Mark Krikorian beat me to it, posting about the episode of Uncommon Knowledge on immigration that he and I taped this afternoon, joining Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute.
I second Mark’s comments about Tamar, who is simply one of the most delightful and articulate people I’ve ever met, and add a word or two about Mark himself, whom I was meeting for the first time, and who turned out to be supremely articulate (and to have a marvelous voice–a ringing baritone–which is the kind of thing that helps in television). In short, a TV host’s dream: Both sides represented by guests who are more than civil in their demeanor and more than pointed in their arguments. I’ll let everyone know when the show will air.
In the meantime, the big news is the anti-immigration piece by Samuel Huntington in the current issue of Foreign Policy (and my thanks to Derb for linking to the article last week as I was prepping for today’s shoot). To quote a just a few sentences:
Continuation of this large immigration…could divide the United States into a country of two languages and two cultures….such as Canada and Belgium….The transformation of the United States into a country like these would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries. Americans should not let that change happen unless that are convinced that this new nation would be a better one.
Who is Samuel Huntington? Samuel Huntington is an esteemed, not to say revered, professor of political science at Harvard. Which means, of course, is that those, such as Tamar, who wish to argue in favor of very high rates of Hispanic immigration can no longer dismiss their opponents as members of the crackpot right. (As Tamar herself realizes: She has already written a letter attacking Huntington to Foreign Policy, and she will be writing a review for the Washington Post of the new Huntington book from which the Foreign Policy essay was drawn.)
The immigration debate just got a whole lot more interesting.