and
Danielle Allen at the
Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics After graduating from Harvard, Salam worked as a reporter-researcher at
The New Republic and as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations before becoming an editorial researcher for
David Brooks at
The New York Times. Salam also worked as a producer for
NBCUniversal's
The Chris Matthews Show and as an associate editor at
The Atlantic, thereafter accepting a fellowship at the think tank
New America.
National Review In 2014, Salam was named executive editor of
National Review. While he was on staff,
National Review gained a reputation for publishing clashing opinions on a wide range of policy issues.
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream In 2008, Salam co-authored
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with
Ross Douthat. The book grew from a cover story for
The Weekly Standard, which called for a reinvention of Republican domestic policy. Salam and Douthat argued that the
Republican Party had lost touch with its own base and that its Bush-era, big-government policies were "an evolutionary dead end." They instead advocated "tak[ing] the 'big-government conservatism' vision" of Bush, and giving it "coherence and sustainability" by vigorously serving the interests of the less-affluent voters, who had become the party's base. The platform would include "an economic policy that places the two-parent family as the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security, which is at the heart of the GOP agenda."
Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders Salam's second book,
Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, was released in 2018. It "contends that while the United States should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, mass low-skilled immigration is swelling the number of poor people in a country that is struggling--with modest success at best--to fulfill the aspirations of the less-privileged citizens already living here". The
New York Times Ross Douthat (co-author of Salam's previous book) described it as "a rigorous, policy-driven argument for more-humane-than-Trump immigration restriction".
Megan McArdle commended it for its "admirable and all-too-rare willingness to lay out the problem in clear terms", and Noah Smith, writing in
Foreign Affairs, called it, "a thoughtful, well-informed, mostly economic argument for limiting low-skilled immigration".
Cato Institute immigration expert
Alex Nowrasteh argues that Salam makes numerous factual and logical errors in arguing for reducing immigration.
Manhattan Institute presidency In February 2019, it was announced that Salam had been selected to become the new president of the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Salam was profiled in the
Wall Street Journal shortly after taking on the presidency and described his interest in examining topics like urban "political monocultures", and "punitive multiculturalism", while still maintaining the Institute's focus on issues such as school choice, pension reform, limited government, and lower taxes. In 2022, Salam defended Manhattan Institute fellow
Christopher Rufo amid his campaigns to ban LGBTQ instruction at schools. ==Political views and style==