Heather Cox Richardson

desire to shut the door for other immigrants because their country is being stolen or whatever.

And again, I'm not putting aside, I'm not going to talk here at all about the reality that to the degree our country is being taken over, it's actually being taken over by corporations, including foreign corporations, right?

So this idea that some family from Ecuador is taking something from me is just a pure fantasy.

But that world that they are describing

is a world where there are limited resources.

That there's only, the pie is only this big and by God, you got to get your piece.

But in fact, the United States- But the elites are stealing it from you.

Well, but the reality of the way that people like me think about the world is that, in fact, the pie is expanding.

And I, again, don't necessarily just mean the economic pie, although certainly if you look at the last 80 years around the world, more than a billion people have been raised out of poverty.

which is a good thing.

You know, they're not dying of starvation and lack of clean water and so on.

Others still are.

We could address that if we chose to.

But the idea of keeping the pie small so that I can get my half or whatever basically says that we are trying to limit the ability of individuals to grow and improve this world because only by keeping it small can we monopolize it.

Whereas if you say, hey, as Abraham Lincoln did, sorry, but also Theodore Roosevelt, whereas if you say, hey, we want you here because we want your ideas and we want your labor and we want your view of the world, what you are saying is we don't have limits.

And again, I'm not saying we don't have economic limits.

I'm very concerned about climate change.

But there are ways to address that if we have those new ideas and those new people.

And that idea of looking at the world as a world of possibilities rather than limitations seems to me to be what the United States of America has always done particularly well.

And these people are saying, no, no, no, no, no, forget our past.