsidized by the existing taxpayers.
To quote again my example: There is a big difference between my owning a huge tract of land, far bigger than I could do anything with myself, and inviting other people to come help me settle it, and on the other hand taking any permissions I may have given at the time as carte blanche for anyone and everyone to enter my home, help themselves to what's in the fridge, urinate on the beds, and claim title.