Thomas Sowell: Simple-minded immigration Indiscriminate policies endanger our health, wealth and security

Why would a country with the world’s largest Jewish population, outside of Israel, admit large numbers of immigrants from countries where hatred of Jews has been taught to their people from earliest childhood?

This question is ultimately not about Muslims and Jews.

It is about discussing immigrants in the abstract, rather than in terms of the specific concrete realities of particular immigrants in particular circumstances at a particular time and place — that time being now.

A hundred years ago, when immigration from other parts of the world was a major issue, there was a government study which provided voluminous statistics on how immigrants from various countries performed in American society — economically, educationally and in terms of social pathology.

Today, it would not be considered right — that is, not politically correct — even to ask such questions about immigrants, especially if immigrants were broken down by country of origin.

Despite some among the intelligentsia who like to refer to the past as “earlier and simpler times”, it is we today who are so simple-minded as to discuss immigrants as if they were just abstract people in an abstract world, to whom we could apply our abstract principles.

Yet there are immigrants from some countries who swell the welfare rolls, while immigrants from some other countries almost never go on welfare...