Just one question Mark...
Are you a Native American? If not, then your family was one a member of the so-called "huddled masses". God forbid we should do anything to help people in need when we have the means and the way. But then again, it's hard to get motivated to do something when it's not your family who's being chopped by a machete' or raped by guerrillas.
Isolationism didn't work after the first world war... If anything it bred a violent and dangerous threat to world stability. So why do you think things would change if we closed our borders now and hoped everyone would leave us alone?
Family legend has it that 'the French guy done laid with a heathen Redskin..' The scientists keep telling us they started as Asians anyway and everyone all spread out from Africa to begin with so at what point is anyone a 'Native' of anywhere? The 'huddled masses' bit isn't in any of our Documents but on a statue in a park. Donated by another French guy. The Founders would have been scared sh!tless by our 'let everyone in(especially if we don't like the government where they come from) and worry about finding something for them to do when they get here' policy. We already have more bodies than jobs and the trend has been to find ways to do jobs without bodies.
War is a nasty business but it has been a fact of human life since one caveman learned to throw rocks at another. Watch soap operas if CNN troubles you.
Isolationism was but a small part of what bred the nastiness after WW1. If the conditions imposed on the defeated Germans didn't inspire Hitler there would have been another like him. Appeasement once he was in power didn't help. Imperial Japan could have been handled differently but conflict was probably inevitable.
There is not another country on the planet that would import a million foreign ditch-diggers and grant citizenship when they already have idle heavy machinery and thousands of unemployed operators. Most countries are downright picky.
How do you propose to feed these hungry masses when food crops are being replaced by fuel crops worldwide?
There is a big difference between 'hoping everyone would leave us alone' and positioning ourselves in the middle of every little spat. Somalia for example.. half the people fighting the other half in a place that can only feed a quarter of them and we jump in to stop them. brilliant. If the South Koreans really didn't want the North Korean system imposed on them, couldn't they have raised an army over the last half-century? If China
Really wants Formosa back, does our Navy belong in between? If the French and Germans are so afraid of Putin and his New Russian Empire, let them put some of
their GNP toward the matter.
edit... some food for thought...
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1727951,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
