Colonist, contributor to the wall street journal at the manhattan institute, fox newsey contributor among your books i want to begin where your book concludes because you say the following quote, liberalism as succeeded tragically in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Yes, i believe that is a big part of a political strategy actually. They have been added for some time and unfortunately they have had a lot of success in painting blacks as primarily f victims ad as defined by their demise asian first and foremost and then thei followup of course is that we have a Government Program or government solution to help you overcome your victimhood so its a political strategy. Your book writes about this and they have been a number of essays in Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society and wasnt a failure or success . I think if you look at the actual track record of the program and if you look at the goals that the objectives that were stated at the time you would have to say its largely a failure and that particularly with regard to the people that were targeted by many of these programs and by that i mean the black poor their lot has not significant the improved and to the extent that we were told it would not it would improve at the time. Another debate i think that we will move beyond separate but equal but in your book you talk about his darkly black colleges in the case of president ronald masonry who was he and why is he important under terms of trying to merge historically black colleges forced out because of the concerns of the impact it would have on other institutio institutions . I think the issue there was what has become of these institutions since the Civil Rights Act and since weve seen more integration in the country and the problem that these institutions have are that because blacks do not have options that they did not once have, particularly in the first half of the 20 century they are exercising those options and they are not attending a historically broad colleges to the extent that they once did because they have more options nowadays and so these schools are struggling with how to stay viable both economically and in terms of what they can contribute to Higher Education and among some of the plans were the smaller colleges perhaps merged and take advantage of scale. This is been resisted by some who want the schools to remain or maintain their independence and i can understand that but is often missed aldrich for reasons rather than practical reasons and so mason is someone who is pushing for this plan or a way to save some of these schools and he got pushed back because of that. Are these schools still relevant or should they merge with i think, if they are producing good results then yes, they should stay in existence. The problem is a lot of them are not and they are being kept afloat primarily through federal dollars that flow to them and my point is if a school is failing these charges then it should close and it doesnt matter whether its an allblack school or a traditional white school. If it is not meeting its subjective it should. Close. Where i think the valueadded in the School Systems of late in recent decades is in the stem fields where they do an excellent job of educating kids, math, science, engineering and so forth and you see a preponderance of blacks to go into those fields coming out of those schools so i do think they do serve a very vital purpose in Higher Education but that is not to say that all of them are performing at duty at the same level and should therefore all be kept closed. This is a cover story of Washington Post sunday magazine visualizing races in one of the headlines from Gene Robinson calling it americas longest w war. Your reaction to that . I think there is a tendency to view black history at large, particularly in americas history of what whites have done ha blacks. And there are various reasons that various groups want to keep that narrative alive but in the end i think black history is about more than that and yes, racism still exists and i dont know any reasonable person who would argue otherwise and nor do i expect to see america vanquished racism in my lifetime. But i do think that black history is more than that and for me the question and the more relevant question is what can be done in the face of whatever racism still exists . What was done in the past by blacks in the face of racism and i think that is the relevant story to tell today and that is the message to give to young people today and my fear is that by perpetuating this notion that its all about victimization and all about racism that you are sending the wrong message, i think, to the next generation. Why try in school if the teachers are racist and the tests are racists . If employers are racist . If youou send a kid out the door with that message i dont thank you are helping that child. Heavy felt the sting of racism . [crowd boos] oh, certainly. Ive experienced racism in a been called names and ive been followed around Department Stores and ive been pulled over by police for no reason that i can understand. You describe that in detail in washington dc. Where were you and how did that happen . I was doing an internship back in the early 90s in washington dc and i was interning at usa today and staying with a relative in the area and i was a on the sports desk so we had two or we do not leave work until the baseball games on the west coast were over so it was usually quite late at night by then. I was driving to and from my uncles house where i was staying and usa today headquarters and i had my car which had new york plates because i was from new york although i was driving in dc and i was driving home one evening after work or probably early the next morning, sometime after midnight and i hear the sirens blaring and the police pull me over and ordered me out of the car at gunpoint and pushed me to the ground and face away from the car and all the rest and they said i fit the description of someone they were after without a state plates and no one. What were you thinking . I was terrified. I remember getting back into the car after i left because they seem to be gone as quickly as they came after they realized i was not the right person and in my car shaking. I remember i had a standard and i cannot get it out of gear and my hand was shaking so vigorously but it was terrifyi terrifying. Story in washington dc making headlines, three black men, 16 years old, 36 years ago convicted of a murder that they did not commit or just released from jail what does that tell you about americas criminal Justice System . That it is not perfect. I thank youk will find and youd be hardpressed to find a black person of my age who has not experienced the things i have experienced. I think the criminal Justice System is certainly an improvement today over what it used to be and over what my father or grandfather experienced in this country but it is still not perfect. But i would caution against taking thesese examples and sait they are typical. Nurses exceptions or aberrations. Or saying the reason that so many blacks are in the criminal Justice System is because its a racist system per per se. I dont see a lot of evidence for that and i think often time we have discussions about the racial makeup of prisons and jails but we dont talk about the racial makeup of people who perpetrate crimes in this country and i dont thank you can really have one discussion without the others so as imperfect as communal Justice System is and has been and continues to be i still think wthat there are behavioral differences among groups that lead to some being overrepresented in that system and others being under representative student must talk title of three of your books. First one, please stop helping us. Whats the message . That was a look back at the Great Society programs put in place under Lyndon Johnson and expanded under nixon and others and i wanted to say what is the track record . Visa programs that were put in place to help the black in particular, welfare programs, housing programs and expansions of minimum wage laws and so forth and i wanted to look back and say what works and what hasnt worked and why. I was attempting to do that in that book. I all spot power . That was a book about and i have a little bit on this in police stop helping us but its essentially about the track record of using political power to advance a group economically which is essentially bent the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement since the time of canaan. The issue there was if we can integrate Political Institutions the economics and Everything Else will take care of itself but we just need to get our own people in place and the civill Rights Movement had quite a bit of success in doing that. If you look back by the early 1980s youou had major black cities in the u. S. And los angeles, philadelphia, washington dc and so forth that had black mayors and in addition to that you had left black Police Chiefs and fire commissioners and School Superintendents and so forth but if you look at the track record of the poor in these black run cities and if you look at washington or marionberrys washington dc in the 1980s or new jersey in the 1990s or coleman youngs detroit in the 1970s under these black regimes you have the poor becoming even more impoverished on their watch so i dont think the track record there is a very good one. That is not to say that the blacks should disengage in the political process because we have seen black regression under white men in white congressmen and white Police Chiefs. It is to say that the connection we were told was essential between black political power in black economic progress simply is not proven to be a strong as some people hoped it would be. Generally speaking, have these Government Programs helped or hurt africanamericans . I think, by and large, they have hurt. Theyla have hurt in a way the way i explain it is that there what the underprivileged need of any race or ethnicity is a moonwalk that has to occur. Its not something that lends itself essentially to political solutions. These are cultural changes that need to take place. Economists refer to it as Human Capital,ha certain attitudes and behaviors and habits that need to develop in a group in order to rise in america. It is what weve seen happen to other groups in this country. To the extent that a Government Program interferes with that necessary selfdevelopment i think is doing more harm than good and what a lot of the Great Society programs did interfere with thatre selfdevelopment or persons or groups work ethic is not going to improve if they think that the government is going to take care of them. You cant replace a father in the home with a government accheck. If you have a system in place that says to a woman, you know, if you have an additional child we will send you more money. If we see the father of the child around your house we will stop sendingd you that money. You can imagine the perverse incentives that were put in onace under programs like that and that is what we saw going on. We corrected, i think i must some of this with bill clintons welfare reforms of the 1990s but not entirely. I still think theres a legacy there. We are in new york and our guest is jason riley in addition to his book he is a regular contributor in his column is available at [inaudible] in the wall street journal. As always, we welcome your phone calls. 202748 8002 and be sure to follow us at the book to be on twitter and you can also send us a text message at 202 7488003 and jason riley let them in, the case for open borders. Asked, that was a book written in the middle to thousands and about immigration. I had i was working at the wall street journal at the time and the person i had been covering immigration for the paper got a new position and asked me if i wanted to take over the beat and thats how it fell into my lap and i did have a real dog in the fight in the sense that im not an immigrant or the child of immigrants and so forth but i did enjoy i studying history and immigrant history is fascinating. If only, the arguments wee realize as you read about it so old and have been around for so long. That book really came out of my writing editorials for the newspaper at that time. Its sort of i sort of expand on the arguments that the wall street journal editorial pages made about immigration over the decades and is very pro immigration editorial page. Which sometimes upsets conservatives, in particular. It is interesting what is happened with that debate because the sort of immigration review on the right and the trump era is very different from what it used to be. You always had a sort of isolationist protectionist strain on the right going back to pat buchanan view in the 1990s but that was never the dominant view on the right. Reagan was extremely pro immigrant and put in place in amnesty in fact. George w. Bush and his father were both very pro immigrant and even the republican nominees that lost like the mccain or romney were still far more pro immigrant then you had in donald trump. This is a new development on the right although there is always been this just more antiimmigrant on the right but a summer up in the dominant one so were in a new era here. Should be rules be different for an immigrant versus a refugee . Oh yes, two different groups but traditionally they have been considered two different groups. These days they are more senflated but the people who have started this will generally tell you that someone who is forced out of their country and who would rather be back home and is coming to the u. S. Is going to be a very different link from someone who willingly leaves their country to start a tonew life in a new place. Excuse me, what i am writing about in that book primarily economic immigrants and the case that i make is that we would do better to put in place guestworker programs or other types of programs that allow the law of supply and demand to determine the level of immigration. Right now it has been made by politicians and public policymakers were trying to think real hard about the u. S. Needs of the economy we will take a little bit from here or there and we will fill this demand and that just does notn work. Its a soviet style planning that isth left us with document fraud, 12 million plus Illegal Immigrants in the country and hundreds of dead bodies in the arizona desert and i think we would do better to put in place Market Mechanisms that would allow us to regulate the flow. The current book you are working on is what . Im currently working on anin intellectual biography of the economist [inaudible] who is based at the Hoover Institution td is someone who ive known a little over the years and whose books and writings had a huge impact on me when i discovered them in college. Its a project im looking forward to. How would you define your ideology . Can you put it in a box or is it more disparate than that . I guess i would define myself as a free market individual, freemarket conservative, someone who believes that Smaller Government is the way to go. Someone that believes in individual freedom. From please stop hoping us, you also wrote, the Civil Rights Movement has become, in your words, and Industry Trade and industry by whom . Its become an industry for everyone from individuals like you or al sharptons and Jesse Jacksons two entire soganizations like the naacp. I think they have effectively monetized black victimization. Different groups have done it for different reasons. If like the naacp. It is not in your interest or knowledge the things that have improved for black people, and what youre trying to do that the civil rights battle that has been hot and one and you are trying to stay relevant. If youre an organization like lives matter you want to raise money so youre going to play out certain aspects of whats going on out there on the racial front. Whether or not they are actually relevant, youre going to play that out because its in your interest to do so. We were talking earlier about the victimization narrative, and that something that democrats and black democrats in particular used to get reelected. So different groups i think have different incentives here, but it has very much i believe, an industry trend one you see an industry that is no vested interest in realistic assessments of black pathology. Guest because again that doesnt serve their purpose. They want to stay relevant by the want to raise money by the want to get reelected, and so they are going to keep race and racial victimization front and center at the national debate, whether or not its relevant. Host where you do most of your thinking and writing . Guest at home. I have a home office, and thats why worked out of mostly. Host you find yourself disciplined to do that . Guest disciplined enough. It took a little getting used to. I commuted into an office for more than two decades at the wall street journal, so it took a little adjustment but i find it more productive now than to simply being able to get started right away. Host our guest is jason riley. Well get to your calls in a moment. Y let me ask you about your father because you write about it in the book. Your parents had separated when you were young but your father was to very much enjoyed as a child. Guest yes, he was. I think it made a big difference. He was an excellent role model. Not only my father, i grew up my mother was very religious and we attended church to three week, and the congregation was full of black men who took care of their families, dressed a certain way, spoke a certain way, behaved a certain way. So ies was very fortunate. I grew up around a lot of very solid male role models, and i think it made a big difference. And i think toda