Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future, by Jens Heycke (Encounter, 345 pp., $29.99)
Pessimism about the scale and pace of migration into America has become something of a conservative mantra. The concerns center on both the scale of migration—how many foreigners should be welcomed yearly, through what channels, and what characteristics should be sought in that selection—and the corollary but distinct question of whether, and how, those migrants should be “assimilated” once here, however that term is defined. The two questions are often dealt with interconnectedly. In his 2018 book, Melting Pot or Civil War?, Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam argued for a lower annual intake with a higher skillset because America’s “melting pot” was rapidly fraying and couldn’t be trusted to function properly at current rates, with migrants primarily low-skilled and increasingly coming from outside Europe. Similarly, while wealthier European nations had a tradition of welcoming immigrants from former colonies, both Christopher Caldwell and Douglas Murray warned that the assimilation steamroller would be overwhelmed by the droves of Muslim refugees flowing into fast-secularizing countries that had forfeited a common culture to assimilate them into.
