James Kirchick explains why Jews residing in America have an obligation “to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime” in an article entitled “Can American Jews Be White Nationalists?”
Nobody’s politics or worldview should be determined by their racial, ethnic, or religious background—certainly not in a country as big, diverse, and welcoming as America. But if there’s an issue that should be at least influenced by one’s American Jewish identity, it’s immigration. And that’s because America, quite simply, has been great for the Jews, whose forebears in the shtetls of Europe spoke about it as the goldene medina, a golden land. Enslaved, ghettoized and murdered throughout our history, Jews have been welcomed by America with open arms.
Of course, that has not always been the case. During the Jewish people’s most desperate hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt slammed the door shut on migrants from Nazi Germany. And it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that institutional discrimination against Jews, in the forms of university quotas and the like, came to an end. But few other nations have been so hospitable to Jews as the United States. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other minority group that has succeeded so much thanks to America’s generosity and openness. The American idea allowed us to flourish to the point where we are the most widely admired religious group in the country. That is not a condition, to say the least, with which Jews have been much familiar at any other point in our long and beleaguered history, anywhere else in the world.
American Jews, then, have something of a communal obligation to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime. And by and large we have: Jews and Jewish organizations are very pro-immigration. This implied social responsibility doesn’t necessarily entail support for open borders. Nor does it apply to other parts of the world; continued mass Muslim immigration from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, for example, is a portentous development that will make Jewish life there, already difficult, increasingly so. But an American Jew calling for a drastic reduction in legal immigration to America is unseemly.
Any group of U.S. residents whose first and foremost question is “is it good for our little group” rather than “is it good for America” is not permitted to use the phrase “fellow Americans”. Because they are nothing of the kind.
A man cannot serve two masters. And while a man can collect as much paperwork as he likes, he can never be member of two nations. Jesus Christ himself told Christians they were to be in, but not of, the world, which is why Christians have been considered a threat by governments everywhere since the days of the Emperor Augustus.
But a nation is neither a state nor a government. Much mischief has been committed, and much confusion has been sown, by those who insist on conflating the nation with the state.
