Is this Trump's worst immigration argument yet?

President Trump has been repeatedly saying that America can't handle any more people because "our country is full." (That links to the Boston Globe, which restricts your number of free articles.)

That piece corrects the president:

Far from running out of room for more people, most of this immense country is wide open and empty. According to the Census Bureau, nearly two-thirds of the US population live in cities — but those cities take up just 3.5 percent of the nation’s land area. Add in all the other places where Americans live — villages, islands, farms — and it still amounts to a mere sliver of US territory. In 2006, a detailed federal government study of land use in the United States reported that “urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7 percent of total US land area.” Our country, in other words, isn’t 100 percent full, it is 93 percent empty.

Peter Suderman adds in Reason:

There are at least 145 countries more physically dense than the U.S. There is no sense in which America has reached its capacity to hold, support, or employ people. . . .

"Our country is full" is not an argument. It's an excuse for draconian political symbolism that will have real and lasting consequences for both immigrants and native-born Americans.