My children were not born in the United States. They were born in El Salvador. We moved to the US when they were 9 and 4 years old. Their father is not and never has been a US citizen or legal resident. They’ve likely lived in the US a lower percentage of their lives than many of the young people who just had their dreams dashed when US Senate blocked the DREAM act, legislation that would have provided legal residency to young people who came to the US illegally before age 16 and who graduated from high school, completed 2 years of college or military service and had no criminal record.
My son is applying for college. He’s just been accepted at one of his top choice schools. He is eligible for scholarships, grants and loans that will cover almost the entire cost of his education. He worked his ass off to get where he is. But what if we’d ended up staying in El Salvador? If he’d worked just as hard there in El Salvador, would he be planning to go to one of the world’s top schools in the Fall? Would his education have prepared him to go? Or what if instead of having me for a mother, he’d had another woman as a mother? A woman exactly like me who wasn’t a US citizen when we moved to the US. What then?
How are my children any more worthy than other young people their same age who came to the US as young children, but whose parents were not able to obtain legal status? Why do my children have more privileges?
Ah, right. Because I happen to be their mother and I happen to have been born in the US. That’s the only reason. It just seems so unfair.
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Wait... What? 
Do you know the phrase “borderless world”? It started life in the context of global corporations, but is now moved on to a discussion of what the world would be like if we removed all barriers to immigration, all need for passports.
Some articles:
Click to access Hiebert.pdf
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/20/where_would_people_live_in_a_borderless_world
That second one mentions El Salvador is a country that would lose 45% of its population under such a scenario.
Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines borders thus:
BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary right of one from the imaginary right of the other.
I like the idea. I can imagine in practice it would mean that the center points of the world would shape-shift a lot more easily as people migrated here and there more freely. I’m not surprised about El Salvador. When I was there some 20% of the population had already left and the 2nd largest population of Salvadorans after San Salvador was Los Angeles, California. Migration isn’t without it’s issues. Many children in El Salvador have grown up with grandparents not parents. The Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles (formed I’d say due in large part to the US’ inability to properly manage migration) were exported back to Central American and spread to Guatemala and Honduras, largely due to contacts made in jails in the US. So there are pros and cons to everything, but I think if we had better migration policies and integration programs, a lot of those issues would not exist…. (I love Ambrose Bierce. :-))