THE ELLIS ISLAND MAX:

The answer is not more controls but expansion of legal immigration. As many of us have long argued and Kukathas neatly summarizes, "Legalization is less expensive: immigrants tend to identify themselves voluntarily, pay fees and fines, remain in work, and continue to pay taxes without burdening their employers, who would otherwise have to replace them."

As America wrestles with questions of race and criminal justice, Kukathas contends that immigration laws are by necessity about classifying and discriminating against people perceived to be different from the native population. This approach was explicit in past decades when Australia, for example, implemented its "White Australia Policy" favoring immigrants from Europe, or when the United States applied national quotas from 1924 to 1965 aimed at favoring immigrants from Northern Europe and largely excluding those from Asia.

"Immigration control in the liberal democratic West has, to a significant extent, been about limiting the entry, or keeping out altogether, people of the wrong ethnicity, religion, color, or (more recently) culture," Kukathas writes. President Trump was channeling such thinking when he expressed his opposition to immigrations from "s--hole" countries in Africa and Latin America or when he imposed travel bans against several Muslim-majority nations.

Behind many of the economic concerns people express about immigration lie more subjective worries about culture, political cohesion and a state's "self-determination." As a political theorist, Kukathas dissects those terms and finds them lacking in any objective meaning.

Kukathas rightly notes that immigrants do, of course, influence the culture of the host country, but cultures are fluid, especially those of more dynamic and open societies such as the United States. And cultural influences can come from many sources and go in both directions. "In a world in which it is not only human beings who are mobile but also corporations, practices, and ideas that cross borders all the time, limiting who may settle more or less permanently in one place or another seems like a rather feeble mechanism for determining the cultural shape of human societies," the author concludes.

To critics who contend that immigration undermines a nation's political cohesion and sovereignty, Kukathas observes that the native-born population is typically quite divided itself over political preferences and views of the nation's history. Immigrants are not the only or even the main source of political strife. As the 2020 U.S. election highlighted, political divisions seem to run far deeper among native-born citizens than between citizens and the foreign-born.

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