The sign on the Statue of Liberty does not ask for your Nobel Prize winners, your valedictorians and your Mensa members.  The state of Georgia was a penal colony. So was Australia.  In Israel the Ethiopians, airlifted in Operation Solomon, became stellar Israelis.  What made the United States, Australia and Israel the successful nations they became was not an immigration meritocracy, but the development of a system where those from the worst conditions in the world could rise so far above it that they created the greatest nations on earth.