This week on The Editors, Rich interviews Reihan about his new book, Melting Pot or Civil War?.
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I dispute the assertion that the abandonment of the melting-pot paradigm in favor of multiculturalism is evidence that people “gave up.”
No one gave up. What happened is that the Left’s preferred methodology for acquiring power is to stir up anger among the aggrieved and then promise redress of those grievances when they’re in power.
The melting pot creates insufficient victims. Assimilated immigrants don’t have grievances that are different from the general population.
Enter multiculturalism, which is the practice of emphasizing differences, magnifying grievances, exacerbating what difficulties may remain between the assimilated and the unassimilated, and setting groups against each other based on immutable characteristics.
Americans are generally OK with including different-skinned people and different ethnicities in our definition of “us.” We have to be reminded that the left-wing screaming about microaggressions is a tactic, not a reaction to actual pain.
Until you recognize that agenda you can’t dismantle it.
I didn’t hear a single word explaining how a new immigration reform would not repeat the betrayals of previous efforts.
Did like the admission that McCain-Kennedy reflected a balance of interests of “donors”, with no natural constituency among voters.
Excellent analysis
Wow, Reihan’s discovered the importance of capital deepening and worker to capital ratios. He’d better watch out for the elite Inquisition. Can’t let such damaging and scary ideas spread.
Conservatives are the ones who should be wise enough to recognize that, sometimes, the best policy is to do nothing.
Currently, illegals are occupying those limited economic niches where their lack of documentation is not a problem. Regularize those illegals and give them documentation, and you permit them to move out of those economic niches and into the rest of the economy, thereby freeing up their original niches — jobs — for another wave of illegal workers.
In other words, even an honest, well-designed, and well-intentioned immigration reform bill, that is not a scam like the Gang of Eight bill (as Salam tells us), could have a disastrous affect.