Thread by @Noahpinion

1/The next book in my "Immigration and Diversity" series is "This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto", by Suketu Mehta.

amazon.com/This-Land-Our-…

2/This "manifesto" is not a very well-organized book. It skips back and forth between personal anecdotes, stories about immigrants, history, data and statistics, etc. It's hard to keep track, and it's hard to make sense of the overall thesis.

3/As best I can describe it, there are three parts to this book:

1) a description of the lived experiences of immigrants,

2) an argument that rich countries should permit "immigration as reparations" for colonialism, and

3) a standard U.S.-specific pro-immigration argument.

4/The descriptions of the lived experiences of immigrants were warm, rich, and sympathetic. I would definitely enjoy reading an entire book of just these! But they were generally brief, disorganized, and low on context.

5/Unlike Tom Gjelten's "Nation of Nations", the anecdotes about immigrants didn't follow the stories of specific people. And some were in Morocco or elsewhere, making it difficult to apply the lessons of the stories to the case of U.S. or European immigration.

6/Much of the rest of the book is an indictment of historical European colonialism and U.S. actions that are painted as a sort of pseudo-colonialism (multinational corporations, climate change, etc.).

The thesis is that immigration should be allowed as reparation for these sins.

7/If the book has one central thesis, it is this: Because Western nations went and messed up the rest of the world, they owe it to the rest of the world to admit lots of immigrants.

8/But this argument is problematic for several reasons.

First, it inadvertently plays to the darkest fantasies of restrictionists at the Claremont Institute and in the Trump administration, who believe that immigrants are invaders who come because they want to conquer the West.

9/By presenting immigrants as stateless debt collectors coming to seize their due, Mehta tacitly encourages the idea that immigration harms the receiving countries.

He explicitly repudiates this idea, later in the book, but the rhetorical damage is done.

10/The fact is, most immigrants do *not* take this attitude. I've known tons and tons of immigrants, and I think I've encountered the idea of immigration-as-reparations precisely once.

Amazingly, most people move to a country because they have a positive image of that country!

11/Later in the book there is a whole section where Mehta presents the case for U.S. immigration as a positive-sum game that benefits both immigrants and native-born -- the kind of thing you might read in a Noah Smith column.

But the earlier parts make it ring a bit hollow.

12/To first present yourself as a vengeful debt collector, rattle off a list of the wounds America has inflicted upon you, explicitly demand reparations, and *then* to argue that your presence benefits America and native-born Americans...well, it's a weird way to make a case.

13/The thing is, when Mehta says immigrants benefit America and native-born Americans...he's absolutely right!

But it's not clear he really believes it. What kind of debt collector offers a debtor a mutually beneficial arrangement and calls it "reparations"? It makes no sense.

14/The reaction to Trump has spurred an outpouring of pro-immigration sentiment across the political spectrum, and that's good. But inevitably, that's going to lead to some pro-immigration cases that don't jive well with each other. And this book doesn't jive with mine.

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