A (3:11)

Likewise. I was just remembering today that we were featured in the same edition of the Spectator magazine, like almost on back to back pages. I don't know if you remember this in like 2019ish. Do you recall this?

B (3:27)

Yeah. Wasn't this around the time that I got into big trouble?

A (3:32)

Yeah, I think it was, yeah. Can you remind me the trouble you got into?

B (3:36)

I had written a piece about Penguin Random House and they had just brought in an elaborate DEI plan so that it wasn't just on race. It was sex and gender identity and class. An educational level, it would have required an incredibly elaborate algorithm. And I made merciless fun of it. And it was already against the law to make fun of DEI initiatives. And it was especially the jokes in the piece that got me into trouble. Unusually, they were actually funny jokes. It's usually the jokes that land flat are the ones that get you into trouble. But this time even funny jokes were not permitted. So it got into a whole affirmative action conversation.

A (4:42)

Right. And then we were both writing about affirmative action, if I recall, in the Spectator magazine. Yeah.

B (4:47)

Yes. And we were both writing about the fact that, for example, even blacks in the United States don't like affirmative action.

A (4:55)

Yeah. And I've noticed in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action, this is now almost three years ago, two and a half years ago, there was surprisingly little protest in America. A part of me was expecting that because affirmative action in college admissions had been such a sacred cow for so long, and I had been very critical of it, that if it were overturned by a conservative court, we'd see protests in the street and, you know, Women's March style uproar. But it was a pretty muted response, relatively speaking, which I think reflected the fact that affirmative action was always a policy for the 1%, for the elite. It didn't actually affect 99% of black 18 year olds. That's a statistic I always love to shock people with. From the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espinheid. Is 99% of African American 18 year olds in any given year completely unaffected by affirmative action policy because they either don't graduate high school, don't go to college, or go to a big state school or a community college that doesn't practice it. So it's always been an elite policy. And so it's sort of hard to get. How do you get 100,000 people into the streets of a big city if the policy only ever affected the top 1%. But anyway, that's not what we're here to discuss. But that, that all came back to me as I was thinking about you and your new book, which is called A Better Life. Is the book out yet or did I read it before it came out?

B (6:36)

The Release date is 10th February in the US and 17th February in the UK.

A (6:44)

Okay. So by the time this episode comes out, it probably will be out hopefully at a bookstore near you or you can get it online. So this is a provocative book. It's a provocative book. It's also a well timed book. You're no stranger to political themes and controversial themes, and I think that's been a real source of strength and creativity for you as a writer of novels. You also stand out to me in that it's rare that I see novels, let's put it this way, conservative novels, insofar as this novel could be characterized that way.

B (7:29)

And you can tell me, insofar as there is such a thing, insofar as.

A (7:33)

There is such a thing. And feel free to disagree with my characterization of that. But it will strike many people as a conservative novel, and that's a rare thing. Like if I go, I have a bookstore two blocks from me, I could probably go through the entire bookstore and struggle to find a single novel that clearly had what seems to me a conservative theme. And why do you think that is? Is it that there aren't conservative writers? Is it that conservatives don't read books? Is it that publishers don't like novels with conservative themes? Is there something about novel writing in general that leans towards a liberal political outlook? What are your thoughts on that?

B (8:16)

Well, I should say, first and foremost, I find the whole phenomenon baffling that fiction writers are so homogeneous and seem to have all the same opinions and the same outlook. And that's obviously, I think it's partly because, unlike in the olden days, writers go to university. And so writers are the product of our current universities, which are all, as we know, dominated by progressive orthodoxy. So that's one thing. The entire publishing industry has become both 90 something percent female and at the same time dominated by progressive ideology. And that would of course include the agents as well as the editors. So these are the people who are controlling what gets published. And they don't like conservative manuscripts. They're, most of those are going to be rejected. So it's impossible to tell, because the publishing industry controls the pipeline, how many people are Writing fiction that could be interpreted to have a conservative slant and they're just not able to get through the gate. So I can't attest to that. I am occasionally contacted by people who have written something that goes against the liberal brain and want help, and I'm not very good at giving it to them. But there are, there's an agent or two out there who specialize in representing the truly oppressed minority in, in the literary world. And that's people who are centrist or right of sin.

A (10:26)

Yeah. I did a great podcast episode late last year, maybe a few months ago, where I had an expert on to talk about the role of sensitivity readers in publishing and sensitivity readers. This is something I didn't even know was a thing. I'm sure you know all about this, but just to remind my audience who can go back and listen to that episode, there are people that essentially rise up based on the status game of social media, sort of nominate themselves, often without any clear expertise, as being sensitivity readers. And their role is to find things that are wrong with an author's manuscript that would offend minorities, offend women, offend sexual minorities, racial minorities, et cetera. And I'm reminded that of something that I think I heard this from now, the late, the recently deceased Scott Adams, who is a cartoonist and political commentator. He said, if you hire a ghost hunter to see if there are ghosts in your house, do you think he's not going to find ghosts? They're going to find ghosts 100% of the time because that's their job. And to a large extent, sensitivity readers, publishers sort of outsource their compliance with cancel culture to sensitivity readers who then come up with something that was wrong in your portrayal. And you know, the whole spirit of. I still grew up in a time where the spirit of art was supposed to be rebellious and norm breaking and challenging and art was supposed to be provocative. And there is something that has happened not just with the publishing world, but with Hollywood, where it's become the opposite in a lot of ways. If you are actually pushing a boundary that makes people very sensitive.

B (12:26)

I have to agree. And yeah, when I was younger, the arts were attractive because they were against the establishment. You know, that's where you could express yourself in a way that is going to piss people off. Right. And that was one of the things you wanted to do. You wanted to be outrageous. It's obviously become much harder than it used to be to be outrageous. But most of all, the arts are now, they're now basically owned by the cultural powers that be and all those parties are left wing and artists seem to have become suck ups, honestly trying to please and outdo each other in how right on they can be, and in all the same direction, taking the same general position on every issue. And it's not artistically fruitful. And I have in some ways found my literary purpose by being one of the only fiction writers out there who is not left wing. And I'm not even especially right wing. I'm not. I started out as a liberal Democrat, like a lot of people in my generation, and I stayed where I was and the entire culture moved, or I should say lurched to the far left. And I didn't change my mind on anything. But I have very little company among novelists. And there's also just a general commercial sense. And I think this is part of the explanation that the people who mostly buy books, especially literary fiction, are women and somewhat older women. And I don't know how well researched this is, but for the most part, you're talking about a group of people who Hughes left and therefore it is considered commercially intelligent to play to the prejudices of that population.

A (15:06)

Right. I talked to a comedian once who said he. He loved the more that culture got woke because it carved out more and more taboos that he could exploit as a comedian and make people laugh against their better judgment. It was actually, perversely a good thing for him. Right.

B (15:30)

I think that I would say the same thing, that I've benefited from this. It means I don't get as many international literary festival invitations as I might have. But that's more time for me and I have more distinction. I stand out. Who needs another writer trooping around in support of the Palestinians? It's like I'm in the field by myself. Which, you know, that suits me.

A (16:10)

Right? Okay, so let's talk about this book. So the first thing I thought of when I started reading the book was this video that, as the kids say, it lives rent free in my head. I think about it pretty frequently whenever the immigration question comes up. I. I don't know if you've seen this video, and I'll link to it maybe in the description, but I think it's in Sweden and they go up to Swedes on the street and say, hey, do you think that Swedish people should house migrants from Syria, given that there's a refugee crisis and every single Swede, man, woman and child 201 says, of course, of course we should open up our homes and accept these people that are desperate and fleeing a civil war and Then the interviewer says, okay, it's so great that you said that because actually my cousin Ahmed right here, he needs a place to stay. And then, you know, enter stage left Ahmed, he's an Arab guy, probably mid-20s, kind of with a slightly frowned face. Doesn't look very friendly, wearing a hoodie. He looks kind of like an Arab version of Jesse from Breaking Bad. He looks somewhere. Yeah. You know, somewhere between menacing and like, at minimum, you know, not very agreeable. And every single one of them to a one comes up with excuses that increasingly, increasingly verge on absurd and obvious lies for why they can't take Ahmed, you know, and it reveals something fundamental about the immigration debate, which is the distance between professed values and lived values. And that is like right at the heart of what your novel is about, I think. So do you want to explain the basic pretense of your novel, the basic, this sort of beginning, or would you prefer if I did, from my vantage point?

B (18:30)

I can do it, though I'm kind of curious how you would do it.

A (18:33)

Yeah. So, I mean, the way I think of it. Do you live in New York City?

B (18:39)

I return to New York in the summer.

A (18:41)

Okay. So. So I live in New York City. And you know, the migrant crisis was one of the biggest issues at a certain point. It's been the biggest issue New York City has dealt with in the past five years, especially starting around 2022. And at that time, and I didn't actually, I didn't actually know about this until I read your book, there was an idea for a policy where New Yorkers would house migrants in their house. Now, like, to me, obviously this is just an obvious non starter, like, what New Yorker in their right mind really is going to open their door to an unknown migrant from Central America? It's just similar to the Swedish video. The more liberal New York New Yorkers would talk about it, but they wouldn't actually do it. They'd come up with an excuse. Nobody wants to inconvenience their life. No one wants to open themselves to the risk of a stranger, even an American citizen stranger, much less someone from another country who might not speak your language. So basically your novel strikes me as a kind of thought experiment of like, well, what if a family, like, decided to do this? Like, what, what direction might it go? Right. It's a hypothetical set in actual recent New York City with all of the policies that actually happen. So in that sense, I tried to.

B (20:12)

Make it all the rules, all the benefits, everything in that book is accurate, aside from the fact that the program that Eric Adams proposed in 2023, he did not actuate. So yeah, it never happened, but it did in my book.

A (20:32)

Right.

B (20:33)

And, and the city pays. That's what Adams proposed, actually, that he would pay regular New Yorkers to put migrants up in their spare bedrooms. Yeah, I have one family in Ditmus park with a, a big house and they take in one migrant to begin with. And yes, it is a thought experiment. And of course the house is in some ways a metaphor for the country. I hope that's not too heavy handed, but should be obvious. And one of the ways I shake it up a little is that the entire story is seen through the eyes of the son who lives at home. He's 26 at the beginning of the book. He's got a college education, he trained as an engineer, but he decided he didn't want to be an engineer. And he is unemployed and doesn't volunteer, doesn't do anything and actually claims to be perfectly happy. And he is fiercely opposed to his mother's taking on some stranger into the house who is going to displace him from his lair in the basement. And he has much more conservative views than she. His mother is a straight down the line progressive, very supportive of open borders. And of course taking in a migrant is her idea, whereas her son is hanging out on YouTube and listen, listening to Victor Davis Hansen.

A (22:30)

And Jordan Peterson.

B (22:31)

Right. But my friend Nico, the protagonist, He doesn't like all of these migrants pouring into New York and burdening the taxpayer, in spite of the fact that he's not a taxpayer and he's resentful of all the dependency that they accrue, the burden they put on the city. But at the same time, he himself is a dependent. He doesn't have a leg to stand on. He's living on, on his mother. He doesn't work himself. He doesn't. He's. He's also, he's a mooch. And mooches don't like other mooches. And that's part of my perspective. But I think that in terms of the political balance of, of the book, the fact that he is also a drain on social resources is important. It means he is a hypocrite. So not only is his mother dewy eyed and overly optimistic, as so many progressives are about human nature, but he himself is also. His position is not especially defensible either. And I just think that gives the book some political balance.

A (24:19)

Yeah, I agree. As I read the first act, and especially the moment when the migrant, Martine this late 20s woman who says she's from Honduras and is sort of bubbly and eager, and Nico finds her to be over eager. She's overly helpful. She insists on cooking breakfast every day, and he doesn't actually want her to cook breakfast for him every day. She. She insists on cleaning all the time, and he doesn't think she needs to be cleaning all the time. And now she feels. He feels that she's making him look bad because he doesn't contribute to the house. But he, you know. So like, when looking at his vantage point on her, I couldn't tell if Martine was actually annoying or if Nico was just a miserable douchebag who put a negative spin on everything in his life. And I kind of alternated between both of those opinions in different times because it seemed like he was unable to. First of all, there was nothing she did that he ever saw. Seemed to see in a positive light. And his anger, which I thought was more properly directed at his mother for letting this stranger in. In. In the house, letting a stranger displace her own son and totally consume their lives. It seems like he. The proper object of his anger should be his mom. But then the real object of his anger seemed, day to day, to be the migrant herself. And. And again, I couldn't tell if. If he was being overly harsh towards the migrant and, and misdirecting his anger, or if this migrant was really behaving in a way that was objectionable.

B (26:23)

Well, the nature of Martine is up for grabs in the novel. And on a narrative level, you can. There. There is a clear and equally weighted interpretation of who she is. Basically, she is either a paragon, one of the nicest people in the world, or she's a lying sack of shit. And the book doesn't really answer that question for you. That's up to the reader. And you can't completely trust Nico's interpretation of things, but you can. I think you can trust him factually. I don't think he's an unreliable narrator in that sense, but you know that he's a biased narrator and he doesn't want this woman in the house from the start, even before she's arrived. So his reading of things is not neutral, and you can't entirely trust his description of her in terms of its texture. So we know what she says, we know what she does, but we are not sure whether he's giving her a fair break in his descriptions of her. And I like this unknowability. It's one of the things that makes the book work. This unknowability of this one migrant in some ways stands in for the issue of immigration in the book. I haven't written a polemic. It's not, you know, this is not a pure political argument on one side. So that Martine is standing in for whether or not mass immigration to the United States is a social cure all. And really the best thing that could possibly happen or is a catastrophe is a corruption of our systems. It's way too much, too fast and bringing in too much foreign influence, more than we can absorb in the tiny amount of time that these people are arriving. In other words, the issue itself is very difficult to sort, whether it's a social good or a social bad. And therefore that unknowability of this one character is representative of the tussle in the book ideologically.

A (29:25)

Yeah. I want to ask you what your preferred immigration policy would be, but before I do that, I'll give you mine. I mean, my basket of beliefs about immigration is, number one, I think we should all want to have a strong border, if for no other reason than that. In a democracy, the idea is that the major policy decisions are up to the people. Right. And there's nothing as big as who gets into the country. And so if you don't have a border, the question of who gets into the country is just answered by the randomness and historical contingency of what happens in Central America. If there is a crisis in Guatemala tomorrow, we have a flood of immigrants the next day. Right. And when citizens of a democracy experience that level of volatility and randomness with respect to such a. Such a big policy, it's going to cause there's going to be a massive political backlash to that.

B (30:41)

Well, also it has huge political implications because of birthright citizenship and naturalization. When you allow mass migration, you allow political takeover by groups. Look at what has happened in the states of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, and in particular, and it's happening in Texas as well. These are formerly red states turning blue or turned blue. And that is a massive political transformation.

A (31:26)

When you say they're turning blue, how do you see that happening?

B (31:29)

Becoming democratically controlled when they used to be Republican controlled? And it is the result of immigration that's getting a little. That trend is a little undermined by some of the results of the last presidential election because obviously Hispanics are not doing what they're supposed to and always vote democratically. But the trend has been that Hispanics have entered these states, set up residents, had children, and it switched the Political landscape completely. That's not small.

A (32:21)

So my mix of views on immigration is, my first half is that I think there's a border, we have to have a border. And Democrats and Republicans should support that because all it does is bring the immigration issue inside the mechanism of democracy. Once we have a border, we can choose like we choose on every other policy between the politicians that reflect our different and preferred immigration outcomes. Now, once we have, have a secure border, I mean, if, if, if it seems like Trump has done a good job of, of securing the border, then my immigration preferences are, I think, significantly more liberal than they are conservative in the sense that I do think if we had a points based immigration system, I'd be comfortable with a high level of immigration. I think it makes America stronger and especially if we are getting a selected version of the immigrants from each country. I'm personally, I think, you know, I think anywhere I've gone in the world that's outside Western Europe, nobody is afraid to say, I like my country, I like our culture. I don't want it to change too fast. Like, if you go anywhere in the world, if you go to Korea or West Africa or Latin America, people will say, yeah, I like my culture. We have a language, we have a history, we have a traditions that I like. And I don't want that to, I don't want to just dilute that too quickly. And I say, okay, yeah, I get that. That's your culture. But in America and Western Europe, I think those expressions have become taboo because they appear to be close cousins or they're heard as close cousins of racism. And so I think a lot of these, the concerns about immigration that are voiced in terms of economic issues.

B (34:23)

Are.

A (34:23)

Often, I do think that they're often really. The cultural loss is what's primary for people psychologically. And because people are afraid to express that because it's been made taboo, people are driven to economic arguments that aren't the crux of the issue.

B (34:41)

I agree. I think where the emotion is coming from is cultural, and that's often backed up by economic arguments. But that's a blind for where the heart is.

A (34:58)

Yes. And here's my, I think, nuanced perspective on that is me, when I'm in Hispanic neighborhoods, when I go to Miami, when I'm in places that are predominantly Spanish speaking, I don't feel that alienated. And this is perhaps inseparable from the fact that I'm half Hispanic myself. My mother's first language was Spanish. My grandparents on her side did not speak English. I Grew up speaking Spanish not really fluently, but pretty often. And so it's impossible for me to say that that's not coloring my level of comfort with Hispanic immigration because it doesn't feel foreign to. Obviously Mexico is not the same as Puerto Rico, but still, there's a cultural similarity there, There's a linguistic similarity there. So me personally, I don't feel so much of a sense of cultural loss from Hispanic immigration in particular to America. However, can I empathize with an American that does? Sure. To me, it's no different than, like, like, I, I would never judge a West African who's complaining about Chinese immigration to West Africa. I would say, yeah, like, I, I get that, you know, you don't want, you don't want the country to change that quickly that, you know. So my view is that I, I understand that the, the cultural loss concern, though me personally, I don't really share that emotional worry.

B (36:33)

Well, I've find it almost comical that in both the other wealthy areas along the coasts in Mexico and lately in Mexico City, there is enormous resentment locally because there are too many Americans. None of the vox pops that I've read have I ever heard anyone catch themselves on about the irony. But I often think that it's worth turning it around in your head. And if Americans were flooding into, I don't know, Nigeria and buying up the land and not just taking up space as people do, that's what they do, wouldn't the Nigerians be reasonably resentful?

A (37:35)

Oh, of course. I mean, there's no question. It's not even a question.

B (37:38)

And this, and I've written about this before, this was, of course, the other Spectator column that got me into terrible trouble, which was simply maintaining that this is not a racial issue, this is a human one. This is what people are like. First of all, we are political. That is, we naturally glommed groups. Right. And when your hang is invaded by someone else from another hang in sufficient quantity to be not just, aren't they interesting, a few visitors from elsewhere, the people who live there don't like it. And it's just, it's all over the world. And there's plenty of this kind of resentment in Africa, South Africa. The South Africans are very resentful of Zimbabweans who have come in for economic reasons in quantity. And they're both black, they're both Africans. And there's been a lot of resentment in Colombia from Venezuelans fleeing Venezuela coming in in massive numbers by the million. This is what people are like. And I think it's unfair to tell the western world, Europe and the United States and Australia, you can't feel that way. That's racist. That's against the rules. That just means you're evil people. You alone, of all the countries and peoples of the world, you're the only people who are not allowed to feel that specific resentment and resistance to a massive influx of people from somewhere else. And just emotionally, I think just having enforced this shut up clause on people is poisonous. And one of the things that I try to express in a Better life, those are not the only sentiments that are expressed in a better Life, but it's one of the only books I know that allow characters to express that cultural wariness and. And pissed off at you.

A (40:15)

Yeah. So, I mean, one way of thinking about this from a progressive lens is, you know, I want to. Actually wanted to ask you about this because we both went to Columbia at different times, and I wanted to ask you what it was like to be there when you were there. But I'll get to that in a second. But one of the most recurring conversations when I was at Columbia between 2016, 2020, was gentrification and the changing character of Harlem. Harlem is a famous and culturally important neighborhood in the African American imagination. It was the center of the African American renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. It was just many of the luminaries and artists of that age came out of Harlem. Now, of course, the thing no one ever talks about is that Harlem was fully a Jewish and Italian neighborhood prior to that. Black people started coming in the early 1900s. And of course, this is of a piece with the two lessons of reality, which is that change is inevitable, and people don't like change. So change isn't obviously a change from a Jewish and Italian neighborhood to essentially the black mecca. Once black people moved in and it took on this outsize importance, well, then, now the black people that live in Harlem and the black people that have an attachment to Harlem want it to never change. Right. Even though our entry changed it from the way it used to be. Right. We want to freeze the frame exactly as it is when we're comfortable with it, when it represents our culture, when it represents traditions that we care about. And so now, with a new generation of mostly white but multiracial, actually people coming from all around the country moving into Harlem, making it, you know, Instead of a 90% black neighborhood, you know, whatever, 50% black neighborhood, those numbers might be slightly off. But just give me a break. It's directionally correct. Well, now, this is seen on the progressive left as a totally valid concern about cultural loss. Totally valid for people that live in Harlem to worry about the fact that the character of the neighborhood is changing. It's becoming whiter, something is lost. In other words, when the character of the neighborhood changes and these same people will look at you sideways as if they don't understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. If a white person living in Arizona were to complain about the changing character of their town, that say, it used to be 10% Mexican and it was really cool to have a Mexican restaurant, and now it's 50%. And they might say something like, I don't recognize my town anymore. Boom, racist. If a black Harlemite says the exact same thing, I don't recognize Harlem anymore. Someone on the progressive left thinks, oh, well, that's totally valid. I mean, if anything, I'm on their side of that. We're. We're gentrifiers, right?

B (43:30)

Yeah.

A (43:31)

So, I mean, is there. I try my very best in politics, and I think this is what my fans on this podcast appreciate is like, I'm actually trying to keep a consistent set of books on what my principles are so that they can survive. They can survive. Encounter with the old black Harlemite that doesn't like change and the white Arizonan that doesn't like change. It's like, what is permissible? And when does it cross the line, I guess is one way of asking the question, when does it cross the line from a valid concern about cultural loss to actual bigotry?

B (44:12)

Who else? Just bigotry is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, I certainly take your point that the, you know, change is the one constant. We're all going to resist it. But in relation to immigration and a lot of the changes we're talking about, The change is a consequence of political decisions. Conspicuously Joe Biden's political decision to essentially run an open border for four years. Let's contrast that. The story of American immigration is the story of political decisions, notably in 1924. I'm sure you're familiar with this. We basically closed the door on immigration, and we closed it until 1965. There was little trickles, but that was a consequence of mass immigration. People had had enough. And in a lot of ways, that's the best thing that this country ever did for its own unity, because that period of time forged a unified American public. Whereas before there were all these immigrant groups, many of them suffering from bigotry, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians. I mean, that's part of the story the United States tells itself with great self congratulation. But one of the reasons that we did forge an American public that felt part of the same country was because we stopped letting in people in such quantity in such a short period of time and allowed genuine assimilation to take place. And I'm from that. My ancestry is German on both sides, but I grew up, I wasn't especially aware of my German roots. It was of passing interest to me. But fundamentally I was American and I wasn't a hyphenated American. And I am a consequence of that long period of time when gradually through intermarriage of the security of a stable population going through, going through a major world war together we were part of a polity that was secure and knew what it was. And I wonder if we don't need to do the same thing again. I mean, you asked me what I recommend. I would see either a moratorium or. Certainly a tightening of our immigration rules. I'm definitely with you on if we are going to keep letting people in use strict criteria for high end people. I mean, we're selling something that's valuable and I don't mean like the golden visa sort of thing, but we are in a position to attract the best and the brightest of every field and we waste it because, you know, getting into the United States legally is a nightmare. By the way, I am an immigrant. I'm twice over an immigrant. I've immigrated to the UK and to Portugal and I know how much of a pain in the bum legal immigration is. And I hear from all kinds of people how terrible it is to try to legally immigrate to the United States, how long it takes to get a green card, et cetera. We need to make that much easier. And I would end the asylum system. That is, I'd certainly end an asylum system that just means that you put a toe, literally a single foot into US territory and then you immediately have a claim on asylum, a claim on benefits, certainly a claim on our judicial system, which is not nothing and it's now so corrupted, it's so overwhelmingly just a route to economic migration. 90% of the applications are rejected. And then we don't make people leave, we're making liars out of people, we're forcing them to make up stupid stories and it doesn't work anymore. And that's also the case in Britain, which it's another story I follow very closely because I live. Yeah, but it's almost all fraudulent. And so let's just withdraw from whatever treaties are requiring this, that doesn't mean you can't let in populations that you decide to let in. There's a situation in Ukraine. You can volunteer to let in hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine, but don't make it just the default requirement that anyone who shows up on your doorstep can claim to be persecuted, and then they're going to be resident for the next 10 years when you finally get around to adjudicating their case, by which time they're never going to leave. This is a completely dysfunctional system. Yeah.

A (50:49)

There's a few things I want to flag that I think don't get talked about enough. I remember when, when I first learned that almost every country in the world has voter id because as, as an American, we can get. Well, you know, we're, we're the global superpower. So in a way you could, you could say we have an excuse to be slightly narcissistic because we are the most powerful country in the world. But a result of that is you can just assume that if America does it this way, the whole world does it this way. And so it's probably standard. Well, no, we don't have voter id. Every country in the world has voter id. You need to present an ID to vote. We are the weird ones, right? If it's racist here, then I guess the whole world is racist. That is another way of framing it. But another thing here is birthright citizenship, right? We have birthright citizenship in America. It's easy to assume that every country in the world operates that way. Really, it's pretty much only us. It might literally be only us, but certainly of our peer countries, of any country you'd probably think to name right now, they don't have birthright citizenship. And when we think about why we have birthright citizenship, it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. It's just that it has to do with slavery. The way that they 14amendment was 4 correct. The 14th amendment was a response pouring.

B (52:19)

Over the Southern border.

A (52:21)

Not only that, the people who wrote the 14th Amendment, the only thing in their mind was slavery and how to guarantee that blacks in the south could not be stripped of citizenship rights. So what was the way to frame this? Well, period, if you're born here, you're a citizen. The subtext was to the south, you cannot deprive black people, former slaves, of citizenship. They couldn't even have envisioned. There was no such thing as mass immigration over the Mexican border at the time. They couldn't even have imagined that. Not only that, they could not have imagined the Phenomenon of anchor babies. The notion that this rule would then create an incentive for people to come across the border and have a baby. You would have been speaking Greek to them if you said they probably would have dismissed these as totally hypothetical concerns. But that's the nature of law, is that you write it one way, and 150 years later, a totally unforeseen problem arises as a result of how you phrase the law. But so we shouldn't. I think we shouldn't pretend that the issue of birthright citizenship is like, well, they decided it. We voted on that constitutional amendment. Therefore, for all time, we have the phenomenon of anchor babies. It's like they weren't even thinking of anchor babies when they wrote that.

B (53:45)

So it's even worse than the standard story of anchor babies. There is now an entire industry which is mostly from China. There are two different ways they do it. One of them is they actually just send eggs and sperm and have surrogates who are American citizens, have Chinese babies with Chinese DNA, and then they're American citizens, and then they get shipped back.

A (54:30)

And then that's insane.

B (54:32)

Then there's the farming of having Chinese women come over, have your kid, and then they take them back home. So the child is an American citizen, but is raised in China under the prc, doesn't know anything about the United States, but is still a citizen. By the time that citizen is 21, they can come over the United States and get their parents in as permanent residents. This year just. This is farming American citizens by. An antagonistic culture to the United States. And that's putting it mildly. So they are actually farming a fifth column for our country, using our laws against us. I've looked at the 14th Amendment, and I think the phrasing is really up for grabs. It's all about the parents being under the jurisdiction of the United States. Well, the people we're talking about are not under the jurisdiction of the United States. And I guess it just depends on what you think that word means. But I think there's a very good case to be made that the, the people who wrote that amendment did not intend that to apply to a couple of tourists from another country who happened to have a kid while they were visiting the United States, and then suddenly it's a US Citizen. It doesn't make any sense. If both of them are. Both their parents are Italian, they don't have any roots here, happen to be here when they bear a child, and then the kid isn't Italian, it's American.

A (56:46)

Right. And Americans would never have this Expectation in reverse. Right. If my wife goes into labor when we're in India, I would not be scandalized when the Indian said, well, tough, your kid is not a citizen of India. That's not how it works, buddy. You know, and so that. So I agree with all that. So at the same time, though, like I said, if we had an orderly border, I would be on the side of increasing the rate of immigration. And it sounds like that might be. This is legal immigration I'm talking about. It sounds like that might be a difference between us. I think if we didn't have such.

B (57:24)

Vast illegal immigration, then I could easily see increasing legal immigration. I mean, I've had that for years. The problem is we're still reeling from having let in. Well, we're not even sure I read all different figures, but it's certainly 10 million people over four years, and it could be a lot worse than.

A (57:44)

Yeah, yeah. So here, I'll give you some of my. In my basket of opinions on immigration, my more liberal opinions is that I hear a lot of talk about immigrant crime. And obviously, you know, every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is especially galling because they're not supposed to be here at all. So there's something doubly angering when an illegal. An illegal immigrant commits. Commits a crime, because it's like they lit. Like, if our government was doing their job, that person shouldn't have been here to begin with. And whoever suffered their crime shouldn't have suffered it. And so I get that. But again, I think this is a situation where rather than just say what people really feel, which is like, I'm losing my culture too fast. Like, are my kids going to grow up in a town the way I grew up, where we have the same cultural traditions and everyone speaks English, instead of saying that, they talk about the immigrant crime rate, which in America is, to me, it's not the biggest issue. In terms, we have a crime issue in America, much worse than Europe, but it's mostly homegrown, and it's disproportionately in the black community. Men in their 20s, pockets of inner cities. And it's not most black men. It's really small pockets committing an outsized amount of the crime. And that's a real issue. But it's not really the crux of the issue with immigration from Latin America, except for, obviously, the cases of literal gangs. And that might seem like an exception. That negates my whole argument. But actually, if you put that in proportion to how many people are coming over, how big is the gang problem, as opposed to how the millions and millions of people that are coming over to be landscapers. I think you got to deal with the gangs, and this is why we have to have a border, because we shouldn't be letting any gang members into the country. Right. We shouldn't be letting anyone with a criminal record into the country. But does that mean that crime from Central America is the problem that the political right thinks it is? I think it tends to be exaggerated and it tends to be sublimated because it's really more about the issue of cultural loss.

B (60:16)

I think the statistics are in the middle. The crime rate, especially among illegal immigrants, is worse than the progressives claim. The statistics have been fiddled. There are not separate statistics for illegal immigrants. And so the only statistics we have, which are rather poor and extremely old, and for the most part, the data is not accurately kept. It's often not recorded what someone's immigration status is when they're arrested or what their national origin is. But the statistics that we've got, the bad ones, throw all the legal immigrants in with the illegal immigrants. And so that includes some French exchange student. It dilutes where the real problem is. So there is a significant crime rate among illegal immigrants. So I wouldn't call it a complete non issue. But I also agree with you that this is one more instance where people seize on especially these single horrific murders. You know, the Lake and Riley.

A (61:56)

Yeah, like Lake and Riley.

B (61:58)

And I have found that line of attack really annoying because it's as if all that matters is if they're criminals. It's one of the things that's going on with the ICE situation, that the assumption runs, even according to Trump's own rhetoric, that the main problem is the criminality, and it has nothing to do with the sheer quantity of just other people from elsewhere who didn't ask for permission to be here. And therefore, I should not be deporting anybody unless they have been convicted of crimes.

A (62:48)

And.

B (62:48)

And in fact, in the likes of the New York Times, you're going to mostly have them then specially select out how few of these people, even if they are criminals, are violent criminals, as if that's the only kind of crime that really matters. And that line of reasoning just whittles down what the real problem is to a very small number of people, comparable to the mass of people who have, who have come in. And so it's the wrong argument. I agree.

A (63:21)

And, you know, another aspect of this is my opinions on immigration are quite different depending on whether we're talking about America or whether we're talking about Europe. If I were, if I were in the uk, I think I would be a pure conservative about immigration because of the kind of immigration that they've gotten and the way in which that immigration has been a lot more problematic in my view, than the immigration that America has gotten. The immigration that America gets, including most of the illegal immigration from Central America or South America mostly we're not getting people that are subscribed to a religion which has at its core the concept that the state and the religion should be one. In Islam, there is not a concept of separation of church and state. Islam is as much a politics as it is a religion. It's supposed to be the governing law of anywhere where Muslims live. Now that doesn't mean there aren't versions of Islam that have found a way to skirt around that and therefore assimilate into secular democracies or constitutional republics and the like. But a huge portion of the Muslim world is still coming from a culture where that is assumed. It's assumed that the religion, that the laws of the land should be Sharia law. Some interpretation of Sharia law, whether it's literal or watered down. And that's a massive problem. It's not a problem that America has with immigration from, you know, from Guatemala and Mexico. Mexicans do not expect. First of all, most of them are Catholic and they, you know, they have roughly the same religious views that Italian immigrants, Catholics and Irish Catholics have had. And so we just don't have. That creates an entirely different layer of friction. And then, you know, the, the much reported and taboo, frankly, stories of groups of Muslim, Muslim migrants committing sexual crimes in, in the United Kingdom, in Germany, all over Europe. I mean, these are stories that you just do not hear happening from Hispanic migrant, the Hispanic migrants that Americans get. Now these, obviously these things are radioactive to talk about, but I think that I'm speaking well within the fairway of verified facts, facts that have been verified by journalistic outlets across the political spectrum, including left leaning political outlets like the BBC and the New York Times and so forth. And, and so my attitude towards immigration in America is proportionally a lot more optimistic than it is in Europe. Would you agree with that? Or where do you differ, if at all?

B (66:39)

The experience in Europe and the UK of taking in large numbers of Muslims has been catastrophic. There has been very little assimilation. It's led to enormous social friction. And I am supportive of policies even for the United States that would put a very high bar on letting in Muslim immigrants. And I know That's a very uncomfortable position for most Americans, not just progressives. But, you know, we don't believe in discrimination. But what has made the small Muslim community in the US So moderate is that it's small and dissipated that when you don't.

A (67:40)

Can it also be the specific sections of Muslim societies that were. That the specific immigrants were getting?

B (67:47)

Possibly entirely. It could be that we generally got a, a more educated section of. Of Muslim countries.

A (67:58)

Now, now, when you say policies that, that would discriminate, would it be. It would literally be if you're a Muslim, you're getting judged by a different set of standards, or would it be. We have a religious neutral set of standards that are going to filter out by definition, extremists of any sect or any religion.

B (68:19)

I think it would probably be done by waiting different nationalities. So it wouldn't be. We're not letting Muslims in, but you don't let in very many Somalis. But it. The Europeans have pretty good statistics on this stuff. They have done studies on the likelihood of particular nationalities of becoming dependent on the state as well as committing crime. And it's very obvious which the countries are that you increase the odds fantastically that these people are going to be a problem in one way or another.

A (69:00)

But what do you do with country? I mean, there's so many countries in the world that are 30% Muslim, 70% Christian. And in my view, you know, we want a lot of those immigrants, like Nigerian Americans have done fantastically well. There's a lot of Christians and a lot of Muslims in that country. So if you select against nationality, we are.

B (69:24)

Nigeria, it would be a particular problem with using nationality as a substitute for religion.

A (69:32)

But also Ghana, I mean, there are many countries that are. That are too mixed by religion to, I guess, select based on nationality. Right.

B (69:44)

You know, I'm not writing the policy, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be writing a policy in the U.S. that would just say we don't want Muslims in. Sorry. And I'm not sure I would be comfortable with that myself. But we can weight our preferences and let in more people from countries that don't have dominant Muslim populations. I have to say I was a little shocked to learn recently that there are now 800,000 Muslims in New York City.

A (70:28)

I mean, and that's almost all like permanent residents.

B (70:32)

Yes.

A (70:33)

Of New York City. So that would be what. What is that? Almost one tenth of the population? About 10%.

B (70:40)

Yes. And that's almost as many as there are Jews. And you know, the problem I'm talking about I mean, New York is the largest Jewish community outside of Israel in the world. And if I were Jewish, I'd be a little anxious about this growing Muslim population, which is almost entirely this century. Before the turn of the century, I gather they weren't very good at collecting the statistics, but it was well under 100,000 Muslims. There just wasn't a big Muslim presence, and now there's a big one. And it does help explain Mamdani. That was certainly an ingredient in the election. The problems with Muslim populations tend to be when they are concentrated in one place and. Don't have as. Because you can tell that this is such an awkward subject that I become unlucid. Yeah, but this is the case just in general, when groups come in and people don't usually assimilate because they want to, for the most part, it's because it's hard. It's because they have to. They are forced to deal with the host population, and little by little, they get with the program. It's a natural process. But when you're surrounded completely with people just like you, for example, you don't have to speak English because everyone around you speaks whatever language you speak, then the assimilation is much less natural. And if New York Muslims are anything like the ones in Europe, then they hang out with each other. This is, again, it's a human thing. People do that. That's what they prefer. People like them around. They like being around people like that. And it's these more isolated concentrations of Muslims that tend to foster more fundamentalist religion, continuation of patterns of cousin marriage, Prejudice, views of women, and oppressive.

A (73:37)

Yeah.

B (73:37)

Attitudes towards women. The things about Muslim culture that are antithetical to Western culture.

A (73:46)

Let me offer a pushback here. And this is. This is. I'm trying to. I'm searching my lived experience right now for. I've probably Talked to over 10.

B (73:54)

Don't say lived experience, please.

A (73:57)

Searching. Searching my memory, if you prefer. Searching my memory of the past 10 years. I've probably had 50 conversations or so with maybe like a hundred, to be honest, with Muslim cab drivers and Uber drivers late at night where they're driving me home from something and I'm a little drunk, and I like to talk to them. Where are you from? What do you think? I asked them about politics. I asked them about life. And virtually all of them speak English. This is not a scientific study, but the Muslims coming to live in New York City, it's deeply in their interest from a business perspective and from a financial perspective, to learn English. And so it's not because we force them to, but it's because it's, you know, they're go getters and they, they want to make more money. And English is the business lingua franca of the world.

B (74:59)

Well, that, which, that's, that's the way, that's why people do things. It's in their interest. And yeah, so that makes perfect sense. And defining immigration policy, that's the, you just want people to do things in their interest. You want to organize things so that what is in their interest is what you want them to do.

A (75:24)

Right. So, but what do you make of the argument that, you know, most of the kids, like, okay, the people I'm talking to, they, they, you know, they came to America maybe at, maybe the earliest at 18, but probably more like 25. Some of them came at 30. So they really, their, their mindset is to a large extent a product of their upbringing. Often, it's often Pakistan or Bangladesh or any, any, any one of these countries. But the kids that they're having in America, some of them speak the language of, of where their parents are from. Many of them don't, many of them speak English and only English. Or they speak a, you know, maybe they speak broken Hindi or broken Urdu. Their children won't speak any Hindi, any Urdu. They'll only speak English. And people who study child development have long known that you don't, you don't adopt the accent of your parents. If your parents have an accent from another country, you adopt the accent of your peers. And accent is actually, it's a proxy for culture in a lot of ways, because it's not only that you're adopting the accent of the, of the new place, you're actually adopting the values of the new place. Which is the subject of a million stories from Rami on HBO to, I can think of other examples. But all these stories about immigrant children who don't relate to their immigrant parents and have such friction because their immigrant parents are going to be, you know, for one thing, very homophobic. They're going to be, you know, you get married young, you get a job that's, that's a stable job. And the immigrant's child who grows up in, you know, an American city and is comparing himself to his American born friend says, well, why do I have to get married young? I mean, first of all, you know, what's wrong with gay marriage? They're not hurting anybody. Well, can I be an artist? Why can't I be an artist? And in a million ways they're more western than their parents because of where they were born. And so that's where the assimilation happens. It happens through generational turnover rather than taking a snapshot of the immigrants, the Muslim immigrants that you're describing, who grew up elsewhere.

B (77:56)

Well, that, that is the happy story Europe is having, the unhappy story that is too frequently because there's a second generation problem in Europe. In the Muslim communities, the second generation is often more fundamentalist and more observing than their parents and more prey to radicalization, Terrorism, et cetera. It's kind of the opposite. I think it may be partly the consequence of being neither fish nor foul, not really being located culturally because they're not from where their parents are, they didn't grow up there, but they don't feel that they really belong where they are. And that's alienating. And part of it is just the times we're living in. There is this phenomenon of political Islam. And as you noted, Islam is political anyway, doctrinally. And a lot of the linear fringe of European Muslims have been that second generation that just doesn't, doesn't really identify with where they, where, where they live.

A (79:53)

Yeah, no, I know. I mean, Europe has like I said, a problem an order of magnitude worse than America. But I think, I think we agree on that relative ranking of the problems. But I am nevertheless more optimistic than you about, I think about America, even given our horrible past five years of immigration. I think.

B (80:19)

Well, I am more optimistic about the United States in terms of the influx from south and Central America. Yeah, I think that population is much more assimilatable than what the population that has arrived in Europe.

A (80:41)

I think they're more eager to assimilate. I think they like.

B (80:44)

More interested in it.

A (80:45)

I think they like America more than, you know, a lot of the immigrants that come to the uk. Like the uk yeah.

B (80:53)

And they're still coming broadly from a Judeo Christian background, you know.

A (80:59)

Yeah. So there's less friction there too.

B (81:01)

Yes, much less. Much less friction. So.

A (81:04)

And so here's the other aspect of this I want to ask you about is so you've been highlighting many of the problems with too much immigration too uncritically, too fast, without a filter. Now, there's an opposite problem here that a lot of places in the world are facing, which is they have basically zero immigration policies. And now that the whole world's population is collapsing and no one's having babies anymore, they're looking at a 50 year prognosis of total fiscal and economic collapse. And I'm talking about countries like China and Korea, Japan And South Korea. And you know, they're the canaries in the coal mine of a phenomenon that is also affecting every western country in the world. Every Judeo, Christian, Christian country in the world, except for Israel, which is the one that has managed to, through certain cultural memes, has, through kind of a different subculture, has been able to have a lot of babies still. But every country in Europe, plus America, plus Canada plus Australia, we're pretty much below replacement rate. And that trend's only going in one direction. It really doesn't look very good for the countries like Japan and South Korea that have had a zero immigration policy. And so 50 years hence, do you think it will have been a bigger mistake to let the countries that let in too much immigrants or do you think it would be a big, it'll look like a bigger mistake the countries that let in no immigrants.

B (82:38)

It depends on which immigrants you're talking about. Apropos of what we just discussed, I think Europe is going to regret having opened the floodgates to North Africa and the Middle East. I think that's not going to turn out well. And among that population you've got a very large welfare dependency. So the economics are not great. I do, however, have a little section in the novel where the end of a long discussion. There are lots of discussions about immigration in the book. I like dialogue and it's a good way of working out what the book's about. But it just. This woman says all this anti immigration talk. You realize there is another perspective that in due course with the low fertility, these same countries that are experiencing such popular resentment are going to be fighting with each other over the young people who are left and who can offer them more to come to their country to support their labor force. I definitely recognize that argument and it is entirely possible that the United States will end up being an enormous beneficiary. Culturally, socially, biologically, anthropologically, politically. Everything because we have more people and everyone else is, has, have, has a house populations that are starting to shrink.

A (84:53)

So I think that America is going to come out ahead in all of this. I think I share your pessimism about Europe, but I think in 50 years or 100 years, America is going to be very glad that we didn't go the route of zero immigration like, like Japan and South Korea. I think we're going to end up being global winners as a result. Which is not to say there are no tradeoffs to immigration. Of course there are, there are downsides, but I think overall that set of trade offs is going to be better for the country than the zero immigration route of East Asia. And I'm glad to have you on the podcast to express what has been, what some people will definitely feel is a provocative and taboo conversation in certain ways. But it's a very important one to be honest about because either we honestly air our opinions, including our differences of opinion, or we enter this just political seesaw of extreme policies that then get reversed by the next president. We've already seen this. It's like Biden undoes everything Trump did out of spite and then we get mass immigration and then Trump, you know, goes as hard as possible rounding up immigrants in ways that cause chaos, and then the left is crazy in turn. And it's really, it's like the seesaw element of our immigration policy cannot be healthy. We have to find a way to have a sane immigration policy that doesn't, doesn't divide the country so much and, and go between extremes. And I think part of that is allowing people to honestly express opinions without immediately canceling them and calling them a racist and so forth. So that's how I feel about it.

B (87:01)

Well, that's one of the purposes of the novel I'm releasing next month is to stimulate conversation. I mean, I think it's a good book club book for exactly that reason. This is an issue that most people have very strong feelings about. And yet a lot of those feelings, we've told them that they're not allowed to express, that we're going to call them names if they even let any of it out. And I don't think that's healthy. I think this is one of the most interesting issues out there. It's certainly the biggest issue of this century internationally. It's many sided, it's not simple. You can easily draw very different conclusions from the same sets of facts. And that's why it made such great fiction. I mean, it was very interesting to write. I write about immigration a lot in nonfiction and I never get bored.

A (88:15)

All right, Lionel Schreiber. The book is called A Better Life, available in bookstores near you or online. I urge you to grab it. Try to make a book club out of it. Might get rejected from your local book club, but that's okay. Start your own book club. You know, that's what it's all about. Lionel Shriver, thank you very much.

B (88:35)

It's been my pleasure.