If you're reading this, it's very likely that you already know that Reihan Salam, now President of the Manhattan Institute, is one of the greatest public intellectuals active in the US today. He is, famously, the author of Melting Pot or Civil War?, a book making the case for restrictionist immigration.

However, now, Salam is making the case for caution. We particularly appreciated this point: "Public opinion on immigration tends to be 'thermostatic'; it runs counter to the excesses of those in power. Just as it turned in favor of immigration during the previous Trump administration, it turned sharply the other way under Biden." The overall thrust of his argument is basically this: the Administration needs to keep the majority of the people on-side, so that it can eventually reach some sort of broader settlement of the immigration issue, and so it doesn't face backlash. Call it the moderate version of the MAGA agenda.

So, for example: "On deportations, take steps that build credibility and support, like expelling criminals and recent immigration-law violators. Those protesting such moves reveal their own extremism, rather than rallying the public to their side. Conversely, deporting people who’ve been living in the U.S. peacefully and productively for over a decade is guaranteed to spark damaging headlines, especially if they have citizen spouses or children, as many of them do."

Other proposals: declare a national emergency and build detention centers near the border; pressure Central American countries to be more cooperative; "Hire additional immigration judges as quickly as possible to address the case backlog."; bring back Trump 1.0's "public charge" rule, which barred the immigration of those unable to support themselves; reduce family-based visas because "unused family-based visas carry over to the employment-based categories"… There's plenty of smart stuff in there.

But "Most of all, though, the incoming administration should learn from Biden’s overreach. Not only does the public tend to shy away from drastic approaches to immigration, but the open borders left and its allies in prestige media will seek to capitalize on every misstep the Trump administration makes." Of course, one could counter that without large-scale mass deportations, Trump might keep the center but he would lose a significant chunk of his own base, so that the electoral calculus would be worse. Still, an important debate. Trump got a mandate, yes, but not a mandate of the size that he can just ignore political reality.

Policy News You Need To Know

#WokeIsDead — "The University of Michigan Board of Regents has asked its president for a plan 'to defund or restructure' the Office of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion—according to the UM faculty senate chair," reports the Manhattan Institute's John Sailer.

#WokeIsNotDead — W. Paul Coates (Ta-Nehisi's father) is going to receive the National Book Award. He is a publisher of (among other things) antisemitic tracts that blame the slave trade on the Jews. Somehow nobody seems to have a problem with this.

#DOGE — WaPo's Jeff Stein has had a briefing on what DOGE intends to actually do. They intend to put DOGE people at every agency and use "advanced technology" (like AI?) to identify regulations that need cutting, and then submit those cuts to Trump for signature. Once they've cut all those regulations, they intend to "identify 'the minimum number of employees' necessary to maintain each agency's core function, which should be lower" once the regulations are slashed, and then cut those employees. This still seems half-baked to us, but it's early days and Elon is a lot smarter than us. Everyone who wants government to work better should give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, there's more stuff to his plan.

#Tax — Brookings' Kyle Pomerlau has a good briefing on the likely issues surrounding corporate tax in the upcoming tax fight.

#HigherEd — A new brief from the Manhattan Institute points out that the nation's top public policy programs have almost no conservative faculty. Here's hoping the Trump-Vance Administration really looks at these programs' accreditation and tax-exempt status…

#Immigration — Yesterday, we noted record numbers of foreign student visas being granted in the US. Today, Heritage's Jay Greene adds commentary to show why these numbers are too high.

#IRA — Cato's Travis Fisher , Adam N. Michel and Joshua Loucks make the case for total IRA repeal.

#Environment — R Street's Philip Rossetti asks: what will the impact of the second Trump Presidency be on air pollution? He answers: probably good. He notes that while Trump's first term pursued a deregulatory agenda, rules on air quality were not touched. But a bigger reason is that market forces have been leading to reduced air pollution under both Trump 1.0 and Biden, largely low-cost natural gas.

#AI — Brian Chau of the Alliance for the Future has a good post arguing that the "AI safety" people have become what he calls, cleverly, "one of the groups," meaning those usually foundation-and-billionaire-funded single-issue groups within the broad Democratic umbrella that are single-mindedly focused on making their own party more crazy. This suggests that on AI the wind is at the accelerationists' side.

#Gender — We have written previously that AIBM, the American Institute for Boys and Men, produces excellent research. For example, they now have an issue brief on the decline of men in doctoral programs. They report that the share of doctoral degrees going to men dropped from 73% in 1980 to 43% in 2022. Basically the same number of men are getting PhDs now, but since 2013 the number of women receiving PhDs has increased by 26,000 (!). Men are now the minority of MDs, and their numbers have plummeted in other health fields: enrollment in veterinary programs, for example, has declined by 40% for men over the past forty years, while female enrollment has surged by about 400%. Given that there's reason to believe that women in academia cause more censorship, which is toxic to the academic world, this is a topic of concern.

#VibeShift #PreferenceCascade — Ray Dalio, who runs the world's biggest hedge fund and is noted for his macroeconomic insights, is very happy Trump got elected. (Why didn't he say it before?) More interestingly, he forecats FDR-scale change, particularly in the area of government reform and deregulatory reform.

#Permitting — Permitting is a huge issue for people who want to "build" as the Andreessen-propelled meme has it, and R Street has a good report on state and local permitting for the energy sector.