PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe American-born son of Bangladeshi immigrants, an editor at National Review and The Atlantic, Salam has written a book that is simultaneously a personal reflection, an accessible summary of current research and a nuanced policy discussion. It is also an implicit reprimand, suggesting that when it comes to debating immigration, we’ve been doing it very, very wrong ... No doubt, Melting Pot or Civil War? will leave many immigration restrictionists unconvinced that enforcement would ever be adequately \'resolute.\' Some progressives will accuse Salam of underplaying the racial animus driving poverty among immigrants. Others will note that low-skilled immigration is already on the wane. Still, this bracing book could be a conversation-changer — if only the outraged on both sides would let it.
Tyler Anbinder
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness ... Anbinder devotes at least one chapter to each of the major immigrant groups — Irish, Germans, Russian Jews and Italians — vividly detailing the political turmoil, famines and pogroms that led them to leave their homes and families, the horrific steerage voyages across a turbulent Atlantic Ocean and their lives in New York ... The text of City of Dreams clocks in at nearly 600 pages, yet it gives little insight into how newcomers like these assimilated, and how their children and grandchildren were educated into the growing middle class, as they so often were. To delve into that question, an especially crucial one today as immigrants struggle to make their way in an 'hourglass' postindustrial economy, readers of this admirable history will have to look elsewhere.
