To understand what influences shaped people who made our immigration laws, I wanted to look at where they and their communities came from. Researching Wilbur J. Carr, who was raised in a German-American farm community in southern Ohio, I encountered the 18th-century Rhineland his third great-grandfather left — a region annihilated by the Thirty Years War. Stoicism shaped that culture; could it have shaped the culture its descendants created in the New World? How might an immature understanding of that philosophy affect the political calculations of its heirs?

This week on How We Got Here, on Substack.

https://alisonpeck.substack.com/p/stoicism-and-the-immigration-laws