ABSTRACT
Why does immigration roil the politics of so many countries, even aging societies that need people to help finance the welfare state benefits of their declining populations? Surely a large part of the answer is that immigration brings strangers into “our land,” raising concerns about the erosion of a common national identity. The territorial nation-state remains the dominant political reality of our time; reports of its demise are vastly exaggerated. A nation is a set of people with a common “we-feeling” seeking a state of their own. The attributes giving rise to this sense of common identity may vary, but all nationalist doctrines insist that “the imagined community of the nation must be the primary focus of values, source of legitimacy, and object of loyalty and basis of identity,” 2 overriding the claims of minority communities within it.
