The Migratory History of the Jews Has Little to Teach about Today’s Immigration Woes

Jews have a long and varied history of exile and migration: ancient Egypt and Babylon, medieval and modern Europe, Ellis Island, aliyah. In his recent essay for Mosaic, Nicholas M. Gallagher seeks lessons from this history that might guide us in addressing the mass population movements now turning the U.S. and the Western world upside-down. He may be looking in the wrong place.

In order to make sense of the present disorder, Gallagher addresses the distinction between migrants (those coming to a country to improve their lot in life) and refugees (those fleeing persecution or disaster). It is a distinction on which, officially at least, depend the lives of millions.

When Angela Merkel announced in the summer of 2015 that Germany could accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in Syria, several hundreds of thousands more from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world rushed to join them en route. When Merkel sought to distribute the uninvited new arrivals among the other 27 countries of the European Union, the continent’s politics grew strident.