“American immigration policy should serve the interests of America and Americans. That sounds obvious.” So begins Dan McLaughlin’s cover piece, “America’s Asylum System Is Broken,” in the new issue of NR. Yet “this is not the premise of two major areas of our immigration law as they exist today: asylum and refugee law and Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Each is grounded in humanitarian concern for the interests of potential immigrants, with little thought for American interests.”

Dan explains how we got here: During the Cold War, our humanitarian immigration policy brought in political refugees fleeing communist persecution who were “often the most pro-liberty, pro-democracy people in their societies.” When those immigrants succeeded here, “they undermined the ideological foundations of communism” in the countries they left behind. Today, “TPS systematically prefers people from the most dysfunctional societies of the third world. . . . We are selecting for the people least likely to be assimilated into the American creed.”

As Dan argues, though we pride ourselves on the humanitarian impulse to “welcome the stranger and share our blessings,” our laws are obsolete, and the system, routinely gamed by immigration lawyers, is broken. In fixing that system, surely we should try to “make American interests and values our compass.”

Also in this issue, Daniel Foster sidles up to one of the witches in Macbeth, intoning along with her: Something wicked this way comes. Except in his case, it’s “Something Is Going to Happen” — and “you aren’t going to like it.” Foster hears the “powerful geopolitical echoes from the decades that preceded the calamitous ‘short 20th century,’ spanning the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-first century analogues of the dynamics that produced that bloody age are again at play.” You may never have such a good time reading an essay foretelling doom.

Speaking of predictions of doom, we’ve been hearing a lot about the end of reading. Dominic Green’s piece on literacy, literature, and liberal democracy, “Reading Is Not Dead,” views things in a different way. “The next decades will see the collapse of the old cultural order,” he writes, but “at the same time, the growing digital economy and the growth in demand for high-quality niche print will continue to drive a reconstruction of cultural literacy.” And yes, it may be disorienting: “The medium of permanence and deep reading is not dead, but its near future will not look like its recent past.”

Elsewhere in this issue:

• Jim Geraghty on “authenticity” (yes, those are scare quotes) in politics: “Authentically Bad: How We Get Shameless Candidates”
• Andrew Stuttaford on a changing battlefield: “Ukraine Shows Its Resilience”
• Jack Crowe on the truth behind a Cuban atrocity: “‘Murder in the Skies’”
• Scott Sumner on an outmoded economic theory: “Keynesianism at 90”
• John Bolton on a failed agency: “Abolish the ODNI“
• Melissa Langsam Braunstein on  “Fighting the New Antisemitism“

The reviews in Books, Arts & Manners offer up a rich selection: Joseph Epstein on Peter Ackroyd’s biography of W. H. Auden; James Rosen on MAGA’s Michael Anton; Erich Prince on Theodore Dalrymple’s Agatha Christie; Charles Fain Lehman on Alvin Roth’s “controversial transactions”; Martha Bayles on Netflix’s Beef; Ross Douthat on David Thomson’s revisionist history of the movies; and Vahaken Mouradian’s bouquet of new releases.

In this month’s Happy Warrior, Mary Katharine Ham brings a bit of summer loveliness.

Last but not least, the star-spangled Whizzbang duo, the tall and bearded Charles C. W. Cooke and Luther Ray Abel, are back on the road for Our Spacious Skies. In “Charlie and Luther’s Hollerin’ Neon Dixieland Whizzbang Adventure,” the Hawaiian-shirted dudes cut a path from Appalachia to the Bayou to see what they can see in the land of the free.

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