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The Contradictory Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act
At a time when immigration has become a polarizing and toxic topic in our politics, it’s worth remembering that 50 years ago this week President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality...
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America’s Immigration Policy Needs Less Emotion and More Reason
Whether you agree or disagree with America’s current or past immigration policies, it’s hard not to shake your head at one distinctively American aspect of immigration policymaking—how it tends to...
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Was the 1965 Immigration Act a Failure?
For as long as America has proclaimed itself a welcoming country of immigrants, policies have been in place to keep specific classes of people out. Naturalized citizenship was limited to “free white...
View ArticleCalifornia, Where Less Costs More
Is “Eureka” still the state motto? I suppose so. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll soon redesign the California official seal to express the real code we live by: Pay more and get less. That’s...
View ArticleCalifornia’s New Homework Assignment Is a Waste of Time
Don’t tell my kids I said this, but it really is OK for Californians to skip homework assignments—if they come from Sacramento. If you’ve lived in California for the past two years, you’ve probably...
View ArticleLet’s Face It, California Is Nuts
My fellow Californians, the state of our state is nuttier than ever. In saying that, I do not meant to judge the sanity of individual Californians—to the contrary, national surveys show we have lower...
View ArticleHow Do You Say Laissez-Faire in Chinese?
China’s Communist leaders are struggling to embrace one of the pesky truths of the capitalist system they have adopted (and adapted) with such success: Markets don’t just go up; sometimes they go down....
View ArticleEurope Has a Problem With Immigrants, Not With Islam
In Germany last month, the debate over Europe’s growing Muslim population reached a fever pitch. More than 100 robberies and sexual assaults were reported in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and the city’s...
View ArticleHomeless Services Don’t End Homelessness
Homelessness is often described as a problem we must solve—and Los Angeles city and county now have expensive plans to do so. Homelessness is also an industry. And as George Mason professor Craig...
View ArticleA Yes Vote on ‘Brexit’ Would Launch a Gripping Melodrama
The shorthand term “Brexit” is a snappy, media-friendly term suggesting a potentially abrupt historical moment, a milestone break with one reality and embrace of another. But the truth is far more...
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Are the Best Parts of America British?
If you’ve ever seen close siblings argue, you will get a sense of the relationship between Britain and America—and a sense of the discussion trying to define this relationship at a Smithsonian/Zócalo...
View ArticleIs Universal Health Care an Impossible Fantasy?
For more than a century, America has argued about how to share the costs of health care. Drawing from new government-sponsored insurance programs in Germany and England, Progressive reformers made the...
View ArticleNational Oversight or Not, All Health Care, Like All Politics, Is Local
At first glance, America’s fragmented, private health care delivery system and Britain’s state-run National Health Service have little in common. But both nations’ contrasting approaches to caring for...
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The Radical Paradox of Sweden’s Consensus Culture
In the 1930s, the American journalist Marquis Childs, after spending time in Sweden, wrote the bestselling book Sweden: The Middle Way. Childs described a country without major social conflicts between...
View ArticleHow Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Drove My Generation into Politics
It’s often said that California is just like America, only sooner. We confront the same issues as the rest of the nation, just earlier. Perhaps no issue exemplifies that sentiment better than...
View ArticleCan Taiwan Teach California How to Thrive Under an Authoritarian Power?
Is California becoming another Taiwan? In asking that, I don’t mean that earthquakes will turn California into an island. Instead, what California and Taiwan share is a problem—the predicament of the...
View ArticleEven Kafka Couldn’t Dream up California’s Surreal Housing Crisis
I keep hearing you Californians calling your state’s housing crisis Kafkaesque. You are far too kind: I never imagined a bureaucratic nightmare this cruel, absurd, and surreal. I don’t know exactly how...
View ArticleWhy Tariffs Have Backfired Throughout American History
In a truly iconic scene from the 1980s comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a high school economics teacher played by Ben Stein fails to elicit even a muscle twitch from his seemingly catatonic pupils as...
View ArticleWhy Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy
One afternoon in July 1985, President Ronald Reagan met with his domestic policy council in the White House cabinet room. The question: should he keep pushing legislation to offer amnesty to...
View ArticleA Yes Vote on ‘Brexit’ Would Launch a Gripping Melodrama
The shorthand term “Brexit” is a snappy, media-friendly term suggesting a potentially abrupt historical moment, a milestone break with one reality and embrace of another. But the truth is far more...
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