One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was that miserable victims of communist regimes would climb walls, swim rivers, dodge bullets, and find other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time that progressive intellectuals would sentimentally proclaim that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is playing out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from Third World nations pour into Western states, academics and...