When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
This country was a frontier in 1819. We needed labor to tame the wilderness. We don't need more unskilled laborers anymore.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.