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Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders Hardcover – September 25, 2018

by Reihan Salam (Author)

4.3 92 ratings

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Long before Covid-19 and the death of George Floyd rocked America, Reihan Salam predicted our current unrest--and provided a blueprint for reuniting the country.

"Tthe years to come may see a new populist revolt, driven by the resentments of working-class Americans of color.”

For too long, liberals have suggested that only cruel, racist, or nativist bigots would want to restrict immigration. Anyone motivated by compassion and egalitarianism would choose open, or nearly-open, borders—or so the argument goes. Now, Reihan Salam, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, turns this argument on its head.

In this deeply researched but also deeply personal book, Salam shows why uncontrolled immigration is bad for everyone, including people like his family. Our current system has intensified the isolation of our native poor, and risks ghettoizing the children of poor immigrants. It ignores the challenges posed by the declining demand for less-skilled labor, even as it exacerbates ethnic inequality and deepens our political divides.

If we continue on our current course, in which immigration policy serves wealthy insiders who profit from cheap labor, and cosmopolitan extremists attack the legitimacy of borders, the rise of a new ethnic underclass is inevitable. Even more so than now, class politics will be ethnic politics, and national unity will be impossible.

Salam offers a solution, if we have the courage to break with the past and craft an immigration policy that serves our long-term national interests. Rejecting both militant multiculturalism and white identity politics, he argues that limiting total immigration and favoring skilled immigrants will combat rising inequality, balance diversity with assimilation, and foster a new nationalism that puts the interests of all Americans—native-born and foreign-born—first.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Sentinel
Publication date

September 25, 2018
Dimensions

5.72 x 0.86 x 8.53 inches
ISBN-10

0735216274
ISBN-13

978-0735216273
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The choice between 'melting pot or civil war' may seem a stark one. But in this clear-sighted and courageous book, Salam persuasively argues that without a radical reform of the U.S. immigration system, our already polarized society might very well come apart at the seams.”

—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution

“Tackling a complex and emotional subject with thoughtfulness and charity, Salam has issued a clarion call to everyone who cares about the American nation and every person who calls it home. Melting Pot or Civil War answers the question of how we can have an immigration policy that is beneficial, humane, and fair to everyone—from ninth-generation Americans to new immigrants.”

—J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy

“Should we lock people out of the middle class, or should we lock people out of the country? That is what is really being asked when we debate whether American immigration policy should be open or closed. Thankfully, Reihan Salam reveals this dichotomy to be a false choice. We can live in a middle class country that welcomes newcomers—if we can live with middle-of-the-road limits rather than absolutist extremes.”

—Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One

"No matter where you stand on the issue of immigration, Salam's book does something marvelously dangerous: it threatens to change your mind."

—Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote and cofounder of Echelon Insights

“For far too long, advocates of open immigration have dismissed their critics without even bothering to answer them. Reihan Salam should make that impossible. He offers a smart, informed, humane, and powerful case for an immigration policy that better serves all Americans. This is essential reading for understanding our country and its future.”

—Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs and author of The Fractured Republic

“Reihan Salam has written the most honest and insightful treatment of immigration you will find right now. I do not agree with everything he says in this book, but I highly recommend it.”

—Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University and author of The Complacent Class

About the Author

Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review and a National
Review Institute policy fellow. He is a contributing editor at The
Atlantic and National Affairs. With Ross Douthat, Salam is the
co-author of Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working
Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The Unfinished Melting Pot

In his 1908 play The Melting Pot, the playwright Israel Zangwill painted a romantic portrait of an America where Mayflower descendants and newcomers would come together as part of a compound nationality: "Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross-how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!" Yet the melting-pot ideal has long since fallen out of style, and it is easy to see why. For one, it was always conspicuously incomplete.

Looking back, the United States wasn't much of a melting pot in the early 1900s, even if we limit ourselves to people of European descent. Though the country did attract large numbers of migrants in that era, mostly from Europe, many were sojourners, who came to the United States for a number of years to make their fortunes before returning to their homelands. Then there were the many migrants who lived among their co-ethnics in flourishing ethnic enclaves, which were regularly replenished by new arrivals. At their most vibrant, these enclaves were social worlds unto themselves, where migrants could speak their native languages and worship in familiar ways. Marrying outside one's own ethnic community was often frowned upon.

Only years later did the melting really begin in earnest. Following the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s, European immigration slowed drastically, and ethnic enclaves around the country were no longer being replenished. The children and grandchildren of European immigrants became much more likely to marry outside their ethnic tribes. While the offspring of these mixed marriages might have held on to some symbols of their cultural inheritances, they tended to identify more as American than anything else. By the 1950s, Americans from many different European ethnic groups were becoming part of a new compound ethnicity: they became, in short, white people. And for most whites, at least, midcentury America was defined by high and rising incomes and the widespread availability of dignified work. This era gave rise to the New Deal, and laid the economic and cultural foundation for the American Century.

The melting pot of old was whites-only, and most white Americans embraced racial segregation and the broader subjection of African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities to an inferior status. Indeed, part of what built solidaristic ties between native whites and European immigrants was common racism against blacks. In the decades since, most Americans have come to reject this whites-only conception of what it means to be an American without finding a broadly shared vision that can take its place. Some Americans, particularly older whites, look to midcentury America as their ideal, and see rising ethnic diversity as a threat to the country's predominantly white character. Others, mostly on the left, reject the idea that America should be understood as a single cultural nation, choosing instead to see it as a multicultural republic, in which separate and distinct groups vie for equal dignity and respect. What is missing is a more unifying understanding of American nationhood.

To that end, the country needs a more expansive "melting pot" ideal, one that includes the descendants of slaves and of newcomers from around the world. As Michael Lind, who has championed this ideal for decades, has argued, the melting pot stands for "the voluntary blending of previously distinct groups into a new community"-a "great American mix" that draws on dozens of ethnicities and religious traditions. It is an ideal that rejects the arbitrary racial categories that have become so central to our cultural and political discourse. By emphasizing all that Americans have in common, and the fact that integration and assimilation can, over time, deepen our shared cultural bonds, the melting pot ideal can pull us back from the brink of ethnic and class conflict.

The alternative to a new American melting pot is, I fear, an even more dangerously divided society. Lately, thinkers of various political stripes have taken to declaring that America is already in the midst of a kind of civil war. The conservative social critic Angelo Codevilla, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, warns that America's left-wing ruling class is waging a "cold civil war against a majority of the American people and their way of life." On the other end of the political spectrum, journalist Peter Leyden and the political demographer Ruy Teixeira argue that our latter-day civil war pits retrograde white conservatives who fear the future against a multicultural alliance of pro-innovation progressives. While Codevilla calls for lowering the temperature of America's cultural struggle, Leyden and Teixeira see victory in sight. For them, the only way forward is for the country's progressive majority to rise up and vanquish its aging white reactionaries once and for all. The shock of Trump's election has led many Americans, on the right and the left, to long for the metaphorical destruction of their domestic enemies. We see this in recurring fantasies of secession, and in an endless parade of fictional portrayals of nightmarish American futures, from The Purge to The Handmaid's Tale. Though it is still rare to hear respectable people say they want their political rivals dead, partisan enmity is such that it is not hard to imagine we will soon get there.

And, as Lind suggests, the false belief that America's racial and cultural boundaries are fixed is making matters worse. If non-Hispanic whites are an impermeable, unchanging group, it stands to reason that those who belong to it would be alarmed by the fact that they will soon lose their majority status to a collection of hostile ethnic others. In an ethnically divided society, to be outnumbered is to be afraid. But if the boundaries between groups are fluid, and if distinctions between whites and nonwhites can be expected to fade away over time, as they would in a melting pot society, such concerns would be greatly reduced. Which will it be?

The Coming Crossover

Consider that among Americans under the age of eighteen, non-Hispanic whites will be in the minority by 2020. Shortly thereafter, in 2032, a majority of working-age adults without college degrees, a decent proxy for the country's non-elite workforce, will be people of color. As older, whiter generations fade away, they will be replaced by younger, less-white generations. This generational replacement will take place regardless of what happens to future immigration levels. As I write, the median age of non-Hispanic whites is forty-three, while that of Hispanics is twenty-eight. The median ages for blacks and Asians were thirty-three and thirty-six, respectively. What this means is that a higher proportion of Hispanics, and to a lesser extent blacks and Asians, are of childbearing age as compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Will the coming majority-minority crossover be positive and peaceful? The answer will depend on the pattern of assimilation during the coming decades. If newcomers are incorporated into the mainstream, the majority-minority crossover will be a non-event, as we'll wind up with a more expansive melting-pot majority, which will include Americans of all sorts of different ethnic backgrounds, non-European ethnic groups included. The bright lines separating disadvantaged groups from the mainstream will blur. But if newcomers instead find themselves marginalized, a much grimmer future lies ahead.

We see glimpses of this future in our most prosperous cities. Recently in Los Angeles, reporters Andrew Romano and Garance Franke-Ruta profiled anti-gentrification protesters, many of them second-generation Americans, who are adopting more radical methods to defend their neighborhoods, as they see it, from affluent outsiders. Some of their tactics seem faintly comic, such as the expletive-laced T-shirts condemning hipsters. But others involve threatening supposed interlopers and vandalizing property.

One could dismiss the new anti-gentrification radicalism as hooliganism. Romano and Franke-Ruta are more sympathetic, pointing to anger and disaffection among "poorer, nonwhite millennials who tend to live in major cities," and the soaring poverty rate among young adults with no more than a high school education, which, they note, increased threefold from 1979 to 2014. They observe that "roughly 70 percent of black families and 71 percent of Latino families don't have enough money saved to cover three months of living expenses." The same is true for only 34 percent of white families. This contrast between wealth and poverty is particularly pronounced in gentrifying neighborhoods. "Ultimately," Romano and Franke-Ruta warn, "the fight over gentrification is what the fight over income inequality in America looks like up close today: a clash between the economic forces transforming our cities and a young, diverse, debt-saddled generation that is losing faith in capitalism itself."

The activism we're seeing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other hotbeds of gentrification will spread. The visible manifestations of racial inequality are inciting many young Americans of color, and will incite them further as America goes through what some are calling "the Great Wealth Transfer."

Over the coming decades, baby boomers are set to pass on $30 trillion in accumulated wealth to their heirs. But this $30 trillion won't be divvied up evenly among younger Americans, for the obvious reason that rich boomer parents are disproportionately white, college-educated, native-born, and married. Families headed by someone who is middle-aged and was born to white parents, at least one of whom went to college, have a median income of $113,618. That is 2.7 times the income of nonwhite, non-college educated families. Meanwhile, the expected net worth of the most privileged is a full 14 times higher than that of the least privileged, at $374,640 compared to $26,718, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

In short, some people start out well ahead, even before their own education and accomplishments are taken into account. "Some of the inherited advantage," posits the St. Louis Fed, "plausibly flows through greater monetary transfers (in gifts and bequests) and more-intensive childhood investments, particularly in education, provided by college-educated parents who also are, in general, wealthier than nongrad parents." Beyond that, such families have greater savings, which can make them more resilient in times of trouble.

And then there are the millions of Americans living on the edge of poverty, many of whom are low-skill immigrants. Of course, most immigrants aren't fighting gentrification in the streets, for the obvious reason that they are typically more concerned with providing for their families. Indeed, the great appeal of newcomers as workers is that relative to native-born workers, they will do any job and live in the most insalubrious conditions. This is especially true of low-skill immigrants, who greatly increase their incomes by moving to the United States, even when they are among the poorest of America's working poor. That's part of why the political influence of the newcomer working class is so muted as compared to the established working class. Low-income immigrants tend to naturalize at low levels, in part because many are so poor that the cost of naturalization is daunting, and naturalized citizens vote at lower rates than the native-born. Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants have even less influence. If they were citizens raised with an expectation of fair and equal treatment, they would undoubtedly demand better wages and working conditions from their elite employers, and they'd have the political muscle to get their way at least some of the time. But, instead, they are forced to toil in the shadows. The relative powerlessness of foreign-born workers is a big part of what's made America's cosmopolitan cities so attractive to high-skill professionals.

But the citizen children of these workers won't be nearly as quiescent. Many of the poorer, nonwhite young people driving the new anti-gentrification radicalism are the children of low-skill immigrants who came to the United States with hope and stamina for sacrifice. It is possible to celebrate their sacrifices while recognizing that their children might reasonably have different attitudes toward their own economic travails. As someone born and raised in neighborhoods transformed by low-skill immigration, I can confirm that: "You're better off than you would have been had you been born in the Third World!" is not a satisfying riposte. "Gee, thanks. I also can't afford my rent."

Most of the poorest Americans are nonwhite, and that majority will continue to grow through the 2020s and 2030s. Assuming present trends, meanwhile, America's rich will continue to be overwhelmingly white. Do you think working-class young Americans of color will shrug and accept their inherited disadvantage? Or will they be drawn to politicians who promise to do something about it, even if it means breaking with the established order?

It would be one thing if these young people were confident that mainstream Americans saw them as their equals. A lot of the time, though, they're not. In December 2017, Conor Williams, a liberal policy analyst and former schoolteacher, interviewed a group of high-achieving young students of color at a Brooklyn charter school. All were from immigrant families. One of them, Esther Reyes, offered a heartfelt, stinging critique of the idea of the American Dream: "[T]he American dream we see in movies or in shows or in books, it's an American dream for white people . . . I think we could make a new version of the American dream if we wanted to, but just because of its history and the way that people have used it in the past, I don't think it exists."

Her doubts about America's promise are widespread among children raised in working-class immigrant households, and they didn't begin with the Trump presidency. Barring real reform, these young people will find themselves in a punishing economic environment, and they will have every reason to resent a power structure dominated by people who don't look like them and who aren't invested in their fate.

Immigrants are not to blame for the challenges we Americans face, which we have inherited from our forebears, and which we have made worse with our shortsightedness and greed. However, our current immigration system is increasing both the number and the share of children being raised in low-income households. If the children of immigrants were immune to the ill effects of growing up poor, this wouldn't be cause for concern. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Today's poor immigrants are raising tomorrow's poor natives, and we aren't doing nearly enough to break the cycle.

Just as Donald Trump's election spoke to the rage and disaffection of older whites in the heartland, the years to come will see a new populist revolt, driven by the resentments of working-class Americans of color. Imagine an America in which wealthy whites and Asians wall themselves off from the rest of society, and low-wage immigrants and their offspring constitute a new underclass. Working-class Americans of color will look upon their more privileged fellow citizens with envy, if not resentment, and better-off whites will look upon their poorer brown and black counterparts with fear and suspicion. Whites will embrace a more hard-edged white identity politics, and they will see efforts to redistribute their wealth as acts of racial aggression. Class politics will be color politics, and extremists on the left and the right will find millions of poor, angry youth willing to heed their calls to battle.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sentinel (September 25, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735216274
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735216273
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.72 x 0.86 x 8.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #967,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #152 in Emigration & Immigration Law (Books)
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- #1,053 in Emigration & Immigration Studies (Books)

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Chris Hansen

Reasonable, Pragmatic, almost Humane. Wasted on the Politicians

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is an important book. It’s a shame that only policy wonks will read it. Though it is short and by no means conclusive, it has many fine insights.
At first, I was a little miffed that Reihan Salam quickly got entangled in speculations about the economic consequences of various migration mixes. This approach tends to veer off into “who owns whom a living” micro-statism. However, the macro issues come later, along with the promised policy ideas.
RS says his perspective is closer to Mr. Trump’s than to that of the “open borders” advocates. This makes no sense. First, his prescription (amnesty, skills-based quotas, and subsidies to migrants with children) is heresy to Trumpists; also, Mr. T’s deep primal need to hurt people, though popular, is not a coherent policy. Secondly, while all decent people should agree that no-borders is the utopian ideal, hardly anyone advocates them, accusations notwithstanding. It is not possible today.
RS’s ideas are sane, practical, and reminiscent of the various compromises that never pass Congress (except in 1984). Indeed, RS sounds more like Brookings Institution than National Review, and there were times when he reminded me of some commissar in the industrial planning bureau of the Supreme Soviet – an impression he anticipates and tries to rebut.
I am also not a fan of Salam’s “amalgamation/racialization” dichotomy. America was never meant to be a melting-pot, though the effect occurs. It’s not that Sioux and Jew, Amish and Inuit should gradually homogenize into Midwestern pea-soup. Au contraire: We may be totally different but are still 100% American (or should be). It’s this wild but mutually-tolerant diversity that makes America a unique miracle of history (or used to?). It also speaks for the widest possible net in accepting migrants. (That’s why Han Chinese will never replace us as the universal culture!)
Then again, RS is spot-on in warning against importing a permanent underclass. Like Europe did.
Salam is far from a “back-to-first-principles” guy, but he has “thought long and hard” about the moral obligation of letting people move as they please if they cause no trouble. But he rejects the utopian, libertarian doctrine that migration is not the problem – borders, and the states they delineate, are. Fences are unavoidable, so the issue comes down to damage-limitation. If you favor free trade in goods and services, and free movement of capital, you must favor the same in labor; the problems arise when these components slip out of formation, as the Europeans have discovered.
Though his perspective is American, his Bengali ethnicity accords him some sympathy for the immigrant experience. His comparisons of policies globally are very interesting, but as a pragmatist he never drives ideas to their logical ends. We are entering an apocalyptic new age of mass migrations, with tidal waves of desperate humans sweeping across oceans and continents. All the “desirable” countries face the onslaught but seem to craft vastly different answers. RS decorously avoids discussing the famous “Wall” – but as the Chinese could tell us, walls don’t work; wall-ism is a symptom of weakness and fear in declining civilizations.
RS doesn’t mention climate change – though Bangla Desh will soon be under water – or that the true problem is crazy overpopulation. But Europe cannot be expected to take in one billion Nigerians, nor can the US absorb entire peoples of failed states. He does see that a “forward strategy” is the key: fix and develop broken countries. Offshoring work (“virtual immigration”) is one way, but he also discusses “charter-cities” – new megacities a la Shenzhen designed by international experts to absorb the overflow. He’s toying here with something more fundamental: effectively, recolonization. I.e., successful civilizations create a demographic bow-wave in front of them; like the Romans, they must advance, slowly making citizens of “the barbarians.” Bicycle-like, the empire falls when it stops moving. Already, Europe is facing the consequences of ending the Reconquista at the sea, as Rome did at the Rhein-Donau line and China did at the Wall. From the stop-point, the wave is soon reflected back, out of control.
States able to provide order, rule of law, and development should stop apologizing and yielding the field to local thugs. Go with what works. As RS clearly sees, it is far better to make, say, Syria livable than try to accept its entire population in Chicago and Berlin – or to have them subsist for generations in camps.
RS’s domestic solutions are “about compromise.” Obviously, we need to favor those who can support themselves, regularize those already settled, and advance the lower-skilled out of their poverty trap. Salam likes the Canadian point-based system, but having gone through it, I don’t think bureaucrats should pick winners and losers for the economy; the market can do that much better, and even rich countries need lettuce-pickers as well as physicists. The Canadian system surely beats the family-weighted U.S. one, but in practice I doubt there’s a lot of difference in outcomes.
Another insight: RS sees that US immigration laws are designed to be broken so as to provide cheap, defenseless labor. Few natives know that legal immigration is a costly, drawn-out, Kafka-esque process that is open to very, very few. “They should come legally” are cheap words. (But paradoxically, this broken system with its “work-or-die” result works far better than Europe’s “Let’s take in millions of moochers and malcontents and put them all on relief for eternity.”)
Salam has also spotted a little recognized, but key phenomenon. In thermodynamic terms, migration is an attempt to exploit a steep gradient in prosperity-levels, but that search for equilibrium goes both ways. As he says, the already rich should consider emigrating to where their fixed income buys the most. (Within Europe this has long been common; also, US retirees abroad may find lower prices, better climates, nicer people, and they escape the US medical-industrial kleptocracy). But this principle of counter-migration can be extended much further. Rich countries quickly develop “flab” – non-productive, burdensome, or even dangerous segments. For them, comparative advantage lies in poor countries. Contracting, say, India to house our prisoners would cost maybe a tenth of their upkeep here (and they’d probably be better off). Same for high-cost patients and assisted-care recipients. In return we’d import the young, hungry, striving hard workers our economy needs. Think about it.
At home, seeking to avoid creating a permanent migrant underclass, RS blunders badly by arguing for big subsidies to poor families. Incentivizing childbirth among the inept is absolutely the last thing needed to fight inequality. The opposite would work, but there again: the solutions that could actually work are politically impossible, whereas those that are possible merely make things worse in the long run.
RS correctly flags birthright citizenship as an anachronism, but how to replace it? No European-style ethnicism, please. Some of us think modern citizenship should move in the direction of voluntary association: agree to the burdens, earn the bennies. Which leads to another issue: Nowhere does RS say that American citizenship should FIRST require true, informed allegiance to the Republic. The Europeans have a similar problem: how to define Western values? (But we know it when we don’t see them.)
Perhaps a tougher citizenship test, longer probation, and a term of public or military service would work? Oops, most natives would fail.
It remains a mystery how RS reconciles his “pro-imm” ideas with supposedly being a Republican strategist. Maybe that’s why he skirts politics. Given his backlash-warnings, he’s well aware that the issue is tailor-made for demagogues and political pyromaniacs, but he does not acknowledge that the two political gangs that take turns destroying the country have NO interest in resolving the issue: Keep the rabble roused, the system broken, and the checks coming. Remember the gang-of-eight who tried to do the right thing? They were slapped down when they threatened the party’s bread-and-butter. How do we address this? Would that be Volume II, Reyhan?

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Pseudo D

Multi-?

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2018

Verified Purchase

There have been many important books on immigration. Back in the 90s there was Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow,
an Englishman who was with National Review and Forbes at the time and started VDARE magazine to look at the
national question. (Christopher Hitchens noted on Firing Line that you don't really become an English-American,
it's not offensive, just intriguing to him). Pat Buchanan had several, including State of Emergency. Perhaps the most
consequential of all was Ann Coulter's !Adios America! I believe that without Coulter's book, President Trump never
could have given the opening minutes of his announcement speech on June 16 of 2015.

Reihan Salam's book is of a different sort, and I identified with it for different reasons. In the opening pages he talks
about being of Bengal (Bangladesh) heritage, and being expected to know more about Islamic terrorism. He mostly
had only positive experiences with stereotypes and little racism, although his parents did in Brooklyn. In my case,
with Filipino and French-Canadian background I didn't have a lot of other ethnic kids around, so besides being close
to my family and religion I mostly just identified with my peers and the culture of the local rural area.

At the end Salam talks about how people need to cross over to meet the other political tribe. So while the title
talks about being opposed to open borders, the book actually argues for amnesty. He understands why this
causes skepticism after what happened after the 80s amnesty and the effects of globalization and over the
past few decades. But besides amnesty he argues for points to look at the merits of the immigrants, and child
tax credits to look at the kids of the next generation which needs to have the hope of mobility and opportunity
beyond the jobs of the first generation. The book looks at a lot of the complexities from a fair perspective. For
instance, bringing in low skilled immigrants to take the jobs may make them better off than in their former countries,
but somebody still has to be at the bottom of the ladder here. Countries that are more welcoming of guest workers
don't allow them to remain permanently, etc. Many seem to realize that the overwhelming immigration and difficulty
of assimilation is causing backlash, but they just want to continue on and crush the former majority culture. Salam
is aware that the Trump era has been polarizing, but he seems to be seizing the moment as an opportunity to speak
these difficult things in a balanced way, because Trump has forced the conversation even if it's been a little rough at
times. There's also discussion of the effects of outsourcing jobs overseas and automation, replacing jobs with robots,
as it relates to trade policy and immigration.

While I found the discussion of economics and education very good, there could have been more on
religion and family influences on culture. Salam names his editor Rich Lowry, his former co-writer
Ross Douthat, David Frum, Yuval Levin and the former colleagues at Slate at the end. Combined
they certainly would have plenty of insights on culture as it relates to religion, family, education
and economic factors influencing the topic of immigration. I used to like Slate back in the late
90s and early 2000s, but in the mid 2000s things got too polarized. Jacob Weisberg's reports on
the 2000 GOP debates were great-Republicans Test Their Metal (Alan Keyes vs. John McCain
on Nine Inch Nails) and Anarchy in the GOP (Gary Bauer vs. Keyes on Rage Against the Machine).
An exception was always Camille Paglia (actually she was Salon) who was various aspects of left
but in weird ways.

The term unauthorized for illegal is still a euphemism, but somewhat less awkward than undocumented,
I suppose.

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Christopher L. Park

Best book on an important, polarizing topic

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018

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Anyone familiar with Reihan Salam's writings knows his unusual ability to sketch a practical, thoughtful vision solving difficult, polarizing problems of public policy. This book is his latest application of that incisive perspective on the world. This topic is so emotionally charged but too important to leave to less thoughtful voices.

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NPS

Does he really mean it?

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2018

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It is a well researched book with many references.

I am not sure the author fully debunks some of the leftist views. He covers immigration policies of many coutries and I find this useful.

It is interesting to see that people come up with ideas such as: unskilled immigrants are useful because they elevate the status of native low skilled workers.

What they imply is that American low skilled workers will be managers of foreign low skilled workers. From experience, I see newly arrived workers, branch out on their own within a couple of years to open their own businesses; gardening shops, hairdressing, cantinas etc.

The author suggests that the focus of immigration policy needs to change away from bloodlines to a system that helps the US cover its skills deficit, whether highly skilled or low skilled. It needs to be a Controlled process. Another debate should be whehter illegal arrivals should be given a path to citizenship or a legal residency status because the former creates a huge moral hazard.

Another question about the US multi-racial society is whether it should be mono-cultural. Culture is the gel that keeps the nation togehter.

The author points out the Right's hypocricy because they resist verification of their employees' status.

I enjoyed the book and the author provided a comprehensive description of where we are a society and plenty of food for thought.

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M Clark

A conservative's proposals on immigration to start possible bipartisan discussions

Reviewed in Germany on January 23, 2019

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Salam is a so-called "reform conservative" who, in this book takes a look at immigration. By saying that he is the son of immigrants, he seems to feel particularly entitled to propose limits on immigrants to the USA. That said, he manages to lay out a conservative proposal on immigration reform that should be an acceptable start for a bipartisan discussion.

Having just finished Paul Collier's book on immigration ("Exodus"), I found the Salam book to be rather shallow. In contrast to Collier who takes an even-handed approach to the subject citing in detail studies from all sides of the issue, Salam's quotes seem to be mostly quotes from opinion articles in conservative journals. He also seems to have selected the studies he looked at based upon which ones agreed best with his own opinion. In the end, much of the book felt like a collection of opinions more suitable to a short essay in one of his favorite journals. For that reason, I found the book disappointing. It was redeemed by its sincere appeal for finding a bipartisan solution to the problem.

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