Welfare state, open borders, or a Republican democracy, pick two, you can't have three.

It isn't about welfare, it's about incentives. If you want open borders, the simple fact is the incentives must be removed. I still think under a my libertarian system there's room for refugees, who could be given govt aid. But no, you cannot give welfare to the masses and not expect exactly what's happening in the U.S. now to be happening.

Welfare for corporations or welfare for people is theft. We should be working to end all welfare.. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Just because the govt shills to corporations isn't a license to excuse welfare for the poor and vice versa. The very fact that govt continues to become evermore omnipresent in giving out "aid" is the very thing displacing private institutions..

Private institutions which for many years have been the lifeline for many ppl. You could at one point walk into a moose, lions club, elks, or religious institution and chat with an actual human about your problems and walk away with money, food, shelter, or a plan to start with. Try walking in to the welfare office and asking for something not on the dole. We should be ending all welfare, for all these recipients. These private institutions are failing because they're being displaced by govt..

And no, just because you're a poor person doesn't mean you're somehow better and/or more deserving than the rich schmuck or uber wealthy corporation getting their govt payout. I'm not sure where such nonsense comes from, well i do know actually..

I'm also not sure how The illegally stolen lands thing comes into play. If that's a take you're going with, i think one argument is while that may have been true at one point, most of the tribal elders or tribes of original inhabitants of North America have been paid some form of reparations and agreed the debt for the land was settled long ago. In fact most tribes now reside on land that isn't actually under the jurisdiction of the U.S, a by-product of most of those deals..

So under such conditions, people who settled the U.S., their slaves, original natives, and any descendents of any aforementioned group actually do belong here and what's more, they're the actual rightful inhabitants.

And continuing your thought experiment of looking through the prism of who are the rightful inhabitants of the land, I'd say you're argument is very strong in favor of rounding up everyone not a current citizen and sending them back from where they came without exception because they haven't seemingly made any attempt to make or pay concessions for citizenship to any group or individual living here now.

I suppose we could cynically say that i won't see any payment firm these invaders for at least a few hundred years, with history being our guide. But I'm here now and I'd like to be paid now.. Maybe if the they really want citizenship they should look into paying every current citizen a small stipend until their citizenship is granted, i can definitely be persuaded to listen to such.

Maybe that's a bit much to ask though.. But what they could do is not take slots or funding from current citizens looking to go to university, since we all agree that credentialing at school is important.