Focus On Immigration Fourth Perspective

Welcoming the Stranger

Do people and nations have a duty to welcome strangers seeking hospitality? Many religious traditions and philosophers have claimed hospitality as a necessity for human society. Pennsylvania itself was founded on the moral claim that we are obliged to welcome the stranger. Some groups fleeing terrible conditions, like Polish Jews who fled into the Soviet Union to escape the Holocaust, found hospitality in unlikely places in Central Asia. But has the United States started to ignore this obligation? Have we forgotten the historical lesson that America is strengthened, economically and culturally, by welcoming strangers in need?