Well Worth Saving

A carefully researched and gripping narrative, Well Worth Saving comes at the moment we need to shine light on the implicit and explicit ways life-and-death decisions about immigration are made and encoded in policy and practice. When confronted with requests to rescue Nazi-threatened European Jewish scholars, American academic decision makers, refugee advocates, and State Department bureaucrats left a demoralizing record of how they assessed which lives were “well worth saving.” The phrase, a chilling transatlantic doppelgänger of the Nazi concept Lebensunwerten (lives unworthy of life), is a bracing reminder of the influence of American eugenics on Nazi thinking. It is particularly disturbing to read this book at a time when the United States confronts the differential impact of the coronavirus pandemic and remorseless police killings of African Americans and members of other vulnerable groups. How does a society demonstrate which lives it values? Ongoing protests and the toppling of statues

Criminology · Eugenics · Immigration · Judaism · Narrative · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration