There’s a common refrain among American immigration skeptics—the most dogmatic ones, at any rate—that liberalism requires a taste for liberty, refined through practice and embedded within social mores and institutions. Our economy, our legal system, our constitutional heritage presuppose a particular kind of culture that is more or less consistent with Anglo-Protestant values, and for this reason open borders constitutes something like collective suicide: As demographics change and norms change with them, the consensus underpinning our politics gradually evaporates, leaving behind a factious anti-nation in which compromise is impractical and self-government impossible—or so some restrictionists contend.

But not Reihan Salam, whose Melting Pot or Civil War? makes a much more moderate argument than its bellicose title might suggest. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Salam eschews cultural determinism for dialectical materialism, presenting uncontrolled migration as a class problem more than an identity crisis. This doesn’t mean Melting Pot ignores culture—on the contrary, it goes to great lengths to show how porous borders undermine civic cohesion—but the book is always careful to attribute such breakdown to labor markets and mismatched skills, economic forces that would operate regardless of newcomers’ social values. Salam can therefore appeal to liberals who are worried about the return of jus sanguinis while at the same time courting conservatives worried about the fact that some 14 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign born. To the extent there’s a reactionary current here, it’s subtle and attenuate, the voltage uncharacteristically low for what in the Trump era has become a political third rail.  

This approach—restrictionism sans racism—is tactically savvy and morally laudable. But it also leaves one rather perplexed about the book’s title: How, exactly, are the economic problems Salam outlines supposed to precipitate a civil war, or anything close? Partisanship, sure; racial tensions, definitely. But a crisis as destructive and consequential as the deadliest conflict in American history? Melting Pot makes scant attempt to justify that comparison, despite the title’s obvious evocations, which suggests Salam has something else in mind when he warns of an impending crack-up.

Indeed, whereas many restrictionists see immigration as a threat to the social order, undermining the civic fabric on which it depends, Melting Pot seems to see immigration as the key to that order’s survival, a crystallization of its inner logic. And that means that by critiquing immigration Salam is implicitly critiquing liberalism itself. He’s not just making the case against open borders, in other words; he’s also making the case against the kind of society in which open borders make sense.

The Economic Worry

Excavating that argument, though, will require some work, so let’s begin with the obvious: What does Salam claim to be claiming?

Roughly this: By creating a large and ethnically homogenous underclass of low-skilled laborers, our current immigration regime will render liberal democratic politics impossible. While in the past America has absorbed such newcomers with relative ease, offshoring and automation have systematically reduced the need for cheap manpower, all but ensuring that low-skilled immigrants remain stuck at the income ladder’s bottommost rungs. “There is a widespread belief that immigrants and their offspring have poverty-defying superpowers that natives do not,” Salam acknowledges—but the reality is that “rags-to-riches stories delight and inspire us precisely because they are so rare.” Most immigrants will not start billion-dollar tech companies or become high-school valedictorians, and those who do typically come from privileged backgrounds, meaning they do not face a skills deficit upon arrival. For everyone else, it is “much harder . . . to climb out of poverty.”

And in an era of increasing geographic segregation, poverty undermines immigrants’ ability to assimilate, especially when their ranks are continuously replenished by new arrivals from the old country. Under these conditions, an immigrant community “has a much better shot at remaining separate and distinct,” which in turn generates “more in-group solidarity” and ethnic cohesion. Ghettoized from mainstream American culture, surrounded by people who overwhelmingly look and speak like them, low-skilled immigrants will begin to think (and vote) as an organized racial block, distrustful of native whites who always seem to come out ahead. That dynamic tends to manifest most strongly among second-generation immigrants:

Native whites, on the other hand, will grow suspicious and resentful of their non-native counterparts—what Salam calls “the backlash paradox”—especially as they watch social resources being diverted to the new arrivals. Class politics will become color politics; compromise will become impossible. And America will become so polarized that it will become effectively ungovernable.

The only way to avert this crisis, Salam says, is by reducing low-skilled immigration—including legal low-skilled immigration—until those at the bottom are successfully assimilated into the American mainstream. Thus the last part of the book is spent outlining a compromise that would make such reductions politically palatable: Institute a skills-based system, but grant amnesty to people already here; tighten border enforcement, but increase foreign aid to the developing world; implement E-verify, but don’t deport DACA recipients.

These are all serious ideas, worth taking seriously. Yet they are unlikely to persuade the progressive-libertarian coalition agitating for higher immigration levels, in part because Salam never succeeds in showing how the economic forces he’s talking about could produce divisions remotely on par with the Vietnam era, let alone the 1860s. To be sure, his argument establishes that immigration is a problem: It will entrench inequality, exacerbate racism, and engender partisan gridlock. But would it do these things enough to spark widespread violence or a constitutional crisis? Probably not—and in any case Salam doesn’t sketch out a plausible pathway for how such calamities might transpire.

As a result, liberals and libertarians are likely to come away from Melting Pot thinking of immigration as a technical problem rather than an existential one: “Yes, immigration is deepening polarization and making it harder to get things done. No, we aren’t going to triple GDP growth or boost real wages anytime soon. But with the right mix of redistribution and political tinkering, surely we can take the edge off.” Furthermore, most of those liberals and libertarians have deep moral reasons for supporting immigration: To liberals, it’s about reducing global inequality and making up for colonialism, while to libertarians, it’s about protecting free movement and free markets from state encroachment. The side-effects must be reckoned with, no doubt, as Salam’s interlocutors will happily concede. But they hardly amount to a knock-down case for restrictionism, and they certainly do not amount to a civil war or anything close.

With its maudlin title, then, Melting Pot appears to have indulged in precisely the same sort of fear-mongering Salam spends so much time warning us against—or rather that’s what it would be doing, if the book were making only an economic argument.

In fact, it’s making just the opposite.

The Societal Worry

Close readers of Melting Pot will notice that it contains a separate, non-economic register that comes across in passages such as the following:

Later, Salam asks what it means for a baby to be “ours:”

And finally, he notes that our immigration-induced underclass has a profoundly “undemocratic” character, with one group always coming out on bottom no matter what its members do.

In essence, these passages offer a rebuke of the economism that drives so much of the crusade for open borders—and, at some points, Salam’s crusade against them too. The logic is a bit opaque, but here’s what I take to be the overall argument:

Since nearly all second-generation immigrants are American citizens, the way they are treated therefore reflects citizenship’s value, or lack of value, in the United States. If we view them as “permanent strangers to whom we have no real obligation,” the thinking goes, that is eventually how we will view ourselves too: a community of unfamiliars in which everyone is unimportant to everyone else, where concourse and camaraderie are optional so long as some very basic needs are being met.

This social landscape sounds impoverished and more than a little dystopian. But it’s virtually indistinguishable from the one that has emerged in modern liberal democracies: atomized, faceless agents pursuing their own self-interest, bargaining and bartering with each other without any sense of shared identity or common purpose. And it’s ratified by a discourse that understands society as a social “contract,” a transaction that serves all persons and parties, if only very minimally. In opposing open borders, then, Salam is really opposing the liberal order itself—or at least, he’s opposing the technocratic liberalism we in the West have ended up with, the sort that shunts aside civic solidarity in in the name of social management.

Hence the title. Although Salam claims “civil war” refers to ethno-racial polarization—a comparison which, for obvious reasons, will strike many as overwrought—what it really describes is this liberalism’s intrinsically antagonistic character. No common identity means no common good—and no common good means each individual effectively becomes a sovereign nation unto himself, competing for resources and freedoms. There can be alliances between nations, of course, just as there can be battles and armistices. But there cannot be friendships or marriages or loves, just rational agents assessing potential allies—and potential threats.

The transactional logic of immigration thus reifies the transactional logic of modernity, plunging citizens into a kind of megalateral civil war with one another. Melting Pot, to be clear, never puts it in quite those terms; the book makes a reactionary argument with decidedly non-reactionary prose, and sometimes grows too wonkish for my taste. But Salam is still worth reading—and recommending—because in the end he understands that our immigration debate is not about facts and figures so much as culture and character, the way human beings relate to one another and ultimately themselves. If Melting Pot can impart that truth to even a tenth of our political class, it will have been a success.