They may have had an effect of causing a political discussion, but fiscally, immigration policy has little impact on welfare programs.

Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.

Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.

On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")

This is a bit oxymoronic. People are a bit too happy to pick and choose what they like and otherwise pretend they're an island to themselves, but it doesn't take a communist to see the contradiction.