The people of Western countries seem to have roughly divided themselves into two camps on immigration policy, and I’m not the first to feel as though both are getting some fundamental elements wrong.

Some rightly see the accomplishments of the West as worth preserving, appreciating, and promoting. Unfortunately, these ideas generally accompany the desire to exclude people from other countries because they are “unassimilable”.

Opposing this stance are the people who do not compare the West to the other actual nations that exist but to a Utopian ideal of what could be. Such a comparison naturally disfavours countries like the United States that have magnificent failures in their past. These same imaginaries want anyone and everyone to flood into their wretched country.

I stand as somebody in awe of the Enlightenment values that greatly benefitted me. I also believe enough in human universality that I think anybody can embrace them. If we’re going to invite people to share in the spoils of capitalism, free trade, freedom of expression, human rights, and the rest, we must imbue the new arrivals with a sense of how valuable these things are. To do that, we must value them ourselves.