At a holiday dinner in 2016, I sat across from a man I had known and held in high esteem for many years.

He was smart, energetic and charismatic. He had worked hard to achieve lofty goals. He was a devoted son, husband and father. We both considered ourselves practicing Catholics. He knew that I had spent the bulk of my working life as a physician in rural Africa and that I was working now in the U.S. with newly arrived refugees from war-torn countries.

He disapproved of the latter — not, I think, that I was working with refugees, but that the U.S. was admitting them in the first place.

His reasoning was simple: “We can’t save them all.”

Before this moment it had not occurred to me that any American would object to our country accepting our share of the world’s tired, poor and huddled

See Full Page