I would hope people are able to read what I'm actually saying in my posts better than that lol. I've never said that the US ever had unrestricted immigration, nor have I ever claimed that the US ever should have unrestricted immigration. What I said was that the particular claim that the US needs more, stricter restrictions on the current number of immigrants coming into the country for fear of a large number of immigrants transforming the cultural fabric of this country is spurious, because the culture of the present-day US has vanishingly little to do with the original American culture of the Puritan settlers and so forth that was actually sacred and worth protecting. More immigrants--any amount of more immigrants, in fact--will not "destroy American culture" or something spurious like that, because American culture was already destroyed a long long time ago by the hordes of Scots-Irish and Palatine Germans and Irish and South Italians and Poles and Russians who we already allowed into the country, all of whom were themselves wholly foreign to genuine American culture and who have already displaced the rightful inhabitants of this country--and I suspect that the ancestors of a good number of people posting in this thread number among those perpetrators.
Did you know that such a large number of Scots-Irish were imported into early America that within a few decades of their immigration they numbered something to the tune of one third of the population of Pennsylvania? A barbarian culture identified by most of the original colonists as the "scum of two nations" or something along that sort--characterized by violence, clannishness, lack of learning, drunkenness, idleness and faithlessness--were imported to such a degree that all the colonies felt compelled to consign them to the west just to prevent them from disrupting the peace and prosperity of the colonies en masse. At least at the beginning the country had the sense to direct them to the frontier where they would not interfere overmuch with the life of genuine Americans, but of course that necessary exile was forgotten long ago, and by a few decades after the Revolution the danger that would be caused by allowing this violent, uncivilized population to overwhelm the rest of the population of the country and displace its native inhabitants was disregarded. In some sense, I would argue that "America" was already lost by the time we allowed the Jackson, damnable as he was, to take the Oval Office.
It didn't end there either, of course! America was so inundated by the immigration of Germans, largely the "Palatine boors" Franklin identified, that today more of so-called "American" culture, even unhyphenated, is more a mix of German and Scots-Irish than anything genuinely recognizable to the early colonists who built this sacred nation. Why do we speak of Hamburgers and Frankfurters as characteristically American national foods? I've never heard of a Hamburg or a Frankfurt in England. Why do state fairs and the like, thought so characteristically American, bear so much more resemblance to the festivals they have in Germany than any celebration in England? Where these at least the the civilized Saxon north Germans like we saw in old Pennsylvania it could perhaps be tolerable, but of course by and large they weren't--and all the Rhineish who came naturally brought with them their culture of drunkenness and so forth, and also formed parallel societies of German speakers that weren't disbanded until the 20th century, by force by Wilson. People here talk about "integration" as though the lack of immediate cultural integration among the latest batch of immigrants is unique, but it has nothing on the audacity of America's Germans, who not only maintained a parallel language but by and large were the driving force behind the import of foreign, continental ideologies like Marxism and later Fascism into the United States.
You have the Irish and the Italians next, and they of course require no introduction--we took in huge numbers of people from some of the poorest, least civilized parts of Europe, which were only dragged into modernity today by virtue of being attached to far wealthier, more industrious peoples in the form of the English and North Italians who spent vast sums on uplifting these regions to a decent standard of living. The massive transformative effect that both of these groups had on the US hardly even needs to be stated, and what remained of genuine US culture, which to some degree was at least still dominant in the North (I hardly even need to speak of the savage realm of scots-irish barbarians lorded over by malign cavalier aristocrats that was the South, do I? It was degenerate from the start) before, say, the Civil War, was swept away under their deluge. By god, more Americans identify with Irish heritage than English heritage today, and those masses gave guns to the IRA. If America was so greatly transformed by immigrants that a significant chunk of Americans decided to send guns to the Taliban, and no one in this country was willing to stop them, I would hope that everyone here would be appalled. And yet we did so--we supported a murderous terrorist group seeking to overthrow rightful English rule in Northern Ireland with arms and money--and nobody batted an eye. And then of course there were the Poles, the Russians, and so forth, but by that point there was hardly any original culture left to mourn over.
My point here is purely to say that if you are against immigration because it will destroy American culture, don't be--you cannot ignite the ashes what was already burned away long ago. To see so many people appropriate the cause of defending so-called "American" culture today when the sacred nation of my ancestors was destroyed centuries ago, and their own ancestors were the very arsonists who destroyed it, disgusts me. Seeing as though my country is already long no more, I would at least rather enjoy the economic benefits of further immigration than faff about why these latest waves of people are not OK when all of the sorry lot who came before them somehow were. If you really want to preserve or restore "America", take a good, long look at your last name determine whether or not you yourself need to get out.