You might expect conservative writer Reihan Salam, 38, to support easy immigration. First, he’s the son of immigrants. His family came from Bangladesh, and he grew up speaking Bengali at home in Brooklyn, N.Y. Second, he’s executive editor of the conservative magazine National Review. Free-market conservatives—as opposed to Trumpian nationalist conservatives—tend to believe that the ability of people to cross international borders is good for economic growth and human liberty.
In reality, Salam has serious reservations about open borders. He has sympathy for immigrants, but not always for how they arrived. His new book, Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, points the way toward compromise on an issue that’s likely to become even more hotly contentious in the years to come.
Salam’s book is more nuanced than its heated title suggests. He doesn’t side with President Donald Trump, who Salam says “built his political career on demonizing immigrants.” But neither does he agree with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, whom he accuses of obscuring real problems with lofty rhetoric, such as in his 2014 executive order for deportation relief: “Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger.”
The risk, Salam says, is that admitting lots more people into the U.S., without special care, will create a permanent underclass of people who are isolated from society’s mainstream, stuck in low-wage occupations, and in some cases dependent on welfare for survival.
The immigrants themselves may accept all that because they’re still better off than they would have been back home. But their children may resent being treated as second-class citizens. What’s more, Salam says, open borders tend to stir resentment from taxpayers and from the segment of native-born Americans who compete with them for work. That’s the “civil war” in his title.
The better outcome, he says, is a 21st version of the melting pot. He quotes from a 1908 play, The Melting Pot: “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!” Less poetically, Salam makes the same point about fusing many peoples into one: “We should admit immigrants only if we are fully committed to their integration and assimilation.”
