No, this is not about 1980s songs. Israel has persuaded Germany to tighten up its refugee resettlement rules so fewer Russian Jews are admitted (the point being to make them more likely to move to Israel instead). I recently published a paper by an Israeli professor on the same controversy that took place in the United States years ago, the basic point of which is the same: as an Israeli official said in the Germany article, “[Israeli President] Katzav was especially concerned about the Jewish immigrants being classified as refugees. This was seen as a flagrant disregard of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state whose law of return guarantees every Jew entry and citizenship.”

The policy question is broader than Jews and Israel: Whatever the numbers, we must reserve refugee resettlement as the last resort, used only for those who do not have, and will never have, anywhere else to go. Unfortunately, we’re not doing this, for reasons of sentimentality, nostalgia, or political calculation. Take the North Koreans, for instance; Nick Eberstadt has a new piece calling upon South Korea to take in all their brethren who escape from the communist north. There are good reasons for this; but for some incomprehensible reason, we may resettle some of them here instead. The same thing happened with the Somali Bantu, descendants of slaves captured by the Arabs; the countries their ancestors were kidnapped from, Tanzania and Mozambique, offered to take them all in, so long as someone helped pay for their resettlement. Instead, we resettled these profoundly backward people in modern American cities, where the odds are slim that they or their children will be able to make stable, productive lives for themselves.