Tl;dr — A well-written, informative book on how immigrants assimilate in the U.S. using big data. But some obvious liberal bias to fit the conclusions into a neat narrative. I don’t read much on immigration policy, but do hold what I think are generally left-center views. Immigrants and immigration are a net good for our country; we need appropriate rule at the borders; and should make reasonable pathways to citizenship. No, I’m not a policy expert so I don’t have details, but this feels like a reasonable position. So I was interested to read Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, when it came up for a book club I was participating in. This came out a few years ago but I had not previously heard of it. Abramitzky and Boustan make the case that immigrants assimilate into U.S. society, are upwardly mobile, and improve our economy with no downsides to U.S. born. It’s a decidedly liberal book, especially in an era of anti-immigration rule and rhetoric, but they take it so far as to sometimes unfairly overlook what their own data say to fit the “myth-busting” story line they want to make in their book, rather than taking the data for what they are, where some findings may (gasp) support a more conservative position. Outcomes don’t always or often map wholly onto one side of the aisle, and pretending or forcing them makes me distrust the honesty of the entire book. I won’t detail each instance of this bias but I’ll note a few areas that particularly stood out to me. In chapter five, they are discussing the upward mobility of children of immigrants and U.S. born of the same socioeconomic starting point in the U.S. So, for example, they compare U.S. born children of, say, parents who are in the 25th percentile of income with immigrants whose parents are also of the 25th percentile of income in the U.S. In the same breath they note that many contemporary immigrants are “under placed” in the U.S. – they may be...