Reply #12: You assume that something cannot have two attributes.

[Igel]

If a woman is young, she can't be pretty.

If an apple is ripe, it can't be wormy.

If opposition to illegal immigration is based in the rule of law, it can't be nativist.

As well.

But, of course it's not necessary for two attributes to be mutually exclusive. These two aren't even necessarily independent reasons, are they, so the idea of 'mutually exclusive' might well make no sense. I leave aside those who blindly want the law enforced because it's the law, with no further probing as to the why and how of the law.

Why do I say this? Because of the reasoning behind having immigration quotas in the first place--no quotas (with '0' being a possible quota) and you cannot have immigration that's illegal. But what kinds of reasoning can go into having immigration quotas?

Well, nativism and racism can certainly fit in there. But so could bureaucracy--the need to make sure you've registered all the in-comers, and with a limited bureaucracy you can only register so many. But you could also argue that every population has the right to defend its own cultural standards (the very reasoning used in defending numerous cultures against globalization and westernization/Americanization) or define what a healthy community looks like, or that there are times when it's economically useful to limit immigration, etc., etc. A person can ascribe to one or to more than one of those reasons.

If you go with some of those reasons--whether accurate or not--you can have a principled stand for reducing illegal immigration as well as reducing, or at least not increasing, legal immigration.

In other words, "we should all support increasing the number of legal immigrants who can enter the country from the Third World" only would be a consequence under *some* of the reasons, with opposition to such increases being a perfectly defensible position, at least in theory. Since there's a reasonable doubt as to the reasons for an anti-illegal-immigration advocate to have, in the absence of further information I stick with my reasonable doubt.