Editor's Notes: What Price Would You Pay for an Open Society?

“Most countries in the world are organized around an ethnicity.”

This was said to me matter-of-factly by a friend, someone quite sympathetic to the idea of having high levels of immigration and easy pathways to citizenship. It was in response to my anger at a panelist we were watching, who was claiming that “Europe is different” when it comes to immigration.

But what I keep coming back to is not the panelist whose immigration centrism I found so repellent, but my friend’s formulation—the idea that “most countries in the world are organized around an ethnicity.”