Michael Brendan Dougherty: How Will Immigrants Reshape America?

Reason Podcasts

How do immigrants change American culture? Just asking questions. While the economy ranks as voters' top concern as of a Wednesday Gallup poll, immigration remains "extremely" or "very" important to 72 percent of registered U.S. voters. As with most issues, there's a large partisan divide, with 63 percent of Republicans responding that immigration is an "extremely" important election year issue, and only 23 percent of Democrats answering the same. Gallup found this summer that more than 55 percent of Americans believed immigration should be decreased, a number higher than it's been for more than 20 years. Although there, too, there's a large partisan divide. In the long view, Gallup finds a fairly stable consensus that immigration is a good thing for the country today, with 68 percent of respondents answering as such in the summer of 2023. This is all in the context of Border Patrol reporting 2.7 million border encounters so far in fiscal year 2024. So what we see is a picture of an American electorate that likes immigration in theory but is increasingly concerned about it in practice. Today's guest predicted that immigration would become the "defining issue of the 21st century" in an article published in an August 2015 opinion piece for The Week, where he wrote that, "just as the building of trade routes and maintenance of empires defined the mercantile age, then the construction of a political economy (capitalist or socialist) became the major problem of the industrial age, the mass movement of people may be the defining issue of whatever we're calling the information age." Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer for National Review, the William F. Buckley Senior Scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and a critic of the kind of libertarian unfettered movement of peaceful people across borders that I favor. We begin by asking why the digital world has brought the issue of immigration to the fore. Chapters: 00:00 Coming up… 00:32 Introduction 03:06 How the information age makes immigration more a pressing issue 07:19 What's Dougherty's preferred system? 15:56 Immigration's effects on native political power 21:20 The history of American nativism is largely Anti-Catholic 31:59 The doctrine of first effective settlement 39:55 Assimilating into a toxic education environment 47:44 Debating "the new economic case against immigration" 56:31 A low-trust society? 59:31 Immigrants upward mobility 01:12:02 Does immigration create a caste system? 01:19:00 Zach's ideal system 01:27:18 What is a question more people should be asking? Photo credit: Qian Weizhong/VCG/Newscom