Currently Israel is home to some 34,000 illegal immigrants, mostly Africans who have entered the country via Egypt in search of economic opportunity. As in Europe, the media routinely refer to these migrants as “refugees,” but that designation, notes Gadi Taub, applies properly only to a tiny fraction. Taub, exploring the social and political tensions that illegal immigration has brought to the fore in Israel, calls attention to the implications for Europe and the America:

In 2016, Xiyue Wang, an American citizen and a PhD candidate at Princeton University, traveled to Tehran to improve his Persian, and to conduct archival research on the governance of border provinces in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few months later he was arrested and sent to the Evin prison, where he was held for 40 months, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. He emerged thoroughly disabused of his former faith in the possibility of U.S conciliation with the Islam Republic. He had a similar change in attitude toward his university. Peter Theroux writes: