A vital, page-turning education.
A convincing argument that most of what we believe about immigration is wrong.
De Haas, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and founding member of Oxford’s International Migration Institute, has spent his career investigating migration, but whenever he speaks before a general audience, the result is “petty bickering.” Provided one is not an ideologue, it’s entertaining when an expert debunks popular myths, and the author debunks one in each of his 22 chapters. From 1960 to 2017, the number of global international migrants rose from 93 million to 247 million. That doesn’t mean immigration is skyrocketing, however, since Earth’s population increased by the same percentage over that period. The “heyday of transatlantic migration” was the 19th century, when tens of millions of Europeans were colonizing the world. In the 19th century, critics warned that immigrants were destroying American culture. “It may be difficult to imagine now,” writes the author, “but Germans, Italians, Irish, Polish, Japanese, Jews and Catholics were once seen as unassimilable and even a menace to the nation in ways that are not fundamentally different from the way Muslims and Latinos have been portrayed in more recent times.” Although less inclined to demonize immigrants, liberals display their own share of prejudice. Believing that immigrants are fleeing poverty (another myth), they propose sending massive aid to poor nations, certain that once citizens have jobs, they’ll stay home. Not only is this a myth; the opposite is true. Immigration is expensive, and the penniless can’t afford to travel. Immigrants move to other countries for jobs (not a myth), and those countries need their labor. The world’s leading emigrators—Mexico, Turkey, India, and the Philippines—are not impoverished, but middle-income countries. It’s unlikely that many of the people who should read this book will do so, but everyone else will relish the lesson.
A vital, page-turning education.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781541604315
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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