Over the course of the last century we have come to understand that immigration is too important a topic to leave to the economists and politicians. It is a topic that demands the engagement of citizens in the form of a national conversation. That conversation needs to locate the current debate. The United States of America is one of a hand-full of advanced democracies in the world that can claim immigration as both history and destiny. The quasi sacred narrative, accounting for how the United States came to be the country it is today, has immigration at its very center: the original settlement of the Native Americans beginning some 20,000 years ago; the arrival of the English, Spanish, and Dutch settlers five centuries ago; the involuntary migration of millions of African slaves; the great transatlantic exodus that between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the first decade of the 20th century sent over 50 million Europeans to the New World; and the current wave of new immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia all constitute the cultural archeology of the nation.

Immigration—especially the ambivalence it generates—is constitutive of the US character. It is deeply embedded in its cultural DNA. Immigrants are loved looking backwards but feared and mistrusted in the here and now. That eternal ambivalence continues to define the US national conversation about the kind of country it is again becoming: a country of new immigrants.