Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, and this is another exciting edition of the Remnant Podcast.

Last week's podcast is brought to you by Podium. I better way to do reviews of businesses that you deal with.

I'll talk about more about that later. As many of you know, I am an avid listener of National Reviews, lesser but still quite good podcast the editors.

And I will say just on the record, yes I'm throwing shade. One of the things I cannot stand about the editors, which again is a perfectly good niche podcast, is the way rich lowery all praise be upon him.

Introduces the regular panel and I for one will not get into a forced stage whisper to say that today we have the effervescent Ryan Salam.

Actually the one thing that really drives me crazy is when he says the notorious M.B.D.

I don't get it anyway we can go off on that in a little bit. But anyway we have today we have Ryan Salam, my colleague the executive editor at National Review.

Indeed indeed. And the author of Melting Pot or Civil War, a new book about immigration. And as I was telling you off air this morning, I listened to most of the podcast that you did with Ezra Klein.

And I thought it was really interesting and really good. And it was actually the first of his podcast I listened to so I might listen to it more. But the one thing he didn't do, which I think is a violation of the rules of our guild is ask you, what is your book about?

What is your book about?

My book came from this starting point of gosh, I know some people who are really hopped up about immigration. They want to restrict immigration. They want to limit it. They feel like the system is out of control. It's chaotic. It's crazy.

Then I know a lot of other folks, many of whom are folks like me of recent immigrant origin, my parents are immigrants themselves who come at it from a totally different vantage point. They think of it as being compassionate. Let's be open. This is such a part of America's heritage, part of what makes us great.

And I wanted to say to the folks in that latter camp, I understand where you're coming from. I hear you, I identify with you. And I believe that you need to be a bit more hard headed and realistic.

To the folks in the former camp, this is my world. I have been part of the conservative world, pretty much my whole adult life. And I wanted to say to them, look, I understand wanting a controlled managed system that absolutely makes sense. But you really need to come at this with some compassion. And you need to come at this from the spirit of wanting to knit the country together, not in a way that seems incredibly divisive and negative.

So I wanted to speak to both of those audiences at once. And as you know, speaking to two different groups that are really at loggerheads is pretty challenging.

So for years, when people asked me what my preferred immigration policy was, my standard pad answer was to have one. Right. I personally, you know, I've always been, my first job in Washington was for Ben Wattenberg, who was a, he wasn't quite, I mean, we'll get to the phrase open borders, which I think has some problems to it.

But he was a, it's funny back then, he called himself an immigration hawk, which meant he was pro immigration today immigration hawk means the reverse. But he was a very raw, raw immigration far more than I was. But, you know, I was, I did a lot of his demography and, and statistics stuff. And I was really drenched in that thing.

And then when I came to NR, I was a real outlier because NR was always more restrictionist than I was. And so I'm actually, I'm kind of agnostic about this. My point about having an immigration policy is that the reason, one of the reasons why everything so screwed up on the topic of immigration is that the government elites, the parties, whatever they argue over what immigration policy should be.

But really what there has been for the last 25 years is sort of a bipartisan consensus to ignore the actual reality of how immigration works. If you, personally, if you want to say you have a million people a year, I'm fine with that. But then it's got to be a million, can't be a million five, a can't be two million, whatever.

And I think that a lot of the populist backlash that we've got now is precisely because so many people feel likely relied to about all of this.

Yes, this is something that's really striking when you look at the bipartisan policy centers polling, for example, when you look at a lot of center's groups, what they find is that the concern, the underlying anxiety is the sense the system is not really a system to your point. And also that it's not working in the national interest.

And the feeling that, hey, no one feels obligated to tell a coherent compelling story about why it is. Instead you get this weird moralistic mishmash, you get a series of arguments that really are arguments for open borders to justify a policy that isn't open borders.

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