How to Argue about the Immigration Mess

I’m grateful to Christopher Caldwell, Linda Chavez, and Daniel Johnson for their thoughtful, and thought-provoking, responses to my essay in Mosaic on America’s immigration woes. Especially heartening is their evidently broad agreement with me that the distinction between migrants and refugees is analytically outmoded and in need of rethinking as a tool of law. I also greatly appreciate the focus on history and the international perspective that the respondents bring to bear.

In what follows I mean to comment on three themes that, in various ways, are addressed by each respondent—and then to point to a motif that, without ever being made explicit, seems to me to lurk behind our joint discussion.

The Jewish Angle