Deniz Sert

Over 11 million illegal immigrants reside in the United States, and a projected 1,400 new immigrants cross the border illegally or overstay their visas each year, making immigration a topic of a raging debate in the US. Debating Immigration is a volume of 18 original essays, written by activists, experts and scholars, and organized around five themes of religion and philosophy, law and policy, economics and demographics, race and ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. Debating Immigration contributes to this debate by searching for the answers to a range of questions: Who should be admitted as an immigrant? What rights and benefits should host countries grant immigrants? What, if anything, do immigrants owe their host countries? How can the division between public attitudes about immigration and the policies produced by elected officials be explained? Why has the US failed to develop a well-articulated public philosophy of immigration? What does the Bible say about immigration policy? What are the moral and social obligations among fellow citizens? Do these obligations trump responsibilities to the world’s poor? How can the tendency to frame the immigration debate in the dichotomous terms of legal versus illegal and citizen versus non-citizen be explained, when the most critical troubles are the consequences of immigration itself and not its legality or lack thereof? How is the European experience different from the US one?