https://www.thefp.com/p/immigration-is-a-mess-heres-how-to
In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction. Having closely followed how countries around the world had handled, and more often mishandled, immigration, I laid out a road map for Making Immigration Great Again. Among other things, I called for rebalancing immigrant admissions toward the young and skilled; rejecting identitarian ideologies that undermined immigrant assimilation and sowed racial resentment; embracing labor-saving automation as an imperfect substitute for low-wage migrant labor; and investing in low-income youth.
If this sounds like a boringly centrist Davos Man manifesto, I don’t disagree.
Keep in mind, though, that I wrote the book in the thick of the Donald Trump–era immigration wars, when the rhetorical temperature was high and public opinion was as pro-immigration as it had ever been. Against a backdrop of family separations, attempted Muslim bans, and anxious Dreamers, it felt taboo to even suggest that Steve Bannon and friends might be half-right about the wisdom of opening our borders, especially in my small, hyper-educated, blue state–parody world.
As I was labeled a fascist by anonymous trolls, and my arguments were called “completely off the rails,” a vocal minority on the right was growing ever more extreme in its opposition to immigration. By making a moderate case, my arguments weren’t restrictionist enough for the hardcore restrictionists or cosmopolitan enough to satisfy enlightened opinion.
But I came by my position honestly. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. They were part of a larger wave of newcomers that helped revitalize New York and other cities that had fallen on hard times. I had seen all that immigration can do to enrich urban neighborhoods up close. Yet I also recognized that mass immigration wasn’t a free lunch, and that open borders romantics were inviting a backlash that risked slamming our borders shut for a generation.
By offering a middle course, my hope was that some number of moderates would read my book and be convinced that the reaction to Trump’s shock-and-awe restrictionism must not be to heedlessly dismantle immigration enforcement altogether.
Instead, a few years later, the Biden administration came in and did just about everything I warned against, torching Democrats’ credibility on the most important issue facing the country.
