[Urbane Guerrilla]

It's hardly petty and unrealistic, but the real problem isn't that America has an immigration problem: it's that too many other countries have a severe middle-class problem. The problem being that they don't have one.

The example is particularly obvious in Latin America: rather than the North American legion of smallholders, some of whom became by their efforts, well, largeholders, Latin America was sparsely colonized by fairly well-fixed aristocratic types and warriors who became large landholders, and there was practically no population between these and the landless, penniless masses.

This has persisted for a very long time. Anyone there who's sick of being penniless has to look elsewhere. And here they are -- and doing well enough to send billions in remittances to their families still in Mexico, keeping that economy afloat, being third in that nation's income behind tourism and oil.

Where the other nations have erred, and consequently are suffering a brain drain and a loss of talent and energy, is in not establishing an American-type sociopolitical order: secure property rights, an absolute minimum of government regulation (that's where we started, anyway), economic liberty to move one's funds around however one thinks best, political liberty and freedom of association -- all these things and more work together, making America supremely wealthy per capita, and all other contenders into also-rans, and also-stumbleds.