The finale of the state's legislative session was a primal scream aimed at the president.

With phrases like “better safe than sorry” and “look before you leap,” it’s clear that concerns about risk are a part of our psyche. Unfortunately, when we take those clichés to heart, we often end up plagued by another: “Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

In these brief comments, I am likely to err on the side of excessive schematization: the positions I want to tease out of several texts deserve more nuance and differentiation than I can provide in this short text. Yet the binary character of the analysis is also a reflection of the highly polarized public debate, certainly in the United States but also in Western Europe, in the wake of various political developments, above all the 2016 election that led to the Donald Trump presidency.

Milton Friedman noted that free immigration is incompatible with the welfare state. Decades of experience in the U.S. and Europe make a case. It is impossible to combine free immigration, access to welfare state subsidies, and national integration. This is an impossible trinity. Any two of the three are possible but not all three.