Issue: December 2008: Immigration

[1] About twenty years ago, Joseph Carens, in a seminal article on the ethics of immigration, pointedly drew attention to the essential dilemma that it poses: “Borders have guards and the guards have guns,” he wrote. To the needy, desperate, and oppressed of the world, seeking access to a free and wealthy nation like the […]

November 2008 [1] Postville, Iowa, a rural town of about 2,200 located in the rolling hills of northeast Iowa, would appear to be an unlikely epicenter for a debate over immigration control and our treatment of undocumented immigrants. However, when on May 12, 2008 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE—formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization […]

[1] Generally speaking, we humans are what I call “narrow-minded knowers.” In our striving to put together a perspective about the world and other people, or of the world in which we live with other people, we create ideas about this world and relationships with which we can feel rather comfortable. We build knowledge about […]