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The Realignment
The Realignment Live from the Aspen Ideas Festival | Reihan Salam: How Did We Get Here? NYC Working Class Immigrants, the Right's H1B Debate, and the New Cultural Politics of Immigration
00:27:08
Last week, Marshall interviewed Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute, at Newark's Aspen Ideas Festival: Economy. Marshall and Reihan discussed culture's impact on the economy and politics through the lens of immigration. They cover the struggles of multigenerational working-class immigrants facing a new cultural and economic landscape and the right's increasing turn against H1B visas and high-skilled immigration through the lens of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's comments about American children choosing sleepovers over hard work.
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- [00:01]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Sorry for the break. I made a declaration a few months back that when I'm traveling for conferences, I'm not going to bother with late night uploads and editing processes. But I'm excited that I can actually share what I was doing while I was out of town. So I went to Newark for the Aspen Ideas Festival Economy spinoff and I had a great conversation with Reihan Salaam, President of the Manhattan Institute Institute, during a segment titled How Did We Get Here and Where Is Here? Raihan and I talked about culture and the intersection of culture, economics and politics. I decided, given the specialty, that Raihan has both as a second generation immigrant, but also as a person who's thought a lot about the melting pot and the debates on the right about immigration and his specific focus on New York City and the mayoral race, where you saw Zoran do particularly well in communities that were second, third, fourth generation immigrants who are recently struggling with upward mobility, which is a broader theme of the conference. So we looked at the topic of culture, economics, politics and immigration through two different lenses. So firstly, like I just said, we focused on the experiences of immigrant communities that no longer feel as if they are as upwardly mobile as they were in the past few decades, and how that's intersecting with their political turn to the populist left, despite Trump performing very well in those same communities last election. We then focused on the right with the debate over the H1B visa and how comments by Vivek Ramaswamy about how we raise children have really gotten to the core of the debate over H1B visas, high school immigration, and how American children need to be prepped or not prepped for global competition and the economy. So hope you all enjoy the conversation and we'll be back with a regular episode on Thursday.
- [02:12]
B
Hi everyone, my name is Marshall Kozlov. I'm a senior fellow and Director of Special Projects at the Niskanen center and I also host the Realignment Podcast. I'm going to have a great conversation with my friend Raihan Salaam, president of the Center Right Manhattan Institute, discussing politics, culture and how that relates to economics. I think the really important intro for you, Reihan, here, is that the Manhattan Institute is based in New York City, so unlike a lot of center right institutions, you obviously are engaging in politics, but you're not based in D.C. which D.C. is not usually ahead or engaged with the culture in the same way. So before we get into a specific issue, namely immigration That I think gets at the core of the politics, culture and economics intersection. I'd love for you just to sort of give your answer to the question of why should we be talking about politics and culture at an event centered on the economy?
- [03:04]
C
When you're looking at how elites shape society, you can think of it in terms of three broad dimensions. Elites shape society through formal control of institutions. They shape society through storytelling, through cultural production, and they also shape it through the power of imitation. Ultimately, so much of our economic lives, our political sensibilities, are informed by our narrative self understanding. Who do we believe ourselves to be? Where do we see ourselves in some larger progression of the family or society? When you think about risk takers, why do they take risks? Why do they make these bold moves? Oftentimes because of how they see themselves as parents, as children, as people who want to achieve, become visible. And these things are shaped by all sorts of larger cultural currents that have really big concrete economic implications.
- [03:59]
B
And I think what's interesting, obviously you've, you've written a lot about immigration. You are the children of Bangladeshi immigrants in the 1970s. So you're rooted in this question. And I think immigration is also just given your expertise, but also like the fact that we're trying to tie together these big complicated topics, just sort of the perfect intersection. So with the realignment, I do a lot of work that's focused on how the populist left and the populist right are really assaulting the establishment. They're really, to your point, about the stories we tell, when you listen to the populist right and left, they are advancing their political ideas through attacking the received story that the center right establishment tells, that the center establishment tells, that the center left establishment tells. So you specifically talk about immigration through the lens of two interesting sort of issues and areas that really expose these weak points of the story and are going to be tension points moving forward at economics, politics and cultural levels. So let's start with the New York City mayoral race and Mondani, and less the version of the story, which is, hey, Zoran has shown how there are all these upwardly mobile millennials who feel that the city doesn't work for them anymore and they were really receptive to democratic socialism. You instead are really interested in a sort of undercovered part of that story, which is actually about immigrant communities, working class immigrants communities specifically. Let's talk about that.
- [05:18]
C
So when you're looking at working class, blue collar immigrants, there is a classic story, which is that you experience upward mobility, you move from One society to another. You have this narrative sense of control over your own fate of agency. The ultimate act is to disembed yourself from one environment to take yourself to another. That can be very heroic, that can be very taxing, but it's something where you feel powerful. But here's the irony. What happens over time. So when you look at why is it that cities like New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco are magnets for immigrants despite the fact they have such an incredibly high cost of living? The reason is that in the early years that immigrants arrive in a country, they send as much as 15% of their income home in the form of remittances. So that means that they're targeting nominal income rather than real income. One way to think about assimilation is that over time, those ties attenuate. Less of your income is going to remittances that you're sending back home. Let's say you're a single male adult who is living in Brooklyn, New York or in Queens. You're living in an illegal basement dwelling. You are focused every single day. You're riding a delivery bike, something like that. You're doing an extremely dangerous, difficult job for your family back home. As you assimilate over time, you build obligations at home. You are someone who has a different set of what is right and appropriate. Shortly before the Democratic mayoral primary, there's little peace in the Wall Street Journal in which the journalist was interviewing an older gentleman, a Muslim gentleman in his 60s, an immigrant who is saying that, you know, I'm struggling. I'm living in a studio apartment. It is not very comfortable, I'm crowded. And, you know, it was really striking because again, you know, we think of that classic plucky immigrant story, the new arrival. They're off to the races, they're in control. They have agency. Then as the decades go by, suddenly you're someone who's driving a four hire vehicle and you're thinking, what is this? What is Waymo? What does this mean? How is the world going to change? How is the fact that I am now here? This is my life. I've been here for decades. How precarious do I feel? Then you think about that person's child. Now, there are, of course, many immigrants who are going directly into the elite, who are already affluent, already established. Their kids are already very much in the mainstream, in fact, in the elite of the mainstream. But if you're a working class, lower middle class immigrant and you're someone who works with your hands or you're behind the wheel of a car every day. Then your kid, they went to community college, maybe they have a college degree, they're out there, maybe they're working as a home health aide. Maybe they're someone who's climbing the ladder just a bit, just a bit. But they can't buy a home. So you have this first generation that is naturalized, that is somewhat more assimilated in its expectations for where it ought to be. And then you have the children of those blue collar migrants who are themselves thinking, where do I fit in? This promise that I was going to be propelled much, much further. It happened, in a sense. And yet where do I fit in in the wider society, how discontent might I be? That's a really interesting constituency that is not everywhere, but is now being politically mobilized in an interesting and meaningful way. When we think about populism, oftentimes we think about someone in the Rust Belt. We think about an older, multi generational American, white or black. You're someone who saw the China shock, you lived through it. But what about those people who are going through this other shock that's happening in these big coastal metros where you have immigrant rich communities, but where for some, not all their narrative is not one of uninterrupted pure upward mobility, but rather of discontent and dissatisfaction.
- [09:17]
B
I'd be curious then. So obviously when we talk about a word like assimilation, it's going to bring to mind that late 19th century, early 20th century story of Eastern Europeans, Jewish, Italian people from Ireland. They sort of like transition in how, you know. The key thing about this story though is obviously assimilation isn't just cultural. It's also assimilating into an American economy. That seems to be, until the Great Depression, on the upswing. So to what degree do you think the culture or the expectation of, let's say, the tension point between assimilating into America culturally, but not this economically, upwardly thing, how would that impact things?
- [09:54]
C
So this is so fascinating and neglected. When you're looking at immigration in the 19th century, that peak, when you're looking at the late 19th century, early 20th century, one story people often forget is that when you look at most immigrant populations, there was always a large number of people who were going back to their native country. If you look at Italian immigrants to the Americas, including to the United States, you had a good 30, 35% of people who went back ultimately to their native country. There were two populations in particular, the Irish and the Jews from Eastern Europe who came. And it was a one way ticket. And it's funny because when we Think about immigrant stories. When we think about the romance of that era, those are the communities that are kind of paradigmatic. So many of the stories are about the assimilation and the battles experienced by both of those groups. So when you're looking at contemporary immigration, it's a very different dynamic for all sorts of reasons. One is that the first immigrants who arrive in a society, they're the pioneers. But then as the enclave grows, that dynamic changes. The 10,000th person to become part of an immigrant enclave is necessarily different. You're not any less virtuous, but there's less of that big cultural risk that you're taking. Right. Another thing is that we live in the world of WhatsApp. We live in a world where actually you can maintain certain cultural connections to your native country in a way that was much harder when you're looking at the Irish and the Jews, where they experience this big rupture. And there's also a deep sense of gratitude that went along with that rupture. Another thing to keep in mind is that even when you look at that period that we look on with a lot of romance, the upward mobility was actually quite limited within the first generation. The big economic gain you were making was going from one society to another. And then as I mentioned, if you were going back, you could accumulate some wealth that you bring back with you to Italy, let's say, or to Norway or wherever else. But, you know, the real upward mobility was in the second generation and the third generation. That's what really, really accelerated. That's where you saw the dramatic gains. So now when you have a society that is a low fertility society, it's very interesting. There's this kind of interesting cultural clash between people who are thinking of themselves as being part of an intergenerational, multi generational story versus people who are thinking about themselves. And I don't mean to say that you're being selfish or terrible, but you're thinking about yourself and you're thinking about your own experience. So again, think back to that 60 plus year old Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant person who had worked his tail off as a cab driver, forever living in a studio apartment in Queens with his wife and feeling a lot of uncertainty about his future and where it's going to go and his family's future and where it's going to go. If you think about your life as, ah, I laid down the foundation for a great American family and my children and grandchildren are going to reap the benefits of my sacrifice. And my sacrifice is real, my sacrifice of disembedding myself, you know, all of these things. If you look to your children, well, first of all, you don't have grandchildren. But if you're looking to your children as people who themselves feel this very deep sense of discontent, who themselves feel very precarious, that's a way in which your story has not necessarily been vindicated. And I think that that is a really interesting development. And that's not new, by the way. This has always happened at other moments in the past, but this is something that I think we've tended to neglect. Because of course, I think for good reasons, for noble reasons, we tend to have a really romantic sense of how immigrants renew our national optimism. They renew our sense of hope. And I think that that's real, but that's not always and everywhere necessarily true. And it's also the case that you're going to have political entrepreneurs who will build on that fact that it's not always and necessarily true. 25% of Americans are first and second generation. This is a huge political force, a huge cultural force, a huge economic force. And rather than look at this as a totally disaggregated population of people who are feeling such a deep sense of gratitude, as my parents did, as I did, you're seeing people who are interacting with a different economic and cultural landscape.
- [14:35]
B
And I think that does a great job of covering this sort of left of left of center populist phenomenon which you're seeing in the New York City mayoral race results. And obviously that's not going to scale contrast to your point. This is a very Los Angeles centric story. This is a New York centric story, but I think a story, as someone of the center left whose story studies the right, the story I'm fascinated by, to give another useful case study here, is the debate over H1B visas and how very quickly this turns into a cultural story where we sort of, especially in the sort of upper middle class sort of sectors where we talk about immigration in the high school degree, we sort of see there's a real breakdown of consensus that I think rooms like this really need to think about. So it should be noted. Realignment. So studying how the right has changed, if you're looking at the immigration debates of the late 2000s or even the 2010s, the generic line would be, if you are a conservative immigration hawk, you would say, I'm not against immigration, I'm against illegal immigration. Or I really am worried about working class people, especially in the Rust Belt or other competitive places. So I'm worried about like Low skilled wages. That side of the immigration thing. Obviously I'm still pro immigration as a whole when it comes to legal immigration or we should be much more like Canada or Australia and have a point system like we need these entrepreneurs. The Elon Musk story, what happened very quickly though after the 2024 election though is you actually saw a major breakdown of that consensus that left people really sort of in a lurch there. And I think the really relevant thing here is that Vivek Ramach Swami, so like very Trumpy, you know, millennial who is now running for the governorship of Ohio, at the time he was in talks to co run doge with Elon, he specifically was defending the H1B process in high school immigration. And he specifically said, Americans, you have to work harder to keep up with high schooled immigrants. And if you have to give up sleepovers, you give up sleepovers if you have to give up the fun things. And I just remember thinking in the early 2000 and tens, you know, Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that was very much sort of the vibe in that moment of time, but as sort of the sort of, let's say, confidence in the meritocracy, even in the upper middle class is sort of broken down. And as a young parent myself, I find myself less thinking I really need my young son to be ready to compete in a globalized economy in 20 years. So no sleepovers. That just doesn't culturally sit well with me in a way that Vivek was just not really. I think he was shocked by how vehement the left, right and center upper middle classes who he thought were going to be on his side turned against him. So I'd love for you to bring a lot of context into this.
- [17:15]
C
This is completely fascinating. It's a very uncomfortable subject, but it's something that we need to think about. When you're looking, you know, of course there are many different populations we're talking about, but a population that's become very visible in this discourse on the right, to a lesser extent on the left, is the Indian American population in particular. And this is a population that it's really important to understand has grown enormously. So this is a group that is now over 1% of the US population and that is foreign born folks who are born in India who are now in the United States, not including their second generation plus descendants. And this is a population that has actually grown enormously since 2010 as well. There has been an Indian origin population in the United States for many Many years stretching back to the 19th century. But if you're looking at the explosive growth there was 1965, that was one wave of growth where you had a group of professionals who came. Then you had family reunification. But then the real explosion came in H1B with the H1B visa, the advent of that in the very early 1990s. And what you saw is a population that is triple selected, a population that within India was unusual. They're disproportionately from upper caste backgrounds, very disproportionately. They don't just have higher education, not just bachelor's degrees, but graduate degrees as well. And then the H1B process, the US skilled immigration system, the way you navigate it, it basically selected for a group that was an unusually well prepared group to thrive in a knowledge economy. So you have a population that again, and I'm generalizing a bit, I'm overstating a bit, but a population that is by far the most affluent immigrant population by household income and a population that in national terms 1% doesn't sound huge, but is very visible, very present in the uppermost echelons of American society, and that it's become particularly pronounced over the last, call it 10, 15 years. So what's really interesting to me about this phenomenon is that it's happening against this larger backdrop of cultural change. When you're looking at the Jewish experience of upward mobility and rising visibility, that is something that happened over a pretty long period of time. It happened against the backdrop of the trauma of the pogroms and later the trauma of the Holocaust. You had a narrative that was built around gratitude, a sense of gratitude for the blessings of American life and also a deep commitment to philanthropy. And again, I'm speaking in generalizations. But then in this era you've had this really huge growth of a population that that was not very visible in American life before. That becomes very visible really quickly and where it's a group that's still being incorporated into American institutions. So when you're thinking about immigration, one thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is that when we had really big immigrant inflows in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you also had very high native fertility. People were having much bigger families than they do today. Today, native born Americans have much smaller families. And what that means is that intergenerational differences become much more pronounced. If you are someone who is, call it 65 plus, think about, who are your grandchildren, then think about what is the landscape that I'm seeing in the culture. If you look at California public schools, for example, it's about 30% of those schools are non Hispanic white. When you look at the kind of student population, and again, on a certain level, that's neither here nor there, you can have a lot in common with people who don't look exactly like you. But if you're someone who is an older person, who doesn't have direct personal relationships with people from different backgrounds, why would you. And you're thinking, my grandchildren, how do they relate to this? Or maybe I don't have grandchildren at all. So when I'm looking at younger Americans, rising generations, when I'm looking at the politics of rising generations, I might feel pretty alienated by that. And that might inform how I'm thinking about whether or not I want to invest in that future, how I'm feeling about that future, the conflict that I might fear for the future. And then to Marshall's point, about this idea of an upper middle class group that seems to really be very well prepared for ferocious meritocratic competition and that it's not necessarily thinking, hey, you know, I'm actually really, I'm looking up to what I'm finding here. I want my kids to take part in the sleepover, right? I want my kids to take part in these rituals. Maybe what you perceive, fairly or otherwise, is, well, I'm looking at these people who are coming here and were enormously successful, and they seem to be looking down a little bit on some of my traditions, some of my rituals, some of what I consider to be important. I'm not saying any of this is right. I'm not saying any of this is fair. But when you have a society in which everyone feels very culturally insecure, then that's something that can be really combustible. What do I mean by culturally insecure? You know, I think about the incredible success of Mark Zuckerberg, and then I think about the incredible success of Mark Zuckerberg's dad. Mark Zuckerberg was an orthodontist living in Dobbs Ferry, New York, who was able to lay the groundwork for his son and his children to do these incredible things. There was a time in American society and in Western societies writ large where the family narrative was. I am laying the groundwork for what comes next. I would argue that we live in a much more narcissistic, narrow society right now. And we live in a society in which there's much more envy and resentment, much more of a sense of, well, where am I fitting in? As opposed to my job is to do that patient work of laying the groundwork for what's to come. And also, when it comes to parenting and grandparenting, the attitude is not how am I laying the groundwork. The attitude is I'm going to get mine to some degree. And I think that that leads to or it contributes to much more friction, much more conflict. And again, I think that there's a lot of this happening on all sides of the cultural divide. But I think that that insecurity comes from the breakdown of cultural transmission. When you're not grounded in whether it's a faith tradition, a historical tradition, some sense of where I've come from and where I'm heading next, you have a lot of confusion and you'll oftentimes have a lot of anger.
- [24:02]
B
Something I'm curious about for this last section then is if I think of the Manhattan Institute's politics in its place on the right, I would say you are very part of this pro meritocracy, right? In the sense that you're defending talented and gifted programs. You're sort of not you personally, but sort of people in your orbit are talking about how we need to bring back standardized testing to higher education, the SAT admissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think in the backlash to Vivek's comments, I think we just see how at a cultural level, we are just primed for an anti meritocratic backlash in the sense of my actual reaction because do you send your kids to sleepovers? Are they allowed to?
- [24:42]
C
They're only five and six, so not yet.
- [24:45]
B
So they haven't been ruined for global competition yet. So good to see. They'll be ready to crush it in the2040s. But I think from my perspective, my reaction to that whole anecdote was if young Theo, my son, can only go to UT or Texas A and M because he went to some sleepovers instead of like going to Yale or Harvard at this point. Maybe it'd be harder for me to say that in the 2000s, like jokes aside, harder to say that in the 2010s, but I think it's much easier to say that. And I think we're at this weird transition point of that. So I'd be curious how you think about this dynamic.
- [25:20]
C
Well, specifically about children and child rearing. I'm totally at sea and there's so much collective wisdom in this room, I'm sure. But I do have an impulse. My impulse is, and I'm sure that it's a reflection of my family and my parents and who they were. I just really believe that you want to do difficult things. You want to overcome, you want to foster some resilience, but also you just want to do things that machines can't do. You want to build friends, you want to build relationships, you want to know how to deal with people who. My kids are incredibly difficult kids. And I think that that's. So that's going to be a gift to everyone around them to learn to deal with people like my children. So I think that. But that's my instinct. And when I think about our organization, so much of it is about cultivating that ability to deal with different people, form new relationships. When I think about the right, there are things that are happening right now in the political right, but I'm also thinking about 10, 15 years from now. What I want to tell my fellow conservatives is, look at where the hockey puck is going. Look at the new America that is emerging. Two thirds of immigrants live in the 20 biggest metro areas in the United States. You cannot write off cities. How are people getting shaped and formed? That is happening in the context of public institutions. When you're thinking about the debates that are emerging, you were saying in New York City and LA right now, those are going to be the national debates in whether it's five years or in 10 minutes, that is absolutely going to be true. So if you are on the right, what I would urge people do is do not retreat from these environments. Engage. You're going to be in the minority sometimes, but engage, because that's going to be a big part of your future and the country's future.
- [27:02]
B
Excellent place. Perfect timing. Thank you for joining all of us.
- [27:05]
C
Thank you very much.