Immigration Forum Comment: Foreign Relations and Migration

In the fall of 2015, a great debate began taking shape internationally and in the United States over how to reconcile foreign-policy interests, national security concerns, and a response to a profound refugee crisis emerging in Europe as a result of the conflict in Syria. World leaders vacillated, demagogues pontificated, and social media memes employed bad historical analogies to shame fellow citizens into action. Despite the sudden urgency, the arguments blasting from twenty-four-hour news stations and ill-drawn cartoons depicting seventeenth-century pilgrims as forlorn refugees given safe harbor by Native Americans at Plymouth Rock did not represent a new line of thinking in the longer history of international migration management. The public is once again debating how to balance humanitarianism against fear, and which sentiment should play the greater role in governing the decision to admit new migrants. As the papers in this forum ably show, policies, procedures, and perspectives on migration have always had an international-relations component that can trump the local concerns that often dominate domestic debates.