by Tim Sommers
Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of immigrants coming into the US relative to population. The percentage of the US population born outside the US is on the rise now, but it has never gone below 5% or above that 15%. The US does have more immigrants than any other country “by a wide margin” – and the rate of immigration has been trending up since the 1970s. But the percentage of immigrants living in the US relative to population (14%) is similar to the number living in similar countries like Canada (20%) and Australia (33%). And then there’s this from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: “In our projections, the deficit is…smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”
In a recent book, “How Migration Really Works,” Dutch sociologist Hans de Haas argues that the real immigration crisis is political and arises from what he calls the “paradox of immigration.” The problem is that there are three demands always in play in immigration debates. (i) We can’t reduce people’s rights to work or settle at the risk of disrupting the smooth running of the economy. (ii) We have a moral obligation to respect the rights of immigrants, including officially unauthorized immigrants, to fair and humane treatment. (iii) We should respect, or at least can’t resist, the political will of the majority of citizens who oppose immigration. The problem is we can do any two of these, but not all three. Simultaneous pressure from both the left and the right has reduced the Western political approach to immigration to, Haas argues, “bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies.” In the U.S., as Duncan Black puts it, immigration “is an issue completely untethered from whatever the reality of it is, and people mostly don’t care until conservative media/politicians are telling them to care and then they get enraged…They aren’t mad about immigration, they are mad about what they see on television.”
One small contribution that ethics might make to this political morass is to examine our moral obligation to allow immigration – or not. Read more »
Sughra Raza. Let Me Just Absorb Today.
There is no genuinely effective lyric poem unless there is a line which lodges itself in the brain like a bullet. Often – though not always – these lines are the first in a poem, the better to abruptly propel the reader into the lyric. William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” or Langston Hughes’ “I’ve known rivers.” For example, John Donne and Emily Dickinson are sterling architects of not just the memorable turn-of-phrase, but the radiant introductory line as well. Think “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” or “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.”
In 
Amy Sherald. They Call me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009.
In November 2023, in an essay for the German national newspaper die taz, I wrote that Germany’s Jews were once again afraid for their lives. It was—and is—a shameful state of affairs, considering that the country has invested heavily in coming to terms with its fascist past and has made anti-antisemitism and the unconditional support of Israel part of its “Staatsräson,” or national interest—or, as others have come to define it, the reason for the country’s very existence. The Jews I’m referring to here, however, were not reacting to a widely deplored lack of empathy following the brutal attacks of October 7. In an open letter initiated by award-winning American journalist Ben Mauk and others, more than 100 Jewish writers, journalists, scientists, and artists living in Germany described a political climate where any form of compassion with Palestinian civilians was (and continues to be) equated with support for Hamas and criminalized. Assaults on the democratic right to dissent in peaceful demonstrations; cancellations of publications, fellowships, professorships, and awards; police brutality against the country’s immigrant population, liberal-minded Jews, and other protesting citizens—the effects have been widely documented, but what matters most now is now: the fact that the German press is still, four months later, nearly monovocal in its support of Israel and that over 28,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, have died. 
