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Conventional arguments for and against immigration are of little help in developing policy in an era of globalization and international terrorism. Tamar Jacoby draws on her experience as a journalist to illustrate problems with current policy by examining vignettes from the border, immigrant communities, and the economic sectors that increasingly rely on unauthorized labor. She moves from these symptoms to a diagnosis of the problem and a set of criteria for developing a better approach and then assesses the Bush administration proposal in terms of these criteria. Finally, returning to the politics of immigration, she gauges the prospects that the 109th Congress will move beyond conventional divisions to pass reform legislation that meets our national needs--remaining a nation of immigrants and open to the world in an era when borders and nationality are increasingly significant.

Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes extensively on immigration, citizenship, ethnicity, and race. Ms. Jacoby's articles and essays have been published in a variety of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, and Foreign Affairs. Her 1998 book, Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books), tells the story of race relations in three American cities--New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. The Economist magazine called it "arguably the most important study of race relations in America since Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma was published in 1944." Her newest book, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American, was published by Basic Books in February 2004. A collection of essays by a diverse group of authors--academics, journalists, and fiction-writers on the Right and the Left--the book argues that we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage assimilation. Before joining the Manhattan Institute, from 1987 to 1989 she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek, where she wrote weekly articles on criminal justice, the Supreme Court, and other law-related topics. Between 1981 and 1987, she was the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Before that, she was an assistant to the editor of the New York Review of Books. In 2004, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.