We often hear about “movies that are better than the book,” but rarely of “book reviews that are better than the book.” Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh has just published one such book review. Here’s Nowrasteh on Reihan Salam’s Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders:
The gap in quality between the book described by reviewers above and the actual book Melting Pot or Civil War? is wider than in any other book that I can remember reading. Descriptions of “calm” and “reasonable” are the most perplexing. True, he appeals to Americans “who are willing to meet others halfway” to solve the problems that he’s identified. On the other hand, he also argues that we need to follow his policy recommendations or face a racialized civil war. That is the very opposite of a “calm” or “reasonable” argument. A better description would be “hysterical” or “paranoid.”
Hysteria and paranoia aside, what’s wrong with the book? Salam engages in extreme reverse engineering, where even the most favorable facts about immigration somehow become extra reasons to oppose it:
For example, Salam disagrees with himself over whether the goal of immigration policy should be to increase wages and employment for low-skilled immigrants and their descendants, or per capita productivity growth in small sectors of the economy. He rightly claims that immigration barely affects wages in the United States, but then argues that a major benefit of stopping low-skilled immigration is higher wages for native-born and immigrant dropouts. Salam correctly points out that low-skilled immigrants today compete mostly against other low-skilled immigrants, so he wants to help low-skilled immigrants here by stopping more from immigrating in the first place.
Much of the book, moreover, is simply odd:
Forgetting everything that he wrote about labor markets, Salam praises a science fiction-esque scenario of “virtual immigration” where workers would work remotely by operating robots in the United States from their home countries — even though the labor market effects of that would at best be economically identical to allowing them to immigrate and work here. Salam argues that “virtual immigration will do more good than harm for U.S. workers, provided we have the right safeguards in place [emphasis added].” Salam does not explain what those safeguards are, how they would prevent competition in labor markets, and why the government couldn’t just apply those same safeguards to prevent labor market competition between low-skilled immigrants and low-skilled natives.
And:
Salam mentions the enormous economic cost to those foreigners who would be locked out of the United States under his preferred immigration policy. He proposes a package of U.S. foreign aid to bribe foreign governments to establish charter cities so that low-skilled immigrants can go there instead of the United States. Oddly, he predicts those charter cities will become “fonts of entrepreneurship and public policy solutions” and that excellent new ideas developed there will enrich America. If low-skilled immigrants are entrepreneurs who will create fantastic new ideas in these charter cities that will eventually make it to America, why not just let them come here in the first place? Why spill so much ink supporting a utopian scheme of charter cities as a solution to global poverty when immigration is a tried and true method?
You might think the “civil war” stuff is just hyperbole on the book cover, but no:
To his credit, Salam does admit that there is no private political violence in American today that is comparable to the chaos before the Civil War, but that “it is hard to shake the feeling that our luck might soon run out.” Civil war is a deadly serious topic and perhaps this reviewer is being too nitpicky, but I require more than Salam’s difficultly in “shaking a feeling” to take his worry seriously. He should have done more to show that the choice is really between his “melting pot” or a “civil war.”
Better yet, Salam should have proposed a bet. I say that America – indeed, the entire First World – is not only too rich, but too electronically sedated, to physically fight about much of anything. The risk of civil war in the First World is small enough to make even the trivial danger of terrorism look big by comparison.
If you think me naive, come take my money.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Mar 25 2019 at 3:34pm
Alex Nowrasteh should’ve titled his review, “Melting Pot or Broken Kettle,” because Salam’s book seems to make liberal use of kettle logic. The civil war panic just reaffirms the old adage that every generation thinks it’s the last.
E. Harding
Mar 25 2019 at 9:26pm
The country won’t become diverse enough to have an actual civil war for at least half a century. But it’s a reasonable scenario after that half century.
Mark Z
Mar 26 2019 at 5:00am
Unless something happens to cause the standard of living to utterly collapse, far worse than the Great Depression even, I think a civil war can be regarded as basically an impossibility. There’s a reason civil wars don’t happen in wealthy countries anymore. People are very comfortable, and a civil war would mean giving up an (by historical standards) extremely nice life for violence and privation. Not many people are going to make that trade off because of cultural anxiety over Spanish speaking people moving into their neighborhood.
An unprecedented economic collapse is, imo, an absolute prerequisite to a civil war. And I don’t just mean a ‘garden variety’ depression. A 21st century depression is still positively luxurious compared to the best of times even a few decades ago. People just aren’t going to give up the amenities of modern life for foxholes over cultural angst.
E. Harding
Mar 26 2019 at 8:42am
“An unprecedented economic collapse is, imo, an absolute prerequisite to a civil war. ”
Historically, it hasn’t been. Look at Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, 1860 USA, etc.
Mark Z
Mar 26 2019 at 11:36am
I mean for the modern US. That there’s no way civil war will break out without economic collapse. All of the countries you mention are poor countries where the people have much less to lose.
Niko Davor
Mar 26 2019 at 4:28am
I politely submit a request to hear the quick Caplan review or response to the immigration related book, Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufmann. Or I’d love to see a Caplan Kaufmann debate.
Mark
Mar 26 2019 at 9:42am
Arguably, the best natural experiment we have on immigration restriction is Chinese Exclusion from the 1880s. Because the ban on immigration was near-total, the effect size would be large and more likely to swamp confounds. Moreover, because other nationalities continued to enjoy open borders, one can compare how Chinese-Americans fared compared to other immigrant groups.
The impacts are not pretty. Racial violence and riots against Chinese-Americans increased after the ban. Chinese-Americans became less well-integrated into American society, instead hunkering down into a few West Coast ghettos. Because of their social isolation and the gender imbalance created by prioritizing workers (who slew male) over families, their fertility plunged and according to the Census Bureau, the Chinese-American population declined by over 40% over the next few decades, a level typically associated with genocide. I don’t know if their wages went up or not, but even if they did, surely it was not worth the downsides. Meanwhile, other immigrant groups who continued to enjoy open borders continued to grow and gradually assimilate into American society.
People who think restrictions on immigration somehow benefit recent immigrants or encourage assimilation need to look at history.
Weir
Mar 27 2019 at 9:54pm
Alex puts quotation marks around the words “rise to the level of respectable people saying they want their political rivals dead” and attributes those words to Reihan. Is that a real quote? I ask because the first chapter of Reihan’s book is online, so I know that Reihan wrote these words:
“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.”
So did Alex get it wrong? He’s already called Reihan “hysterical” and “paranoid” right up front. It’s not as if Alex is trying to persuade his readers to see him as fair-minded or open to engaging with other people’s arguments. Aristotle talked about winning people’s trust and suggesting an ethos of thoughtfulness, but Alex has gone the opposite way, and made it clear up front that, as far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing worth taking on board or thinking about.
And yet when I read Reihan’s actual words, it seems like Alex is being unfair. There clearly is a lot of “metaphorical destruction” (Reihan’s words) in American discourse, and Alex himself is doing a bit of a John Oliver impersonation in this very review, like every TV comedian or pundit who “destroys Trump” in all those clips on YouTube.
Rachel Morrow is respectable, but a fan of hers called James Hodgkinson is not respectable. She didn’t open fire on a baseball field of Republicans, but he did. And so the trivial danger of terrorism is made worse by self-righteousness per se, even when that self-righteousness stops a long way short of saying that the evil people on the other team need to be murdered.
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