Part 1: Trump’s immigration policy is part of a wholesale abandonment of an Enlightenment-inspired commitment to global human rights and human welfare.

The Trump administration is abandoning our commitment to help advance human capabilities throughout the world. Call this commitment a genuine gesture or a form of imperialism, but it has been part of American political culture and of both parties since World War II.

The globe is interconnected; the actions of countries can threaten the life chances of persons anywhere, such as driving persons to flee or creating mass expulsions. What happens in Ukraine or the Democratic Republic of Congo eventually affects us. But the case for our paying attention to persons far from our borders rests more on Western Enlightenment ideology, namely the belief that all persons have a right to sustenance, protection of life, and advocacy for human capabilities.

A global compact for recognizing persons fleeing their country was created by the United Nations. The main instrument is a 1951 convention on refugee rights. Key provisions of the convention were expressly incorporated into American law by the Refugee Act of 1980.

Putting this history into broader context starts with post-WWII mass expulsions, mostly Germans living in Eastern Europe. Perhaps it is no coincidence that arising out of post-war Europe, especially Eastern Europe, were human rights concepts that led to international agreements on genocide (1948), human rights (1948), and later in the Helsinki Accords of 1975.

Our domestic policies matched these agreements: the creation of the Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps in 1961; Civil Rights legislation; and the Immigration and Nationality Act (or Hart-Celler Act) of 1965. These actions served as an implicit declaration of commitment by the United States to global standards of human rights and welfare.