Policy, But Better: July 2026

What unites state legislators and the Vatican, why the left is wrong about assimilation, and whether Kakistocracy is as good or bad as they say

Last week I presented my book on how to make immigration popular at the Board of Latino Legislative Leaders summit in Niagara Falls, in front of state legislators and leaders from across the country. It was refreshing to talk to people who actually care about what works. I noticed the same pragmatism I found in the Vatican last fall: most of these folks really just want to do things that will help their constituencies, and they know migration can be a huge part of that, whether they are more liberal or conservative.

You may have also noticed that this section is now called Policy, But Better. The truth is that half of what I end up linking to here these days is about population, housing, AI, academia, or the general craft of policy design. This is all in line with the broader ambition set up by my July 4 essay, though immigration will still remain the spine of this newsletter.

Popular by Design also has a chat now, and, since we are building a community there, come introduce yourself. Last time we started with your biggest immigration bugbears. This time I am opening a new thread to ask for book recommendations: what do you think folks in our pragmatic-oriented community have overlooked?

In case you missed it: Starting with the big things I promised for the Fourth of July: Why US Nationalism is Essential after 250 Years, on how I learned to love my country and where Popular by Design is heading next. Then came Even In a Liberal Democracy, Some People Need to Be Deported, on why due process lacks legitimacy when losing never has consequences. And just this week I published Reality May Have a Liberal Bias, but the Social Sciences Still Need Conservatives, on why I was wrong about viewpoint diversity. Just so that you don’t think I am becoming some kind of a reactionary, this month we also ran a somewhat more programmatic and positive guest essay by Aubrey Westfall of Wheaton College on whether local governments should pick their own immigrants.

If you also want to write for Popular by Design, there are now actual guidelines for that, so please do reach out. And don’t forget that paid subscriptions are now also on: if you have been finding this newsletter useful, and you want to keep it free for everyone, upgrading is the best way to support it.

Finally, as a sort of experiment, from now on, in each new monthly newsletter, I’ll be highlighting a relevant book I will recommend (or NOT) to my readers among the stuff I read recently. Let’s start with some of the positives:

👍 Richard Hanania’s new Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster argues that the real divide in politics now runs between populists and institutionalists, and that populism reliably ends in government by the least competent and virtuous people available. Given the somewhat unusual perspective Richard is coming from (right-wing populist to libertarian academic to conservative anti-populist), I thought the book was extremely engaging and his framing could be educational not just to regular readers and moderates, but also to many of my left-of-center colleagues who study populism. My sense is that these folks usually just assume populism is bad because it tends to be against minorities in the West or “liberal democracy” the way they envision it without thinking much about why it appeals so much to conservatives and why they may not like it either.

This is not necessarily detrimental to the main argument in the book, but my biggest quibble is that I am not sure populism is really a stable trait as the book portrays it. Given my own research showing that the same exact politicians like Barack Obama can decide to use it in some cases but not others, it seems to me more like a risky strategy of losing politicians. But, all in all, the book has many insightful points, including a genuinely novel conceptualization of who the elites really are and case studies of when populism can actually do some good in developing countries (which you wouldn’t expect to see given the title).

Here are the July links (linking does not imply endorsement):

• The biggest immigration news as this goes out: the Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is weighing attaching a $100,000 fee to Optional Practical Training, the program that lets international graduates work on their student visas. Jeremy Neufeld points out that the immigrant founders of many billion-dollar companies first came to the US as students: they would qualify for an O-1 visa today, after building their companies, but not back when they were getting started. There seems to be a very tough competition for sure, but this is the single worst thing the Miller administration could do on immigration and to our country, all for no good reason, to date. It certainly does not seem to be helping the administration’s own push for a new golden age of American science.

• This is July, which means now is the right time for your annual Gallup data update and immigration thermostat appreciation note. Only 29% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% just two years ago, while 31% want it increased, almost back to the all-time high of 2020. Repeat after me: in this house, we believe that thermostatic public opinion is real. That is, Americans have not changed their hearts and minds on immigration much, but they have changed their concerns in response to the actual policy reality on the ground.

• Jerusalem Demsas at The Argument argues the left is wrong about assimilation. You cannot invite people into a culture you keep describing as rotten, and the share of Democrats calling it important that immigrants share American customs fell from 79% to 59% between 2016 and 2020. Assimilation talk, just like the stuff on patriotism and nationalism, makes many progressives uneasy, but giving up on it just hands the language of belonging to restrictionists.

  • Meanwhile, Eli McKown-Dawson and Nate Silver show that America used to be exceptionally patriotic but is now below average. In the first World Values Survey wave in the 1980s, 95% of Americans said they were proud of their nationality; the latest wave puts it at 78%, below the European average.

  • David J. Bier also made the case that the Founders lived through, and loved, high immigration rates, with the immigrant share of the population at roughly a fifth in 1776 by his estimates.

• Martin Schröder and colleagues have a new PLOS ONE paper on AfD support using ten years of German panel data: concern about immigration alone accounts for roughly 75% of the explicable variation in AfD support, and about 90% for vote choice, with economic deprivation adding almost nothing. The “left behind” story keeps losing to the boring answer that far-right voting across Europe is mostly about immigration.

• Tiphaine Le Corre, Jane Green, and Alexander Yeandle have a big new review of whether political elites shape immigration attitudes in EJPR, synthesizing over 200 studies: elites barely move how extreme people’s views are, but they strongly shape whether those views get expressed, at the ballot box and in everyday life.

• My friend and co-author James Dennison asks whether the standard Western findings on the demographic predictors of immigration attitudes hold up globally in Public Opinion Quarterly, using World Values Survey data from 66 countries. Mostly yes, actually (his words), with instructive exceptions: education and left-right ideology predict attitudes far less outside the West.

• Hannah Ritchie notes that Thailand’s population has already peaked, with fertility near one child per woman and the crossing below replacement made at a fraction of the income level of its neighbors. Getting old before getting rich is no longer a hypothetical about China.

• Sonja Trauss at Works in Progress looks at what a high-fertility subculture actually does differently: Yiddish-speaking women in the US expect 6.6 children against a national average of 1.6, and the difference looks structural (early marriage, communal childcare) more than attitudinal.

• Chris Best says Substack is partnering with Pangram now to fight what they call “Claudefishing.” The integration actually seems pretty reasonable to me: they acknowledge that not all AI writing is slop, and the scan is basically an optional feature for those who care. The good scenario is that all this will just nudge writers to be more careful about their AI use (like it just did with this post which is now apparently 100% human-written 😉). The bad scenario, of course, is that it will create yet another excuse for public witch hunts as I argued about earlier. Knowing the internet, I am not holding my breath.

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know!