Confessions of a former immigration hawk

How I came to appreciate the messy human reality of immigration

Being wrong is the de-facto, if almost universally unacknowledged, vocation of the opinion columnist. Anyone who offers his views regularly in a public forum is bound to be wrong frequently, if not most of the time. But for obvious reasons it is considered a professional liability to admit this, and most of us go on subtly changing our minds without ever stopping to ask ourselves what happened.

The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy of incarcerating all persons suspected of having entered this country illegally, and in the meantime holding their frightened children in metal hutches, strikes me as a suitable occasion for examining how I have come to change my mind about immigration, something that has happened almost without my noticing it in the space of, I suppose, three or four years.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.