In which I draw a sharp distinction between Christian love and humanitarianism.

“The other” as he appears in the liberal imagination is an abstraction. To love the other, in the manner of a yard sign pronouncement, costs me nothing. That is what makes it sentimentalism. To maintain the sentiment, and with it a certain view of myself as magnanimous, I need the other to remain an abstraction. Hence my need not to notice concrete sociological facts about the objects of my solicitude, and the moratorium against speaking in detail about the social realities that attend a massive influx of people from very different societies.

Some of these societies have little tradition of the rule of law or of self-government. Or they may have a strong tendency toward clannishness, that is, the extension of social trust only to one’s ­in-group and a corresponding readiness to exploit the wider trust of the host society, as happened in the case of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota. The males may not have been socialized into that discipline of the eyes, to say nothing of the hands, that marks a significant accomplishment of the West and allows women to occupy public space without discomfort or fear.