On September 30, 2025, Davidson College’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative hosted an Expert Roundtable on “Balancing Equality and Unity: The Case of Immigration and Citizenship.” The roundtable is the first event in the Deliberative Forum Series on American Values that Davidson College, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence co-hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This roundtable focused on two particular founding values, unity and equality, and explored them in the context of both American history generally and the specific policy issue of immigration and citizenship.
It included four panelists, Danielle Battisti (U. of Nebraska at Omaha), Philip Cafaro (Colorado State University, retired), Fernando Tesón (Florida State University, retired), and Hrishikesh Joshi (University of Arizona), and was moderated by John Wertheimer (Davidson College). More info on each panelist is provided below, and more background about the roundtable generally is available at this link. The event was introduced by Graham Bullock (Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative at Davidson College) and Doug Hicks (President of Davidson College).
Nearly 100 people attended in person and approximately 200 joined the event via Zoom. After engaging in a spirited and respectful discussion with one another, the panelists answered questions from both the in-person and online audiences. A video recording of the event is available below.
In the week following the Roundtable, Davidson, Duke, UNC, and potentially other institutions will be hosting community conversations building on the roundtable discussion. If you are interested in hosting a conversation yourself, click here to watch a webinar that provides some ideas about how both individuals and institutions can get involved in the series by doing exactly that, either now or over the next several months.
The DCI’s series of Community Conversations during the week of October 6 will build on the scholars’ deliberations. These two-hour deliberative discussions of 6-10 people will be moderated by trained facilitators and will use a similar format to the DCI’s D Teams. To learn more about this opportunity to engage with your fellow citizens — either online or in-person) and reserve a spot at a time that works for you, click here. The primary time for these conversations is Wednesday, October 8 at 7 pm in the Student Union’s 900 Room on the Davidson campus. We’ll have round tables and DCI-trained facilitators on hand to moderate small group discussions of 6-7 people. If you can’t make that time, you can select the other times you are available and we’ll be in touch about another facilitated Community Conversation that you can join. The deadline to sign-up for one of these additional times is October 5, but everyone is welcome to join the Oct. 8 conversation without advance registration.
Included below is a deliberation guide that provides some background information about the topic of the roundtable and the community conversations. Participants are invited to review it in advance of the conversation, as it includes some discussion questions that the facilitators will be asking everyone in their group to share their thoughts on during the conversation.
DCI-Unity-Equality-and-Immigration-Deliberation-GuideExpert Roundtable
- Danielle Battisti is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she specializes in immigration and ethnic history. Her book, “Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform” (Fordham University Press, 2019) examines both the liberal and conservative elements of Italian American efforts to influence American immigration policies in the 1950s and 1960s. It was awarded the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s best first book award for 2019. She is also the co-editor of Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States (Illinois University Press 2025). One of her current projects is examining the immigration laws that largely facilitated Euro-Americans’ efforts to adjust their status from “illegal alien” to “legal permanent resident.”
- Philip Cafaro, a philosophy professor who recently retired from Colorado State, is the author of the book, How Many Is Too Many? The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which argues that current immigration levels—the highest in U.S. history—undermine efforts to achieve a more economically just and ecologically sustainable society. He is also the co-editor of Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and Virtue Ethics and the Environment (Springer-Verlag 2010) as well as the author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue (University of Georgia Press 2004) and “The Impact of Immigration Policy on Future US Population Size” in The Journal of Population and Sustainability (2025).
- Fernando Tesón is Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Florida State University College of Law. An Argentine-American legal scholar, he is a leading authority on humanitarian intervention and the philosophy of international law. He is the editor of The Theory of Self-Determination (Cambridge University Press 2016) and co-author of Debating Humanitarian Intervention: Should We Try to Save Strangers? (Oxford University Press (2017) and Justice at a Distance: Extending Freedom Globally (Cambridge University Press 2015). He has also published articles supporting less restrictive immigration policies, including “The Bourgeois Argument for Freer Immigration” in The Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought and “Brain Drain” in the San Diego Law Review.
- Hrishikesh Joshi is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as a core faculty member at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. His research focuses on normative issues at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). He has published several chapters related to immigration and citizenship, including “Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants” (in The Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy), “Immigration” (in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism), and “Immigration: Some Arguments for Limits” (in The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics and Economics of Immigration). He has also published a book on Why It’s Okay to Speak Your Mind (Routledge).
- John Wertheimer, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at Davidson College, will serve as moderator of the roundtable discussion. Dr. Wertheimer’s research and teaching focuses on modern U.S. history and legal history; his two books – Law and Society in the South: A History of North Carolina Court Cases (University Press of Kentucky) and Race and the Law in South Carolina: From Slavery to Jim Crow (Amherst College Press) – explore the legal history of the U.S. South.
