Immigration Politics: Wishful Thinking?

Newsweek ^ | 1/5/2021 | Pedro Gonzales

[Onthebrink]

All politics have consequences. But few political issues are as consequential as immigration because it alone raises that all-important question: "Who are we?" Immigration policy determines whether America exists as a coherent political unit, a home to a people sharing an identity and national destiny, or as "only a geographical expression" in the fashion of pre-unification Italy, where principalities and powers vied over a space known incidentally as the Italian peninsula.

Rending Italy from the hands of petty princes formed an essential part of Niccolò Machiavelli's life work, for only a unified Italy could resist evils from within and without. Thus, he reconceived political affairs when he distinguished the "effectual truth" from the "imagination of it"—that is, the difference between how things really are versus how men imagine them to be. For Machiavelli, the first step toward decisive action is removing the blinders from one's eyes.