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On The Gist, Democrats might actually be winning. Supporters of open immigration policy—and immigrants themselves—often have a rosy view of what awaits them in the United States. National Review executive editor (and Slate alumnus) Reihan Salam says high costs of living can put immigrants in debt rather than on a path to the middle class. “When we’re totally sentimental about this, we miss some of those struggles, and those struggles are inconvenient. People don’t want to hear about them.” Salam’s book is Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. In the Spiel, Omarosa again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On The Gist, Democrats might actually be winning. Supporters of open immigration policy—and immigrants themselves—often have a rosy view of what awaits them in the United States. National Review executive editor (and Slate alumnus) Reihan Salam says high costs of living can put immigrants in debt rather than on a path to the middle class. “When we’re totally sentimental about this, we miss some of those struggles, and those struggles are inconvenient. People don’t want to hear about them.” Salam’s book is Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. In the Spiel, Omarosa again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, Reihan Salam tries to do something difficult: build a pro-immigrant case for a more restrictive immigration system. This is an argument, interestingly, that’s as much about inequality as it is about immigration. “Diversity is not the problem,” Salam writes. “What’s uniquely pernicious is extreme between-group inequality.” Salam, the executive editor of the National Review, thus makes a two-sided case: He argues that a socially sustainable immigration system is one where America is more deeply committed to equality, which means both focusing on higher-skilled immigrants who need less support and radically raising the amount of support we’re willing to give immigrants who do need it. And that compromise, he argues, should be paired with a more serious American effort to improve the economic conditions of the places immigrants travel here from. Is this a synthesis that makes sense? Does it really address the cleavages preventing us from moving forward on immigration? And what are the fundamental values that we should base our immigration system on anyway? That’s what Reihan and I discuss in this episode. Recommended books: The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants Are Changing American Life by Tomas Jimenez Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity by Tomas Jimenez Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity by Samuel Huntington Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Are we headed for a tribal fracture to the degree of another civil war? Are borders and enforced immigration laws racist? Reihan Salam discusses the complicated discourse around immigration, and why uncontrolled immigration is bad for everyone. His new book is, "Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders." He is the executive editor of National Review. "Our politics right now feels like the Four Loko-ization of ideas, rather than actually taking ideas in their rich, complicated context," Salam said.