Kids see the world as having begun a short while before they were born, and think that their birth was an epocal event.

Over the last 50 years, American society has undergone wrenching transformations that moved us toward equality for Catholics, blacks, Jews, women, gays and lesbian, and other traditionally disfavored groups. We achieved these reforms not by emphasizing how reform would benefit straight white men, or by building complex models of how oppression depressed GDP, but by focusing on the cruelty of the status quo and appealing to America’s founding ideals. We’ve now reached the point where opponents of equality for blacks or Jews are not only in the minority, but are among the most despised people in society.

A more accurate and useful account begins before the American colonies became an independent nation since it was populated by a motley assortment of traditionally disfavored groups from a variety of traditions. There's nothing novel or even particularly interesting about the last 50 years of that centuries old story.

The problem with our immigration laws is not primarily that they are economically inefficient (Jim Crow wasn’t efficient either). The problem is that they deny civil rights to millions of hard-working individuals based on a factor over which they have no control: their place of birth. I’m sure Dixon and Rimmer mean well, but their narrow focus on the costs and benefits of immigration to American households not only ignores powerful arguments about justice, it actually undercuts them by accepting the premise that we’re justified in ignoring the welfare of the millions of people who are in such deep poverty that they’re willing to risk their lives for the privilege of picking our strawberries and scrubbing our toilets.

That's just silly, a Krugmanesque type of argument "saying that if you don't accept his means, then you must not accept his ends." It's an exceedingly sloppy argument as well. True concern for "the millions of people who are in such deep poverty that they’re willing to risk their lives for the privilege of picking our strawberries and scrubbing our toilets" consists of far, far, far more than allowing a tiny fraction of them to immigrate. Real concern for justice consists of managing ourselves and our nation well enough to be able to help the hundreds of millions of less fortunate people to have improved lives. Sterile posturing about immigration does nothing about that issue and it's somewhat despicable to frame arguments in those terms.