This TED Talk features historian, writer, and professor of history, Paul A. Kramer, recorded live at TED Salon, Border Stories, 2019.

We often hear these days that the immigration system is broken. I want to make the case today that our immigration conversation is broken

and to suggest some ways that together we might build a better one.

In order to do that, I'm going to propose some new questions

about immigration, the United States, and the world,

questions that might move the borders of the immigration debate. I'm not going to begin

with the feverish argument that we're currently having, even as the lives and well-being of immigrants

are being put at risk at the U.S. border and far beyond it. Instead, I'm going to begin with me in

graduate school, in New Jersey, in the mid-1990s,

earnestly studying U.S. history, which is what I currently teach as a professor at Vanderbilt

University in Nashville, Tennessee. And when I wasn't studying, sometimes to avoid writing my dissertation,

my friends and I would go into town to hand out neon-colored flyers protesting legislation

that was threatening to take away immigrants' rights.

Our flyers were sincere, they were well-meaning, they were factually accurate, but I realize

now they were also kind of a problem.

Here's what they said. Don't take away

immigrant rights to public education, to medical services, to the social safety net. They work hard.

They pay taxes. They're law-abiding. They use social services less than Americans do. They're eager to learn English, and their children serve in the U.S. military all over the world.

Now, these are, of course, arguments that we hear every day.

Immigrants and their advocates use them as they confront those who would deny immigrants their rights or even exclude

them from society. And up to a certain point, it makes perfect sense that these would be the

kinds of claims that immigrants' defenders would turn to. But in the long term, and maybe

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