I like the NYT’s “Room for Debate” web feature, which solicits mini-op-eds on the topic of that day from five to ten people, giving you a better sense of the various wrinkles of a given policy discussion. Today’s installment is on the asylum process, pegged to a story in yesterday’s paper on asylum-seeking liars like the DSK accuser and famous police-shooting victim Amadou Diallo.

And you sure do get a sense of the shape — or rather narrowness — of national discourse on immigration from the makeup of the contributors. There are four immigration lawyers or amnesty advocates, who all think our (routinely gamed) laws need to be even looser; one representative of the government, in this case the head of the immigration judges’ association, who makes a useful but bureaucratic point about the processing of asylum claims (she echoed a similar recommendation made by a former colleague of hers in a recent CIS publication on immigration courts); and, finally, me. The dearth of elite spokesmen for a hawkish immigration stance is fine with me, because less competition means it’s easier for me and my staff to get in print and on the air. But it does highlight the elite/public gap on immigration — the public is lopsidedly hawkish, while the elites are even more lopsidedly dovish. A more-representative elite would mean that I’d have more competition and might lose face time to people taller, thinner, smarter, wittier, and better-looking than me — but our nation’s policies would probably be less verkakte, so it’d be worth it.