Introduction to Part 6

I have long been deeply interested in the history, sociology, economics, and policy surrounding immigration. More than perhaps any other nation, the U.S. has been shaped by it. But the cliché that we are a nation of immigrants conceals the deep divisions and bitter struggles that Americans have experienced from the very beginning over questions of who may join our society and under what conditions. In my writings, I have always been very pro-immigration, including endorsing larger legal immigration quotas, expanding refugee admissions, designing generous legalization programs for many of the undocumented, and securing our borders as a necessary condition for such reforms.

In this Part, I include three articles that shed light on these most fundamental questions about the nature of the American polity. The first is a very recent analysis of certain aspects of immigration policy that are shaping partisan conflicts over illegal migration. It focuses on what the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress can do to advance an agenda that could possibly loosen the policy logjam. The second piece is about birthright citizenship—the legal rule that anyone born on U.S. soil, even if the parents lack legal status here, is nevertheless automatically a U.S. citizen. In a highly controversial book on the subject published by me and Professor Rogers Smith back in 1985, we argued that this rule violates the consensual principle underlying the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. The American version of birthright citizenship is more absolute than that of probably any other country today and has long been criticized, most recently by President Trump, but even he did not seriously challenge it—although many other liberal democracies with birthright citizenship are narrowing its scope to address the challenges presented by large-scale illegal migration. My article establishes the context of this controversy and proposes a novel solution.

The final article – the longest in this collection – presents an innovative proposal that I advanced many years ago designed to resolve, or at least ameliorate, the tragically chronic and steadily growing refugee flows throughout the world. The problem has only grown worse since 2015 when I updated the article. At the end of 2022, the World Refugee Survey reported over 100 million refugees, which does not include the millions displaced since then by the war in Ukraine.