ABSTRACT
The Open Society Institute has taken a different approach. One of its signature initiatives in its first year of work in the United States—the Emma Lazarus Fund—was undertaken on behalf of legal immigrants. In considering the question “What Do We Owe Each Other?,” emphasis is usually placed on the “what” part of the social contract: does it contain goods and benefits like education, pensions, health care, or perhaps less tangible things, like tolerance and civility. Nation-states have extremely broad power to determine who is a citizen of the polity, with whatever package of rights, benefits and responsibilities that entails. Society may owe us something, but we owe it something, too. One concern about immigration—certainly in Western Europe, which is grappling, and much less well, with some of these matters than the United States—is whether some immigrants will change the values of the society in a less tolerant way.
