Consider the irony. A country famously founded by a search for a better life — freedom of conscious, economic opportunity, etc. — has no clue why people flee here.
Anti-immigration folk have focused on bogus results — "they're stealing our jobs [that none of us want to work in]" and "they're horrible criminals [even though immigrant populations tend to commit less crime than native-born ones]" — while making up a weird fantasy about why these folk are coming to the US — "they want to live on lavish welfare checks and collect Obamaphones [even though neither of those are a thing]."
Yes, there are criminals who come over the border illegally. But the vast majority — as demonstrated by the brutal hardship of the journey to get to the US southern border, or to cross it — are desperate, fleeing horrifying poverty and terrific domestic violence. That's why folk are coming with their families — because they don't want to leave their spouses and children behind in such an awful place.
One can debate whether people fleeing such horrible circumstances should be allowed in, but to simply deny that, and to instead lambaste them as frauds, murderers and rapists, and lazy bums, displays a profound cruelty, as well as an inability to try to address the root causes of such illegal immigration (beyond the dependence of a significant amount of the American economy on such workers).
Why Central American Refugees Will Keep Coming to the U.S.
“There is no way we can turn back”
Well before Trump dreamed of huddled masses of Norwegians coming to our shores, some of his predecessors preferred that some people come here, and others stay away.
Unless there was work to be done that Americans wouldn’t do – build railroads, pick crops, etc. And even then, eventually it was decided that too many of those people were here.
Also, it is probably our fault in the first place that people are fleeing their countries.
In fairness, when our "founders" came here, they were stealing jobs and treasure, they were horrible criminals – often literally – who eventually worked up to slaying people at genocidal scale, and they wanted to live on the lavish (natural) resources of others and collect everything of value for themselves.
Maybe we're our own guilty template, maybe we say these things today because we're looking in a very old mirror, even as we point the finger at others.