Lionel Shriver on the Immigration Taboo

22:27Lionel Shriver:And of course, taking in a migrant is her idea. Whereas her son is hanging out on YouTube and listening to Victor Davis Hanson. And Jordan Peterson. Right. But my friend Nico, the protagonist, And he doesn't like all of these migrants pouring into New York and burdening the taxpayer in spite of the fact that he's not a taxpayer. And he's resentful of all the dependency that they accrue, the burden they put on the city. But at the same time, he himself is a dependent. He doesn't have a leg to stand on. He's living on his mother. He doesn't work himself. He's also, he's a mooch. And mooches don't like other mooches.

23:35Lionel Shriver:And that's part of my perspective. But I think that in terms of the political balance of the book, the fact that he is also a drain on social resources is important. It means he is a hypocrite. So not only is his mother dewy-eyed and overly optimistic, as so many progressives are, about human nature, but he himself is also, his position is not especially defensible either. And I just think that gives the book some political balance. Yeah, I agree.

24:31Coleman Hughes:As I read the first act, and especially the moment when the migrant Martine, this late 20s woman who says she's from Honduras and is sort of bubbly and eager, and Nico finds her to be over-eager. She's overly helpful. She insists on cooking breakfast every day, and he doesn't actually want her to cook breakfast for him every day. She insists on cleaning all the time, and he doesn't think she needs to be cleaning all the time. And now he feels that she's making him look bad because he doesn't contribute to the house. But he, you know, so like when looking at his vantage point on her, I couldn't tell if Martine was actually annoying or if Nico was just a miserable douchebag who put a negative spin on everything in his life.

25:30Coleman Hughes:and I kind of alternated between both of those opinions in different times because it seemed like he was unable to, first of all, there was nothing she did that he ever seemed to see in a positive light. And his anger, which I thought was more properly directed at his mother for letting this stranger in the house, letting a stranger displace her own son and totally consume their lives. It seems like the proper object of his anger should be his mom, but then the real object of his anger seemed day to day to be the migrant herself. And again, I couldn't tell if he was being overly harsh towards the migrant and misdirecting his anger, or if this migrant was really behaving in a way that was objectionable.

26:34Lionel Shriver:Well, the nature of Martine is up for grabs in the novel. And on a narrative level, there is a clear and equally weighted interpretation of who she is. Basically, she is either a paragon, one of the nicest people in the world, or she's a lying sack of shit. And the book doesn't really answer that question for you. That's up to the reader. And you can't completely trust Nico's interpretation of things, but you can, I think you can trust him factually. You know, I don't think he's an unreliable narrator in that sense, but you know that he's a biased narrator and he doesn't want this woman in the house from the start, even before she's arrived.

27:38Lionel Shriver:So his reading of things is not neutral and you can't entirely trust his description of her in terms of its texture. So we know what she says, We know what she does, but we are not sure whether he's giving her a fair break in his descriptions of her. And I like this unknowability. It's one of the things that makes the book work. This unknowability of this one migrant in some ways stands in for the issue of immigration in the book. I haven't written a polemic it's not this is not a pure political argument on one side so that Martine is standing in for whether or not mass immigration to the United States is a a social cure-all and really the best thing that could possibly happen, or is a catastrophe, right?

28:55Lionel Shriver:Is a corruption of our systems. It's way too much too fast and bringing in too much foreign influence more than we can absorb in the tiny amount of time that these people are arriving. In other words, the issue itself is very difficult to sort. whether it's a social good or a social bad. And therefore, that unknowability of this one character is representative of the tussle in the book ideologically.

29:36Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I want to ask you what your preferred immigration policy would be, but before I do that, I'll give you mine. I mean, my basket of beliefs about immigration is, number one, I think we should all want to have a strong border. If for no other reason than that in a democracy, the idea is that the major policy decisions are up to the people, right? And there's nothing as big as who gets into the country. And so if you don't have a border, the question of who gets into the country is just answered by the randomness and historical contingency of what happens in Central America. If there is a crisis in Guatemala tomorrow, we have a flood of immigrants the next day, right?

30:35Coleman Hughes:And when citizens of a democracy experience that level of volatility and randomness with respect to such a big policy, it's going to cause, there's going to be a massive political backlash to that.

30:51Lionel Shriver:Well, also it has huge political implications because of birthright citizenship and naturalization. When you allow mass migration, you allow political takeover by groups. I mean, look at what has happened in the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, and it's happening in Texas as well. These are formerly red states turning blue or turned blue. And that is a massive political transformation.

31:36Coleman Hughes:When you say they're turning blue, how do you see that happening?

31:41Lionel Shriver:Becoming democratically controlled. When they used to be Republican controlled, and it is the result of immigration. You know, that's getting a little, that trend is a little undermined by some of the results of the last presidential election, because obviously Hispanics are not doing what they're supposed to. and always vote democratically. But the trend has been that Hispanics have entered these states, set up residents, had children, and it switched the political landscape completely. That's not small.

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34:23Coleman Hughes:EbGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EbGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. So my mix of views on immigration is, you know, my first half is that I think there's a border. We have to have a border. And Democrats and Republicans should support that because all it does is bring the immigration issue inside the mechanism of democracy.

35:01Coleman Hughes:Once we have a border, we can choose like we choose on every other policy between the politicians that reflect our different and preferred immigration outcomes. Now, once we have a secure border, I mean, it seems like Trump has done a good job of securing the border. Then my immigration preferences are, I think, significantly more liberal than they are conservative in the sense that I do think if we had a points-based immigration system, I'd be comfortable with a high level of immigration. I think it makes America stronger. And especially if we are getting a selected version of the immigrants from each country.

35:46Coleman Hughes:I'm personally, I think, you know, I think everywhere I've gone in the world that's outside Western Europe, nobody is afraid to say, I like my country. I like our culture. I don't want it to change too fast. Like if you go anywhere in the world, if you go to Korea or West Africa or Latin America, people will say, yeah, I like my culture. We have a language. We have a history. We have traditions that I like. And I don't want to just dilute that too quickly. And I say, OK, yeah, I get that. That's your culture. But in America and Western Europe, I think that those expressions have become taboo because they appear to be close cousins or they're heard as close cousins of racism.

36:39Coleman Hughes:And so I think a lot of the concerns about immigration that are voiced in terms of economic issues are often, I do think that they're often really the cultural loss is what's primary for people psychologically. And because people are afraid to express that, Because it's been made taboo, people are driven to economic arguments that aren't the crux of the issue. I agree.

37:08Lionel Shriver:I think where the emotion is coming from is cultural. And that's often backed up by economic arguments. But that's a blind for where the heart is. Yes.

37:25Coleman Hughes:And here's my, I think, nuanced perspective on that. is me, when I'm in Hispanic neighborhoods, when I go to Miami, when I'm in places that are predominantly Spanish-speaking, I don't feel that alienated. And this is perhaps inseparable from the fact that I'm half Hispanic myself. My mother's first language was Spanish. My grandparents on her side did not speak English. I grew up speaking Spanish, not really fluently, but pretty often. And so it's impossible for me to say that that's not coloring my level of comfort with Hispanic immigration because it doesn't feel foreign to me. Obviously, Mexico is not the same as Puerto Rico, but still there's a cultural similarity there.

38:14Coleman Hughes:There's a linguistic similarity there. So me personally, I don't feel so much of a sense of cultural loss from Hispanic immigration in particular to America. However, can I empathize with an American that does? Sure. To me, it's no different than, like, I would never judge a West African who's complaining about Chinese immigration to West Africa. I would say, yeah, like, I get that. You know, you don't want the country to change that quickly. You know, so my view is that I understand that the cultural loss concern, though me personally, I don't really share that emotional worry. Well, I find it almost comical that

39:05Lionel Shriver:in both the wealthy areas along the coast in Mexico and lately in Mexico City, there is enormous resentment locally because there are too many Americans. none of the vox pops that i've read have i ever heard anyone catch themselves on about the irony um but you know i often think that it's worth turning it around in your head and if americans were flooding into, I don't know, Nigeria,

39:47Lionel Shriver:and buying up the land and not, you know, just taking up space, as people do, that's what they do, wouldn't the Nigerians be reasonably resentful?

40:01Coleman Hughes:Oh, of course. I mean, there's no question. It's not even a question.

40:05Lionel Shriver:And I've written about this before, and this was, of course, the other spectator column that got me into terrible trouble, which was simply maintaining that this is not a racial issue. This is a human one. This is what people are like. First of all, we are political. That is, we naturally glom into groups, right? And when your hang is invaded by someone else from another hang in sufficient quantity to be not just, aren't they interesting, a few visitors from elsewhere. The people who live there don't like it. And it's just, it's all over the world. And there's plenty of this kind of resentment in Africa.

40:57Lionel Shriver:The South Africans are very resentful of Zimbabweans who have come in for economic reasons in quantity. And they're both black. They're both Africans. And there's been a lot of resentment in Colombia from Venezuelans fleeing Venezuela, coming in in massive numbers by the million. This is what people are like. and I think it's unfair to tell the western world Europe and the United States and Australia you can't feel that way that's racist that's against the rules that's that just means you're evil people you you alone of all the of all the countries and peoples of the world you're the only people who are not allowed to feel that specific resentment and resistance to a massive influx of people from somewhere else.

42:02Lionel Shriver:And, you know, just emotionally, I think just having enforced this shut up clause on people is poisonous. And one of the things that I try to express in a better life. Those are not the only sentiments that are expressed in a better life, but it's one of the only books I know that allow characters to express that cultural weariness and pissed-offitude.

42:41Coleman Hughes:Yeah, so, I mean, one way of thinking about this from a progressive lens is, you know, I actually wanted to ask you about this because we both went to Colombia at different times. And I wanted to ask you what it was like to be there when you were there, but I'll get to that in a second. But one of the most recurring conversations when I was at Colombia between 2016, 2020 was gentrification and the changing character of Harlem. Harlem is a famous and culturally important neighborhood in the African-American imagination. It was the center of the African-American Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s.

43:29Coleman Hughes:It was just many of the luminaries and artists of that age came out of Harlem. Now, of course, the thing no one ever talks about is that Harlem was fully a Jewish and Italian neighborhood prior to that. Black people started coming in the early 1900s. And of course, this is of a piece with the two lessons of reality, which is that change is inevitable and people don't like change. So change is obviously a change from a Jewish and Italian neighborhood to essentially the black Mecca. Once black people moved in and it took on this outsized importance, well then now the black people that live in Harlem and the black people that have an attachment to Harlem, want it to never change, right?

44:17Coleman Hughes:Even though our entry changed it from the way it used to be, right? We want to freeze the frame exactly as it is when we're comfortable with it, when it represents our culture, when it represents traditions that we care about. And so now with a new generation of mostly white, but multiracial, actually, people coming from all around the country moving into Harlem, making it, you know, instead of a 90 % Black neighborhood, you know, whatever, 50 % Black neighborhood. Those numbers might be slightly off, but just give me a break. It's directionally correct. Well, now, this is seen on the progressive left as a totally valid concern about cultural loss.

45:04Coleman Hughes:Totally valid for people that live in Harlem to worry about the fact that the character of the neighborhood is changing, it's becoming whiter. Something is lost, in other words, when the character of the neighborhood changes. And these same people will look at you sideways as if they don't understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. If a white person living in Arizona were to complain about the changing character of their town that, say, it used to be 10 % Mexican, and it was really cool to have a Mexican restaurant. And now it's 50%. And they might say something like, I don't recognize my town anymore.

45:44Coleman Hughes:Boom, racist. If a black Harlemite says the exact same thing, I don't recognize Harlem anymore, someone on the progressive left thinks, oh, well, that's totally valid. I mean, if anything, I'm on their side of that. We're gentrifiers, right?

45:57Lionel Shriver:Yeah. So, I mean, is there...

46:00Coleman Hughes:I try my very best in politics and I think this is what my fans on this podcast appreciate is like, I'm actually trying to keep a consistent set of books on what my principles are so that they can survive. They can survive encounter with the old black Harlemite that doesn't like change and the white Arizonan that doesn't like change. It's like, what is permissible and when does it cross the line? I guess is one way of asking the question. When does it cross the line from a valid concern about cultural loss to actual bigotry?

46:39Lionel Shriver:Well, it's just bigotry is in the eye of the beholder.

46:44I mean, I certainly take your point that the, you know, change is the one constant.

46:51Lionel Shriver:And we're all going to resist it. But in relation to immigration and a lot of the changes we're talking about, the change is a consequence of political decisions.

47:13Lionel Shriver:Conspicuously, Joe Biden's political decision to essentially run an open border for four years. And, I mean, let's contrast that. The story of American immigration is the story of political decisions. Notably, in 1924, I'm sure you're familiar with this, we basically closed the door on immigration and we closed it until 1965. There were little trickles. But that was a consequence of mass immigration to people that had enough. And in a lot of ways, that's the best thing that this country ever did for its own unity, because that period of time forged a unified American public. whereas before there were all these immigrant groups, many of them suffering from bigotry, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians.

48:20Lionel Shriver:I mean, that's part of the story the United States tells itself with great self-congratulation. But one of the reasons that we did forge an American public that felt part of the same country was because we stopped letting in people in such quantity in such a short period of time and allowed genuine assimilation to take place. And I'm from that. You know, my ancestry is German on both sides, but I grew up, I wasn't especially aware of my German roots. It was of passing interest to me, but fundamentally I was an American and I wasn't a hyphenated American. And I am a consequence of that long period of time when gradually through intermarriage, by the security of a stable population, going through a major world war together, we were part of a polity that was secure.

49:52Lionel Shriver:and knew what it was. And I wonder if we don't need to do the same thing again. I mean, you asked me what I recommend. I would see either a moratorium or certainly a tightening of our immigration rules. I'm definitely with you on, you know, if we are going to keep letting people in, use strict criteria for high-end people. I mean, we're selling something that's valuable. And I don't mean like the golden visa sort of thing, but we are in a position to attract the best and the brightest of every field. And we waste it because getting into the United States legally is a nightmare. By the way, I am an immigrant.

50:53Lionel Shriver:I'm twice over an immigrant. I've immigrated to the UK and to Portugal. And I know how much of a pain in the bum legal immigration is. And I hear from all kinds of people how terrible it is to try to legally immigrate to the United States, how long it takes to get a green card, etc. We need to make that much easier. And I would end the asylum system. That is, I'd certainly end an asylum system that just means that you put a toe, literally a single foot, into U.S. territory, and then you immediately have a claim on asylum, a claim on benefits, certainly a claim on our judicial system, which is not nothing.

51:47Lionel Shriver:And it's now so corrupted. It's so overwhelmingly just a route to economic migration. 90 % of the applications are rejected, and then we don't make people leave. We're making liars out of people. We're forcing them to make up stupid stories, and it doesn't work anymore. And that's also the case in Britain, which is another story I follow very closely. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's it's all it's almost all fraudulent. And so let's just withdraw from whatever treaties are requiring this. That doesn't mean you can't let in populations that you decide to let in. And, you know, there's a situation in Ukraine.

52:44You can volunteer to let in hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine. But don't make it just the default requirement that anyone who shows up on your doorstep can claim to be persecuted.

53:00Lionel Shriver:and then they're going to be resident for the next 10 years when you finally get around to adjudicating their case, by which time they're never going to leave. This is a completely dysfunctional system.

53:15Coleman Hughes:Yeah, there's a few things I want to flag that I think don't get talked about enough. I remember when I first learned that almost every country in the world has voter ID. because as an American, we can get, well, you know, we're the global superpower. So in a way, you could say we have an excuse to be slightly narcissistic because we are the most powerful country in the world. But a result of that is you can just assume that if America does it this way, the whole world does it this way. And so it's probably standard. Well, no, like we don't have voter ID. Every country in the world has voter ID.

53:56Coleman Hughes:You need to present an ID to vote. We are the weird ones, right? If it's racist here, then I guess the whole world is racist. That is another way of framing it. But another thing here is birthright citizenship, right? We have birthright citizenship in America. It's easy to assume that every country in the world operates that way. Really, it's pretty much only us. It might literally be only us, but certainly of our peer countries, of any country you'd probably think to name right now, they don't have birthright citizenship. And when we think about why we have birthright citizenship, it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration.

54:37It's just that it has to do with slavery.

54:40Coleman Hughes:That's what the 14th Amendment was for. Correct. The 14th Amendment was a response.

54:45Lionel Shriver:It wasn't for people pouring over the southern border.

54:47Coleman Hughes:Not only that, the people who wrote the 14th Amendment, the only thing in their mind was slavery and how to guarantee that blacks in the South could not be stripped of citizenship rights. So what was the way to frame this? Well, period, if you're born here, you're a citizen. The subtext was, to the South, you cannot deprive black people, former slaves, of citizenship. They couldn't even have envisioned, there was no such thing as mass immigration over the Mexican border at the time. They couldn't even have imagined that. not only that they could not have imagined the phenomenon of anchor babies the notion that this rule would then create an incentive for people to come across the border and have a baby you would have been speaking Greek to them if you said they probably would have dismissed these as totally hypothetical concerns but that's the nature of law is that you write it one way and 150 years later a totally unforeseen problem arises as a result of how you phrase the law.

55:55Coleman Hughes:But so we shouldn't, I think we shouldn't pretend that the issue of birthright citizenship is like, well, they decided it, we voted on that constitutional amendment, therefore, for all time, we have the phenomenon of anchor babies. It's like, they weren't even thinking of anchor babies when they wrote that.

56:11Lionel Shriver:So I think that's... It's even worse than the standard story of anchor babies. We have, there is now an entire industry, which is mostly from China. There are two different ways they do it. One of them is they actually just send eggs and sperm and have surrogates who are American citizens have Chinese babies with Chinese DNA. And then they're American citizens and then they get shipped back. And then...

56:57Coleman Hughes:That's insane.

56:58Lionel Shriver:Then there's the farming of having Chinese women come over, have your kid, and then they take them back home. So the child is an American citizen, but is raised in China under the PRC, doesn't know anything about the United States, but is still a citizen. By the time that citizen is 21, they can come over to the United States and get their parents in as permanent residents. I mean, this is farming American citizens by an antagonistic culture to the United States. And that's putting it mildly. So they are actually farming a fifth column for our country, using our laws against us. I've looked at the 14th Amendment and I think the phrasing is really up for grabs it's all about the parents being under the jurisdiction of the United States well the people we're talking about are not under the jurisdiction of the United States and I guess it just depends on what you think that word means but I think there's a very good case to be made that the people who wrote that amendment did not intend that to apply to a couple of tourists from another country who happened to have a kid while they were visiting the United States, and then suddenly it's a United, it's a U.S.

58:54Lionel Shriver:citizen. It doesn't make any sense. you know if if both of them are both their parents are italian they don't have any roots here happen to be here when they bear a child and then the kid isn't italian it's american

59:12Coleman Hughes:right and americans would never have this expectation in reverse right if i if my wife goes into labor when we're in india i would not be scandalized when the indian said well Topher kid is not a citizen of India. That's not how it works, buddy. You know, and so I agree with all that. So at the same time, though, like I said, if we had an orderly border, I would be on the side of increasing the rate of immigration. And it sounds like that might be, this is legal immigration I'm talking about. It sounds like that might be a difference between us.

59:46Lionel Shriver:um i think if we didn't have such vast illegal immigration then i could easily see increasing legal immigration i mean i've seen that for years that's my problem we're still reeling from having written let in well we're not even sure i i read all different figures but there's certainly 10

1:00:07Coleman Hughes:million people over four years and it could be a lot worse than yeah yeah so but so here i'll give you some of my basket of opinions on immigration, my more liberal opinions, is that I hear a lot of talk about immigrant crime. And obviously, every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is especially galling because they're not supposed to be here at all. So there's something doubly angering when an illegal immigrant commits a crime. Because it's like, if our government was doing their job, that person shouldn't have been here to begin with. And whoever suffered their crime shouldn't have suffered it.

1:00:55Coleman Hughes:And so I get that. But again, I think this is a situation where rather than just say what people really feel, which is like, I'm losing my culture too fast. Like, are my kids going to grow up in a town the way I grew up, you know, where we have the same cultural traditions and everyone speaks English? Instead of saying that, they talk about the immigrant crime rate, which in America is, to me, it's not the biggest issue. We have a crime issue in America, much worse than Europe, but it's mostly homegrown. And it's disproportionately in the Black community, men in their 20s, pockets of inner cities.

1:01:37Coleman Hughes:And it's not most Black men. It's really small pockets committing an outsized amount of the crime. And that's a real issue. But it's not really the crux of the issue with immigration from Latin America, except for, obviously, the cases of literal gangs. And that might seem like an exception that negates my whole argument, but actually, if you put that in proportion to how many people are coming over, how big is the gang problem as opposed to the millions and millions of people that are coming over to be landscapers? I think you got to deal with the gangs, and this is why we have to have borders, because we shouldn't be letting any gang members into the country, right?

1:02:22Coleman Hughes:We shouldn't be letting anyone with a criminal record into the country. But does that mean that crime from Central America is the problem that the political right thinks it is, I think it tends to be exaggerated and it tends to be sublimated because it's really more about the issue of cultural loss.

1:02:41Lionel Shriver:I think the statistics are in the middle. The crime rate, especially among illegal immigrants, is worse than the progressives claim. The statistics have been fiddled. There are not separate statistics for illegal immigrants. And so the only statistics we have, which are rather poor and extremely old, and for the most part, the data is not accurately kept. It's often not recorded what someone's immigration status is when they're arrested or what their national origin is. But the statistics that we've got, the bad ones, throw all the legal immigrants in with the illegal immigrants. And so, you know, that includes some French exchange student.

1:03:47Lionel Shriver:You know, it dilutes where the real problem is. So there is a significant crime rate among illegal immigrants. So I wouldn't call it a complete non-issue, but I also agree with you that this is one more instance where people seize on the, especially these single horrific murders, you know, the Lake and Riley. Yeah, like Lake and Riley. And I have found that line of attack really annoying because it's as if all that matters is if they're criminals. It's one of the things that's going on with the ICE situation that the assumption runs, even according to Trump's own rhetoric, that the main problem is the criminality.

1:04:55Lionel Shriver:And it has nothing to do with the sheer quantity of just other people from elsewhere who didn't ask for permission to be here. Um, so it's, and therefore I should not be, uh, deporting anybody unless they have been convicted of crimes. And in fact, um, in the likes of the New York times, you're going to mostly have them then specially select out how few of these people, even if they are criminals, are violent criminals, as if that's the only kind of crime that really matters. And that line of reasoning just whittles down what the real problem is to a very small number of people comparable to the mass of people who have come in.

1:05:42Lionel Shriver:And so it's the wrong argument. I agree.

1:05:48Coleman Hughes:And another aspect of this is my opinions on immigration are quite different depending on whether we're talking about America or whether we're talking about Europe. if I were in the UK, I think I would be a pure conservative about immigration because of the kind of immigration that they've gotten and the way in which that immigration has been a lot more problematic, in my view, than the immigration that America has gotten. The immigration that America gets, including most of the illegal immigration from Central America or South America, mostly we're not getting people that are subscribed to a religion which has at its core the concept that the state and the religion should be one.

1:06:47Coleman Hughes:In Islam, there is not a concept of separation of church and state. Islam is as much a politics as it is a religion. It's supposed to be the governing law of anywhere where Muslims live. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't versions of Islam that have found a way to skirt around that and therefore assimilate into secular democracies or constitutional republics and the like. But a huge portion of the Muslim world is still coming from a culture where that is assumed. It's assumed that the religion, that the laws of the land should be Sharia law, some interpretation of Sharia law, whether it's literal or watered down.

1:07:30Coleman Hughes:And that's a massive problem. It's not a problem that America has with immigration from Guatemala and Mexico. Mexicans do not expect, first of all, most of them are Catholic, And they have roughly the same religious views that Italian immigrants, Catholics, and Irish Catholics have had. And so we just don't have – that creates an entirely different layer of friction. And then, you know, the much reported and taboo, frankly, stories of groups of Muslim migrants committing sexual crimes in the United Kingdom, in Germany, all over Europe. I mean, these are stories that you just do not hear happening from the Hispanic migrants that Americans get.

1:08:22Coleman Hughes:Now, these obviously, these things are radioactive to talk about, but I think that I'm speaking well within the fairway of verified facts, facts that have been verified by journalistic outlets across the political spectrum, including left-leaning political outlets like the BBC and the New York Times and so forth.

1:08:50Coleman Hughes:and so my attitude towards immigration in America is proportionally a lot more optimistic than it is in Europe. Would you agree with that or where do you differ if at all?

1:09:05Lionel Shriver:The experience in Europe and the UK of taking in large numbers of Muslims has been catastrophic. There has been very little assimilation. It's led to enormous social friction.

1:09:23Lionel Shriver:And I am supportive of policies, even for the United States, that would put a very high bar on letting in Muslim immigrants. And I know that's a very uncomfortable position for most Americans, not just progressives. But, you know, we don't believe in discrimination. But what has made the small Muslim community in the U.S. so moderate is that it's small and dissipated. That when you don't...

1:10:06Coleman Hughes:Can it also be the specific sections of Muslim societies that the specific immigrants were getting? Possibly.

1:10:14Lionel Shriver:entirely it could be that we generally got a a more educated uh section of of muslim countries

1:10:23Coleman Hughes:um now now when you say policies that that would discriminate would it be it would literally be if you're a muslim you're getting judged by a different set of standards or would it be we have a religious neutral set of standards that are going to filter out by definition extremists of any sect or any religion?

1:10:46Lionel Shriver:I think it would probably be done by weighting different nationalities. So it wouldn't be, we're not letting Muslims in, but you don't let in very many Somalis.

1:11:03Lionel Shriver:The Europeans have pretty good statistics on this stuff. They have done studies on the likelihood of particular nationalities of becoming dependent on the state as well as committing crime. And it's very obvious which the countries are that, you know, you've increased the odds fantastically that these people are going to be a problem in one way or another.

1:11:27Coleman Hughes:But what do you do with country? I mean, there's so many countries in the world that are 30 % Muslim, 70 % Christian. and in my view, you know, we want a lot of those immigrants. Like, Nigerian Americans have done fantastically well. There's a lot of Christians and a lot of Muslims in that country. So if you select against nationality, we are paying a cost, right?

1:11:52Lionel Shriver:It would be a particular problem with using nationality as a substitute for religion. But also Ghana.

1:12:00Coleman Hughes:I mean, there are many countries that are too mixed by religion to, I guess, select based on nationality, right?

1:12:10Lionel Shriver:You know, I'm not writing the policy, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be writing a policy in the U.S. that would just say, we don't let Muslims in, sorry. And I'm not sure I would be comfortable with that myself. But we can weight our preferences and let in more people from countries that don't have dominant Muslim populations. And I have to say, I was a little shocked to learn recently that there are now 800 ,000 Muslims in New York City. I mean, and that's almost all.

1:12:57Coleman Hughes:Like permanent residents? Yes. Of New York City? So that would be what, what is that? Almost one-tenth of the population? Yes. About 10 %?

1:13:06Lionel Shriver:Yes. And that's almost as many as there are Jews. And you know the problem I'm talking about. I mean, New York is the largest Jewish community outside of Israel in the world. And if I were Jewish, I'd be a little anxious about this growing Muslim population, which is almost entirely this century. Before the turn of the century, I gather they weren't very good at collecting the statistics, but it was well under 100 ,000 Muslims. There just wasn't a big Muslim presence. And now there's a big one. And it does help explain Mamdani. That was certainly an ingredient in the election. And the problems with Muslim populations tend to be when they are concentrated in one place and don't have this, because you can tell that this is such an awkward subject.

1:14:25that I become unlucid. Yeah.

1:14:30Lionel Shriver:But this is the case just in general when groups come in and people don't usually assimilate because they want to. For the most part, it's because it's hard. It's because they have to. They are forced to deal with the host population and little by little, they get with the program. it's a natural process but when you're surrounded completely with people just like you for example you don't have to speak English because everyone around you speaks whatever language you speak then assimilation is much less natural and if New York Muslims are anything like the ones in Europe then they hang out with each other this is again, it's a human thing People do that.

1:15:23Lionel Shriver:That's what they prefer. People like them around. They like being around people like them. And it's these more isolated concentrations of Muslims that tend to foster more fundamentalist religion, continuation of patterns of cousin marriage.

1:15:59Lionel Shriver:and prejudiced views of women and oppressive attitudes towards women, the things about Muslim culture that are antithetical to Western culture.

1:16:12Coleman Hughes:Let me offer a pushback here. And this is, I'm trying to, I'm searching my lived experience right now for, I've probably talked to over 10.

1:16:20Lionel Shriver:Oh, and don't say lived experience, please.

1:16:23Coleman Hughes:Searching my memory, if you prefer. searching my memory of the past 10 years. I've probably had 50 conversations or so with maybe like 100, to be honest, with Muslim cab drivers and Uber drivers late at night where they're driving me home from something and I'm a little drunk and I like to talk to them. Where are you from? What do you think? I asked them about politics. I asked them about, you know, life and virtual, all of them speak English. So, you know, that's, this is not a scientific study, but, but, you know, the Muslims coming to live in New York city, it's deeply in their interest from a business perspective and from a financial perspective to learn English.

1:17:15Coleman Hughes:And so it's not because we force them to, but it's because it's, you know, they're go-getters and they want to make more money. And English is the business lingua franca of the world.

1:17:26Lionel Shriver:Well, that's the way, that's why people do things. It's in their interest. And so that makes perfect sense. And in designing immigration policy, you just want people to do things in their interest. You want to organize things so that what is in their interest is what you want them to do.

1:17:50Coleman Hughes:Right. So, but what do you make of the argument that, you know, most of the kids, like, okay, the people I'm talking to, they, you know, they came to America maybe at, maybe the earliest at 18, but probably more like 25. Some of them came at 30. So they really, their mindset is to a large extent a product of their upbringing often it's often Pakistan or Bangladesh or any one of these countries. But the kids that they're having in America some of them speak the language of where their parents are from. Many of them don't. Many of them speak English and only English or maybe they speak broken Hindi or broken Urdu.

1:18:40Coleman Hughes:Their children won't speak any Hindi, any Urdu. They'll only speak English. and people who study child development have long known that you don't you don't adopt the accent of your parents if your parents have an accent from another country you adopt the accent of your peers and accent is actually it's a proxy for culture in a lot of ways because it's not only that you're adopting the accent of the of the new place you're actually adopting the values in the New Place, which is the subject of a million stories from Rami on HBO to, I can think of other examples, but all these short stories about immigrant children who don't relate to their immigrant parents and have such friction because their immigrant parents are going to be, you know, for one thing, very homophobic.

1:19:37They're going to be, you know, you get married young,

1:19:43Coleman Hughes:You get a job that's a stable job. And the immigrant's child who grows up in an American city and is comparing himself to his American-born friend says, well, why do I have to get married young? I mean, first of all, what's wrong with gay marriage? They're not hurting anybody. Can I be an artist? Why can't I be an artist? And in a million ways, they're more Western than their parents because of where they were born. And so that's where the assimilation happens. It happens through generational turnover rather than taking a snapshot of the immigrants, the Muslim immigrants that you're describing who grew up elsewhere.

1:20:22Well, that is the happy story.

1:20:26Lionel Shriver:Europe is having the unhappy story. That is too frequently. Because there's a second generation problem in Europe. In the Muslim communities, the second generation is often more fundamentalist and more observing than their parents. and more prey to radicalization, terrorism, et cetera. It's kind of the opposite. I mean, I think it may be partly the consequence of, you know, being neither fish nor fowl, not really being located culturally because they're not from where their parents are. They didn't grow up there, but they don't feel that they really belong where they are. And that's alienating.

1:21:36And part of it is just the times we're living in.

1:21:42Lionel Shriver:There is this phenomenon of political Islam. And as you noted, Islam is political anyway, doctrinally. And a lot of the loonier fringe of European Muslims has been that second generation that just doesn't really identify with where they live.

1:22:19Coleman Hughes:yeah no i know i mean europe has um like i said a problem an order of magnitude worse than america but i think i think we agree on that relative ranking of the of the problems but i i i am nevertheless more optimistic than you about i think about america even given our our horrible past five years of immigration, I think.

1:22:46Lionel Shriver:Well, I am more optimistic about the United States in terms of the influx from South and Central America. I think that population is much more assimilatable than the population that has arrived in Europe.

1:23:07Coleman Hughes:I think they're more eager to assimilate. I think they like America. I think they're more interested in it. I think they like America more than a lot of the immigrants that come to the UK like the UK.

1:23:19Lionel Shriver:Yeah, and they're still coming broadly from a Judeo-Christian background. Yeah, so there's less friction there too. Yes, much less friction.

1:23:30Coleman Hughes:And so here's the other aspect of this I want to ask you about. is, so you've been highlighting many of the problems with too much immigration, too uncritically, too fast, without a filter. Now, there's an opposite problem here that a lot of places in the world are facing, which is they have basically zero immigration policies. And now that the whole world's population is collapsing and no one's having babies anymore, they're looking at a 50-year prognosis of total fiscal and economic collapse. And I'm talking about countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. And they're the canaries in the coal mine of a phenomenon that is also affecting every Western country in the world, every Judeo-Christian country in the world, except for Israel, which is the one that has managed to, through certain cultural memes, through kind of a different subculture has been able to have a lot of babies still.

1:24:33Coleman Hughes:But every country in Europe, plus America, plus Canada, plus Australia, we're pretty much below replacement rate and that trend's only going in one direction. It really doesn't look very good for the countries like Japan and South Korea that have had a zero immigration policy. And so, you know, 50 years hence, do you think it will have been a bigger mistake to the countries that let in too much immigrants? Or do you think it'll look like a bigger mistake the countries that let in no immigrants?

1:25:04Lionel Shriver:It depends on which immigrants you're talking about. Apropos of what we just discussed, I think Europe is going to regret having opened the floodgates to North Africa and the Middle East. I think that's not going to turn out well.

1:25:26Lionel Shriver:and among that population, you've got a very large welfare dependency. So the economics are not great.

1:25:41Lionel Shriver:I do, however, have a little section in the novel where it's at the end of a long discussion. There are lots of discussions about immigration in the book. I like dialogue, and it's a good way of working out what the book's about. But it just is this woman says, you know, all this anti-immigration talk, you realize there is another perspective that in due course with the low fertility, the same countries that are experiencing such popular resentment are going to be fighting with each other. over the young people who are left and who can offer them more to come to their country to support their labor force.

1:26:45Lionel Shriver:So, I mean, I definitely recognize that argument, and it is entirely possible that the United States will end up being an enormous beneficiary culturally, socially, biologically, anthropologically, politically, everything, because we have more people and everyone else has populations that are starting to shrink.

1:27:19Coleman Hughes:So I think that America is going to come out ahead in all of this. I think I share your pessimism about Europe. But I think in 50 years or 100 years, America is going to be very glad that we didn't go the route of zero immigration like Japan and South Korea. I think we're going to end up being global winners as a result, which is not to say there are no trade-offs to immigration. Of course, there are downsides. But I think overall, that set of trade-offs is going to be better for the country than the zero immigration route of East Asia. And I'm glad to have you on the podcast to express what has been, what some people will definitely feel is a provocative and taboo conversation in certain ways.

1:28:14Coleman Hughes:But it's a very important one to be honest about because either we honestly air our opinions, including our differences of opinion, Or we enter this just political seesaw of extreme policies that then get reversed by the next president. We've already seen this. It's like Biden undoes everything Trump did out of spite, and then we get mass immigration, and then Trump goes as hard as possible rounding up immigrants in ways that cause chaos. And then the left is crazy in turn. And it's really, it's like the seesaw element of our immigration policy cannot be healthy. We have to find a way to have a sane immigration policy that doesn't divide the country so much and go between extremes.

1:29:15Coleman Hughes:And I think part of that is allowing people to honestly express opinions without immediately canceling them and calling them a racist and so forth. So that's how I feel about it.

1:29:27Lionel Shriver:Well, that's one of the purposes of the novel I'm releasing next month is to stimulate conversation. I mean, I think it's a good book club book for exactly that reason. This is an issue that most people have very strong feelings about. And yet a lot of those feelings, we've told them that they're not allowed to express, that we're going to call them names if they even let any of it out. And I don't think that's healthy. I think this is one of the most interesting issues out there. It's certainly the biggest issue of this century internationally. And it's many-sided. It's not simple. You can easily draw very different conclusions from the same sets of facts.

1:30:25Lionel Shriver:And that's why it made such great fiction. I mean, it was very interesting to write. I write about immigration a lot in nonfiction. And I never get bored.

1:30:41Coleman Hughes:All right, Lionel Shriver, the book is called A Better Life, available in bookstores near you or online. I urge you to grab it. Try to make a book club out of it. Might get rejected from your local book club, but that's okay. Start your own book club, you know? That's what it's all about. Lionel Shriver, thank you very much.

1:31:01Lionel Shriver:It's been my pleasure.

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