Immigration is currently one of the most contentious issues in American politics. To Jeff Jacoby, our present woes can be traced back to the Immigration Act of 1924, which had significant, and doleful, consequences for Jewish history:

It was a terrible law, steeped in racism and the quack science of eugenics. Its quotas were heavily tilted in favor of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Northern Europe. By contrast, immigrants from Asia were almost wholly barred, while Russians, Poles, Italians, Jews, and Greeks—deemed by progressive elites of the day to be genetically inferior and incapable of assimilating with Anglo-Saxons—were reduced to a trickle.

There is a popular misconception that the 1924 law was undone by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In reality, as the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier has written, every essential feature of our current system dates back to 1924. . . . Above all, the system established in 1924, by making it impossible for most would-be immigrants to enter the United States legally, guaranteed a steady stream of illegal immigration.

With a larger population, America would have a larger, richer, and more productive economy.

Jacoby adds, in a follow-up post, that this last assertion generated more negative responses from readers than any other in the original column. At the heart of his critics’ thinking is the flawed assumption that it’s better to have too few people than too many. That’s the same assumption, Jacoby notes, shared by those who think people should be having fewer children, not more.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].