In his commentary on the Bush administration's proposal of a new amnesty program for illegal immigrant workers, my colleague, Jonathan Dresner, cited this New York Times op-ed by David Abraham. It strikes me as a very smart commentary on the administration's proposal, drawing both on the European and the American experience with such programs to call for a critical examination of what the administration proposes.

For historians above the age of 50, however, the op-ed is bound to evoke memories of a disgraceful episode among us. In 1981, with three degrees from the University of Chicago, David Abraham was a young historian at Princeton University. His book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, published by the University's press, was well reviewed and he had every reason to expect to be granted tenure. That was before Henry Turner (front row, 3rd from left) and Gerald Feldman of the University of California at Berkeley began looking at the book more closely. In fact, Feldman had recommended the book for publication, but alerted by Turner, they joined in a campaign that would destroy David Abraham's future as a historian. The story is a complicated one, reasonably well summarized here. It mixed ideological and methodological antipathy with personal ambitions and claims for empirical accuracy. Abraham acknowledged that he had made errors, but that was insufficient for his critics who literally tracked his job search across several continents and threatened to go beyond departmental authorities to boards of trustees to be certain that Abraham had no future as a historian.

David Abraham was still young and smart enough to go to law school, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. After two years as a clerk and an associate, he joined the faculty at the University of Miami. There must be a special personal reward in the identifier at the close of his fine op-ed in the New York Times:"David Abraham, a visiting fellow in European history at Princeton, is a professor of immigration law at the University of Miami." Congratulations to Princeton University, but more especially to David Abraham. It's been a long time coming.