About “Popular by Design”
Popular by Design is about a stubborn problem: good policy has to work in practice and earn public support in a democracy, and our politics too often delivers neither.
I’m Alexander Kustov, a public policy professor at the University of Notre Dame. I’ve spent more than a decade studying immigration politics, and my book, In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular (Columbia University Press, 2025), distills years of data and frustration into one core insight: no democracy has ever eased widespread immigration concerns without securing its borders and being selective about whom it admits. Persuasion through better messaging alone doesn’t cut it. What wins voters’ trust are better policies.
That insight is the premise of this newsletter. Immigration and public opinion remain its main anchors, but the same problem shows up across other areas too: demographic change and depopulation, housing and land use, artificial intelligence, and the broader question of how America keeps adapting without taking its advantages for granted. In each case, the way forward depends on crafting policies that are popular by design: effective enough to work, and clear enough that ordinary people can see why.
Why subscribe?
Everything here is free, and it stays free. Paid membership is patronage: your support keeps the writing free for everyone and funds the editing, guest posts, reader events, and the time to keep this a serious project. It also, honestly, backs me up: telling people the inconvenient version of things has drawn its share of hostility, and knowing there are real people behind the work, not only its loudest critics, is part of what keeps me doing it. Supporters contribute $15/month or $120/year, with a small founding tier at $1,000/year. And if you’d like to be part of it but genuinely can’t afford it, just email me.
If you want a public conversation where policy is judged by whether it actually works and whether people will actually support it, I hope you’ll subscribe. And if you want me to dig into a particular policy or political puzzle, immigration or otherwise, let me know. I look forward to the conversation.
