Letter from the Co-Presidents Citizenship, Authoritarianism, and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine Today, once again, we are witnessing the great paradox of liberal democracy, one that Carl Popper was keenly aware of: the threat to open societies does not always come from outside the gates, it often comes from within. Western liberal democracies rose out of the ashes of World War II and led to the longest period of peace that the modern world has known. It was those war experiences and the knowledge that millions of people died in the name of ethnic nationalism, communism, and fascism, that led to the establishment of open societies striving to be inclusive of the other and supportive of the weak. These days, we live in an era when more and more immigrants from all over the world are seeking to share into the material and moral riches of the West, embracing the political, social, and cultural values of liberal democracy. Often required by law, they shed headscarves and native tongues along with other cultural and social practices and beliefs. Data from multiple countries tell us that immigrants are net contributors to Western economies (the story for refugees is more complicated given the conditions under which they are admitted), they display lower levels of criminality, they are patriotic (in the U.S. thousands have served in the military and have been welcomed to do so, until recent efforts by the Trump administration to purge the ranks), and they are the strongest hope for stemming the Western demographic crisis and the associated crisis of the welfare state. At the same time, a portion of the native-born population, those raised in the context of liberal ideals and institutions, feel so threatened by Spanish or Turkish or Arabic spoken on the train platform and the supermarket line, by the chanting call of the muezzin, and the different color of skin of the people in their midst, that they become willing to sacrifice liberal norms and institutions built with great sacrifice and over many decades. Ultra-nationalist, authoritarian leaders and parties have cropped up in almost every Western democracy attacking liberal values and institutions, but promising protection of cultural homogeneity. http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 2