“Be open to surprises and possibilities,” conservative commentator says in wide-ranging discussion
“What I find interesting is, how are these stories [of immigrants] being incorporated into a larger American story?” political commentator Reihan Salam said at the March 31 event. “I think that there would be something good and healthy about trying to tell mythic, positive stories about these newcomer populations and what they mean for the American future.” Photo: Chaanakya Seethala
Immigration is a hot-button topic these days. But the influence of immigration and racial and ethnic demographic shifts on U.S. society and politics is complex and just might surprise you.
That was the message of political commentator Reihan Salam, who spoke at a March 31 event hosted by the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education as part of a series called The Future of the American Left and Right. Salam is president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, and author of Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders.
Immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1965, their children, and their grandchildren now comprise one-third of the American population, said Salam, whose parents immigrated to New York City from Bangladesh in 1976.
This very diverse group has been incorporated into not only the working class and middle class, but also the American elite, he said, responding to a question about the nation’s 250th anniversary from moderator Deborah Schildkraut, J95. Schildkraut is a professor of political science and professor at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts.
“What I find interesting is, how are these stories [of immigrants] being incorporated into a larger American story?” Salam said. “I think that there would be something good and healthy about trying to tell mythic, positive stories about these newcomer populations and what they mean for the American future.”
Audience members posed questions to Salam on topics including mass deportations, school choice, and the federal government’s relationship to higher education. Photo: Jack Smart
Yet he often hears other narratives, he said. For example, he referred to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who was born in Uganda to Indian parents. Salam called Mamdani an “extremely impressive politician” and an “incredibly charismatic figure,” despite disagreeing with him on “almost everything.”
“He is someone who from one vantage point would be seen as a triumph of 21st century American pluralism and inclusion,” Salam said. “But the story that really moves him, the story that makes him cry, is the story about the ways in which he felt he and his family members had been mistreated or spoken ill of in the wake of 9/11.”
Salam, who grew up in and lives in New York City, said his own experiences as a Muslim American were quite different. “That’s not to say that my experience was valid and his wasn’t, but it’s interesting that as a wildly successful American politician, that’s the story that is the salient, meaningful one for him,” he said.
While feelings of exclusion or emotional harm may be an authentic part of the paradox of integration, Salam said, he pointed to other aspects of being part of an immigrant community that could be positive, such as the sense of identity, meaning, and purpose that group membership might provide. “Visible ethnicity is not just a disadvantage,” he said. “It can also be an advantage.”
Wide-Ranging Views
The evening’s conversation was expansive, as Salam responded to questions from students and others in the audience about mass deportations, school choice, the federal government’s relationship to higher education, and other topics.
Asked about his thoughts on how fertility rates are affecting demographics, and on Republican support for policies that promote childbearing, he noted that declining fertility rates around the world are affecting immigration to the United States. For example, he said the number of Korean-born immigrants in the United States shrank between 2010 and 2020, which he linked to the low birth rate in South Korea.
Groups that have above-replacement fertility rates might be expected to have greater influence in the future, he said, so “a lot of secular cosmopolitan liberals are actually thinking about fertility as a long-run challenge for their kind of worldview.” While some voices on the right have popularized focusing on the issue, it is not unique to them, he argued.
He also said that Americans’ support of immigrants may be more variable than many people think. According to a recent study, he said, “What people really care about is, will immigration help their team? That is, will the newcomers vote Republican or will they vote Democratic?” If you tell Democrats that a group of immigrants will vote Republican, their support drops, while if you tell Republicans that a group about to be deported would vote Republican, they want to change policies to keep them, he said.
On mass deportations, Salam said the “unauthorized population” is not monolithic, and policies should be specific to different groups, with operations focused on “the least sympathetic population.” But he said a legislative solution feels impossible to reach because of current high levels of distrust.
He also reiterated that public opinion on immigration changes. “There was a lot of support for mass deportation when President Biden was in office,” he said. But given the images that have been seen recently under the Trump administration, he added, “You have large numbers of people who favored mass deportation two years ago who are now opposed to it.”
Although the left is often considered supportive of immigration, in the future, a new left-of-center U.S. administration might restrict immigration, perhaps because of concerns about how AI is threatening white-collar jobs, Salam said. He pointed to New Zealand’s restrictions on immigration under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, a Labour Party leader, as an example of this sort of shift.
“Be open to surprises and possibilities like that,” he said. “Things could wind up looking really, really different” from what you expect of a political party. As in the example of liberals turning against immigration in New Zealand, which he said was due to concerns about housing, people’s commitments can change “pretty quickly in response to some kind of technological or cultural or ideological shock.”
Asked what he thought about the arguments in conservative political commentator Jeremy Carl’s book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, Salam said, “That fundamental idea, that there is such a thing as anti-white discrimination or anti-white bias, seems to me to be obviously true.” That said, he added, “Where do you rank that relative to all of the injustices in the world?”
He acknowledged that white people who claim they have missed out on opportunities due to discrimination might be seen as just making excuses or whining. “But of course, would you make the same argument about me as an aggrieved South Asian man saying the same thing?” he asked.
One questioner asked about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, a 2025 effort by the Trump administration to tie federal funding of universities to requirements aligned with its political priorities. Salam said he thought the prior “implicit compact” in which the federal government makes a large, open-ended investment in higher education was not going well. For example, he argued that subsidized student loans do “an enormous amount of damage to vulnerable people.”
While the Trump administration’s approach has been “pretty chaotic,” he said, “when you look at the larger question of, does this [earlier] compact need to be renewed or rethought? I think the answer is clearly yes.”
