The lively style and constant change converge to create a kind of urban shopping paradise that centers on hip, trendy Mitte and its surrounds, featuring a collection of everything from edgy boutiques and organic cafes to upscale jewelry shops and galleries (like one in a former gas station), all frequented by creative artist types. On a mid-December visit, the crisp winter days made a retail adventure — with brisk walking and frequent stops — even more inviting.

Mitte is also where I found two stylish yet affordable hotels: the year-and-a-half-old Soho House(Torstrasse 1, 011-49-03-0405-0440, www.sohohouseberlin.com, from $224), a 40-room hotel in a historic Bauhaus building that has become the buzzy epicenter of artists, writers, and designers in the city; and Casa Camper (Weinmeisterstrasse 1, 011-49-03-0200-03410, www.casacamper.com/berlin, from $244, including breakfast and round-the-clock buffet), by Camper, the Spanish shoe company. Opened two years ago, Casa Camper has appropriately fabulous design — intimate and cozy, with clean, uncluttered lines — and a terrific Asian-tapas restaurant, Dos Palillos, by Albert Raurich, former chef de cuisine at the celebrated El Bulli.With one (or both) as home base, you are ideally situated to explore. I stayed at Casa Camper, but I started my stroll west on Torstrasse from Soho House, and before long I hit upon a fresh crop of streetwear shops, including Primitive (Torstrasse 102, 011-49-30-2887-3618, primitiveshoes.com), a born-in-Los Angeles skate-fashion label, and the recently opened Superficial (Torstrasse 102, no phone, www.superficial-berlin.com). The latter’s aesthetic is rock ’n’ roll chic, with a punky-pop edge and soft jersey dresses and screen-printed T’s that are perfect for Lady Gaga’s dancers. Not surprisingly, one of the mega-star’s former dancers frequents the establishment (and performed at the shop opening).

Co-owner Tony Vouardoux, a filmmaker originally from Switzerland, curates an ever-changing selection of items, such as his own capsule line of nylon windbreakers printed with the fluorescent palette of the old analog television screen test ($78), a flower-patterned belt with a butterfly buckle ($26), and nail polish bottles with a girl-figurine top ($13). Other tongue-in-cheek items for the season included shiny Christmas tree ornaments shaped like grenades ($25).

Perhaps because Vouardoux is a filmmaker, Superficial is the kind of retail shop that blurs boundaries. The hairdresser for the singer Beth Ditto has crafted accessories that were carried here, but he has also been employed to cut hair as a kind of performance art in the middle of the store. Vouardoux has also had guest painters in from Tokyo sit outside on the street, painting custom T’s for passersby at the bargain price of $20 apiece.

In just the five months he has been open, Vouardoux has been observing rapid change in the neighborhood, with new shops opening seemingly every week. “There are so many things happening on this street, so we really wanted to be here,’’ he told me, watching an eye-candy parade of pedestrians go by. “It’s been in the shadow of Mitte for a long time – it’s still edgy, still with graffiti on the walls, and there are all these young people and creatives. Of course it’s still a shopping area, but it’s a little bit underground.’’

A couple of doors down, A.D. Deertz (Torstrasse 106, 011-49-30-9120-6630, www.addeertz.com) sells relaxed, elegant menswear, including multicolored leather gloves ($37), knit caps ($53), and handwoven overalls ($343). “For a lot of years, nothing ever happened on Torstrasse,’’ said Wibke Deertz, the owner and designer, who opened the shop in December 2010. “Now this is the edgy part, with the credibility that comes along with that. It’s been a good year.’’

A.D. Deertz occupies a long, narrow space that has a minimalist, art-gallery feel: bright blue-and-red-checked scarves are stacked on low wooden stools – as are suede shoes – and canvas bags hang on the wall like pieces of art. In the back, big loft-like windows let in an abundance of natural light.

Artist Anna Hellsgard, whose four-year-old shop Bongoût (Torstrasse 110, 011-49-30-2809-3758, www.bongout.org) specializes in screen-printed artists’ books, shirts, and other works, has been a relative fixture on the booming street. She showed me the silkscreen atelier at the back of her store, and an exhibition by artist Ehren Tool, a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War who, since 2001, has created a striking series of more than 6,000 ceramic cups featuring complicated war images of skulls, Tomahawk missiles, and bombs (each cup $72).

Afterward, I peeled off from gritty Torstrasse onto quieter, tucked-away Linienstrasse, a parallel street. The shops here are hidden in a different way, amid pretty brick residences, apartments, and historic buildings. I encountered galleries galore and retail finds of a different sort, such as clothing made from recycled fabrics at pop-up store Upcycling Fashion (Linienstrasse 77, www.upcycling-fashion.de), and high-end jewelry by designer René Talmon l’Armée. After 17 years in Paris, he has just opened Atelier René Talmon l‘Arméein his native city (Linienstrasse 109, 011-49-30-9559-8466, www.renetalmonlarmee.com).

Trained in a traditional goldsmith atelier in Berlin and at the prestigious Hermès workshop in Paris, l’Armée cultivates a look that might be called vintage-inspired: He uses old-fashioned hammers, anvils, and magnifying loupes to create his pieces, and his boutique resides in an 1850s building (obsessed with the history of place, he even showed me a black-and-white print of the building in 1979, from a monograph by photographer Hans Martin Sewcz on Berlin’s Mitte district). But the aesthetic is wholly l’Armée’s, with a rugged, modern edge – the atelier’s interior features custom-built jewelry showcases that recall bell jars, and his new line includes hammered silver cuff bracelets lined with crocodile skin for men (price upon request) and delicate black diamond strand necklaces for women (from $132).

“There are so many great shops here – it could be hairdressers, it could be clothing, but they’re all little places with very good design,’’ l’Armée said. “You just have to walk around and look.’’

Around the corner on Auguststrasse, you will find Marron Interior Studio (Auguststrasse 77, 011-49-30-2809-4878, www.marronberlin.de), owned by Sandra Baumer and her husband. The five-year-old store sells beautiful housewares; near the entrance, I found a nice display of the small and simple, including Sukie travel journals ($16) and coral plaid tea towels ($25 a pair); of particular charm were a set of bone china cat cups (about $18 each) and a larger version decorated with a turquoise owl (about $22). On the far side of the shop were the large and dear, including carved wood bowls and serving trays ($769) and an exclusive selection of furniture from the current collection by German design house Richard Lampert. The latter is more suited for daydreaming, but I took a few photos for inspiration.

After all that shopping, I wanted to recharge. By day, I hit up the recently opened goodQ (Tucholskystrasse 43, 011-49-176-3228-9718), a yogurt and sweet shop owned by Mario Attard. Though there are cookies and other bakery items for sale, a small cup of plain yogurt topped with pomegranate is a perfect and refreshing treat (about $3.40).

By night, I had been told to people-watch on the rooftop bar of the Soho House. But I did that one better, hunting down a craft cocktail at Buck & Breck (Bruinstrasse 177, 011-49-176-3231-5507, buckandbreck.com), a tiny, refined 14-seat cocktail bar that guests enter by ringing a bell marked simply with the word “BAR’’ (look for the faux-gallery window; in mid-December, there was a tongue-in-cheek display of battered men’s shoes). If there is space, one of the owner-bartenders – Gonçalo de Sousa Monteiro and Holger Groll, two of the city’s most respected mixologists – will come down and let you up.

Upstairs, in an intimate, warmly lighted room, impeccably crafted cocktails take center stage: a frothy Ramos gin fizz resembled a pristine white milkshake, and a Manhattan sparkled like a garnet. I found myself sipping a perfectly balanced Talisker Old-Fashioned next to one of the creative neighborhood denizens who sold me the dress I was wearing. Now that’s uber-local.

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A small hotel with a residential feeling, where rooms start at $240.

BASICS

Opened in August after a long delay, this 55-room property is a nice alternative to those in Midtown. Designed by the New Yorkarchitecture firm Grzywinski+Pons — who also did the Hotel on Rivington — it appeals to an under-35 crowd with its bar, style-conscious rooms and downtown location (though when I stayed, during the holidays, families were also in evidence).

LOCATION

The hotel cultivates a “feel like a local” charm, and its location, at Kenmare and Elizabeth Streets in NoLIta — on a residential block but within easy walking distance of SoHo, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy and the East Village — helps greatly in this regard.

THE ROOM

Thanks to a midwinter promotion, my husband and I upgraded from a standard room to a corner room on the seventh floor for less than the starting price of the standard. The doorman escorted us up, pointing out the cushy king bed (“It’s going to knock you out,” he said) and the lovely views of the Empire State Building. The snack bar was affordable (“half the price of other minibars”). With wood-plank floors, unfinished concrete ceilings, sleek, spare tables and chairs, a carpeted headboard, and a bedside iPod dock that looked like an old-fashioned radio, the aesthetic was a mixed bag of industrial chic and modern design. The floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the rooms stopped short of exhibitionism with strategically placed frosted panels. The sound insulation on the windows and hallway doors could be improved — coma-inducing bed or not, you’ll want to bring earplugs for a good night’s sleep.

THE BATHROOM

Corner rooms have a stand-alone tub and a glass-enclosed shower, with a separate toilet by the door. Bath products scented with Moroccan rose are from Red Flower, the organic beauty boutique two blocks away.

AMENITIES

An abundance of free rentals is available at the front desk — bicycles and skateboards for getting around town, laptop, iPad and video game systems for in-room entertainment. The in-house restaurant, Ellabess, is just off the lobby lounge, and also furnishes the hotel’s room service. Its menu — with items like pork chop surf and turf, fried mashed potatoes — has a dash of Southern flair. (The hotel recently said that it plans to close the restaurant to the public starting Wednesday so that it can use the space for private events.) Guests have free all-access gym passes to 24 Hour Fitness, a five-minute walk away, and each room has a yoga mat. In warm weather, the rooftop sun deck, with its wraparound views of the Midtown skyline and Williamsburg, is a great place to have a glass of wine.

ROOM SERVICE

I ordered the Be a Nolitan ($22) for breakfast, which arrived in (an apologetically late) 31 minutes. The bacon was crisp and the potatoes savory, though everything — including the eggs — was cold. Avoid the transition time from the kitchen by eating downstairs in the restaurant itself.

BOTTOM LINE

The Nolitan’s friendly staff members make the hotel feel inviting, much like a small apartment building (with a doorman, Felix, who welcomes you back with a smile). A downtown location makes walking around a pleasure.

The Nolitan, 30 Kenmare Street, New York; (212) 925-2555; nolitanhotel.com.

The original New Haven project came out of McMullan’s longtime affinity for public libraries. “My mother and father both work in public libraries,” says McMullan, a handyman and artist who now lives in Williamsburg. “I love that we have a public institution that is based around the idea of sharing resources equitably with everyone.”

He thinks the concept of the library should be extended to everything, from tools to kitchen gadgets and sports equipment. If sharing with other members of the community was easier, he says, “we wouldn’t feel so compelled to buy and possess so many things for ourselves.”

In New Haven, McMullan worked with a literary advocacy group to re-stock the library throughout the six months it was open. In reality, it functioned more as a book exchange than a library. It didn’t have a fixed collection, and books kept disappearing.

In Brooklyn, McMullan experimented with a handful of models, including a school desk chained to the street and a wooden structure that resembled the ubiquitous urban newspaper distribution box.

He’s now in the process of planning and installing permanent Corner Library branches all over New York City.

“Right now, I’m just working with people I know and trust and making just as many branches as we can handle maintaining,” says McMullan. He manages the Williamsburg branch along with Gabriela Alva, who runs the art project/space EyelevelBQE, and volunteer librarian Kyra Ferber.

The library’s eclectic collection currently includes materials like The Old Farmer’s Almanac, pamphlets on nature preserves in New York City, Popular Mechanics’ The Boy Mechanic: 200 Classic Things to Build, handmade zines and children’s books donated by local artists, and a copy of Goethe’s Faust.

McMullan is working on “opening” locations in the Flatiron/Chelsea area of Manhattan, and in the Prospect Heights/Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The two branches are both slated to launch in the spring. Recently, he discovered Little Free Library, a group that is building a nationwide network of micro-libraries. McMullan eventually intends to merge his efforts with that group.

At the end of the day, McMullan wants to encourage citizen participation in the sharing of public spaces. His new brainstorm involves installing miniature libraries as part of the tree pit structures lining public sidewalks, much the way that cafes and other businesses have done with tree benches to extend their influence onto the street.

“Every city has various restrictions and regulations on the uses of sidewalks — you just have to learn the quirks,” he says. Installing tricked-out tree guards is one area of public space where the city government actively encourages citizen participation and care. Why not get a library out of it, too?

Afterwards, should one want to continue experiencing the fantasy of life as an East German, there are East German-themed bars and even a “GDR design hostel,” with lovingly restored communist-era furnishings and a “Stasi suite.”

Though they may seem oddly theme park-esque for such a cosmopolitan city, these tourist-directed retro-chic experiences are manifestations of a very real sentiment in Berlin: ostalgie, the German term that refers to nostalgia for aspects of life under the East German regime. Of course, locals don’t tend to tool around in rickety Cold War-era death traps or bunk down in spartan concrete-block lodgings. But by parsing the wacky surface trappings of the historical East, a visitor can get a sense of the deeper cultural currents behind ostalgie, and why Berliners feel the way that they do.

Born in East Germany, Naima Muenz was 12 years-old when the wall came down, and she remembers her childhood as an uncomplicated one. “My parents were intellectuals, so of course we had interesting discussions of how it would be nice if we were free to travel and so on, but we were happy,” says Muenz, who works at the Grand Hyatt Berlin. “Everyone wore the same clothes, and there was no worry or anxiety about jobs or money. It was a simple life.”

For her, the onset of ostalgie was relatively recent. “I never understood my friends who had this nostalgia for the past – ‘oh, life was better then, there’s so much worry now,’ complain, complain,” she says with a laugh. “I always thought that everything was much freer after reunification, and people could do what they want. But now I understand why there are so many people who feel this nostalgia, particularly because there is a new uncertainty with the economy being so bad. I’m a freelancer, and there’s definitely an anxiety around everything to do with money and how to live.”

When she feels like escaping the everyday world for a slice of the past, Muenz visits her grandmother in East Berlin. Her grandmother’s apartment building is the same one she has lived in since 1959. “My grandmother was depressed when the wall came down—she loves the idea that the health care system, banks, and schools were in the hand of the government. There was no poor and rich,” Muenz says. “When I visit her, I go back to that time, and I feel comfortable and worry-free. That is really nice.”

In Germany, the word ostalgie has already taken on a negative association, “like you don’t want to live in the present moment and just want to glorify the past,” Muenz explains. She says her East German friends just want to honor their roots and where they came from. “They didn’t have bad experiences, like with the Stasi, so they can honor the good parts.”

Not everyone talks about the East German regime with warmth, of course, and for many young people, the romanticization of the past is a fiction. Take Anya Fischer, a 36-year-old actress, who thinks that a lot of the nostalgia is constructed “for money,” directed at tourists. “You have to have a lot of fantasy, because everything has changed so quickly,” she says. “At least for me, it’s really hard to imagine how it could have been with this wall through the city.”

But Fischer’s boyfriend is East German, and the “ossi-wessi” relationship does inform her experience. “Thank God he’s not one of the guys who has this ‘in earlier days everything was better’ tone,” Fischer says. “But I see that he is still fighting the big fears of his parents, which are very deep—of being controlled and watched.”

Ironically, the most potent symbol of Germany’s historic split, the Berlin Wall, is largely nonexistent. The physical manifestations that remain are few and far between, and perhaps that explains the popularity of any pilgrimage place: the remaining bits of the wall (most intact at the East Side Gallery, and marked elsewhere by a double row of cobblestones); Checkpoint Charlie (which has a replica guardhouse and sign); the Trabant tour to these places; the many museums.

At the DDR Museum, tucked along the Spree River, visitors crowd the compact galleries, watch old film reels, and pose by a tiny Trabant. In the gift shop, DVDs of Good Bye Lenin! (the immensely popular and sweetly affectionate 2003 film, in which a son reconstructs a semblance of life in the East for his ailing mother) and The Lives of Others (a decidedly more menacing tale, from 2006, about the effects that the Stasi’s activities have on one couple) are sold alongside GDR game playing cards (“A PLAYFUL EXPERIENCE OF HISTORY”). Absent the physical relics, the modern city figures out how to contend with the idea of that time.

Knowing this, where can a visitor get a dose of history and local flavor—avoiding the ossified, wooing the vibrantly alive—absent the kitsch? On a visit in mid-December, my husband and I walked everywhere, through Brandenberg Gate and the lovely Unter den Linden, and through the haunting Holocaust Memorial. Among the museums, the Judisches Museum is an excellent chronicle of Jewish German history, while the little-known Story of Berlin tells the city’s 800-year history through interactive exhibits and an awe-inspiring (and still functioning) nuclear bomb shelter. We milled among the residents speeding through the streets by bicycle (rentals are available everywhere), and joined families sipping gluhwein and heisse schokolade at the famously ebullient winter markets. We ate our way around Prenzlauer Berg, packed with restaurants of all flavors, and checked out the fashions in Mitte, the lively Turkish delis of Kreuzberg, and the many bars and shops of Friedrichshain. We ran through Tiergarten and along the Spree River, next to the soaring, joyful architecture of the Reichstag. And we strolled 1.3 kilometers along the open-air East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the Wall, famously painted by international artists on one side (and covered in just-folks graffiti on the other).

Naima Muenz says that in her city—more than in the rest of Germany—people are still trying to grapple with the weight of history and its subsequent realities. She has tried to get her grandmother to accept her West German-born boyfriends. Her grandmother, now a youthful 81, is herself dating. But when she posts singles ads for herself, there’s one requirement. “He has to be from East Berlin,” Muenz says, laughing. “No West Berliners allowed.”

In June, Infinite Monkey Theorem, a hip winery in Denver, began selling its black muscat, a slightly effervescent wine with a subtle taste of litchi, in a small black can emblazoned with its monkey logo.

“Being in a state that’s very outdoorsy, it made a lot of sense to find a container that would enable people to put it in their pocket and go for a hike or a picnic or to a concert,” said Ben Parsons, who owns the winery.

Don Ryan, assistant wine manager at Westminster Total Beverage, a huge wine and liquor store in suburban Denver, said they have been selling about a case of the wine a week, with each 250-milliliter can (about a glass and a half) selling for $6.99.

“I’ve been a little surprised that they’re willing to pay so much for it,” Mr. Ryan said, “but it’s good quality.”

In Northern California, a new brand called Flasq has been selling chardonnays and merlots in aluminum bottles. Flasq bottles have a sporty energy-drink aesthetic, with a brushed metal finish and spare black lettering. They’re sold at sporting arenas, private golf clubs and upscale markets.

Wine in a can isn’t entirely new. Among the first was sold by Barokes Wines, an Australian winemaker that invented a patented process called Vinsafe, which lines the aluminum to prevent any reaction that would impart flavors to the wine or degrade the container. The techniques are similar to what some craft brewers have been using, but wine’s high acidity and alcohol levels require a thicker lining.

Barokes’s wines, first sold in 2003, have won praise at numerous international wine competitions. Four varietals, including chardonnay and blanc de noirs, are sold in the United States.

The first winemaker in the United States to offer canned wines was the Francis Ford Coppola Winery, which starting selling its Sofia Blanc de Blancs minis in 2004 (in pink, Red Bull-size cans).

Paul Sanguinetti, the sommelier at Ray’s and Stark at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said that the growth of canned wines is fueled by a mobile generation. “Hipsters love it,” he said.

Another newcomer is Neowines, a Swiss company that makes three canned wines including chasselas, a varietal from the terraced vineyards of Lavaux, Switzerland. Its bright pink, lime-green and purple cans are labeled with the Lavaux appellation. As its name suggests, it is also aimed at plugged-in drinkers.

Neowines aren’t available in the United States, but with a new Bordeaux coming out this fall, the founder, Alain Toscan, is already fine-tuning the company’s message to enter the American market.

His tagline: “Yes, we can!”

As the manager of a Chinatown career center on Kearny Street in San Francisco, Winnie Yu has watched working-class clients come and go. Most of them, like Shen Ming Fa, have the makings of the quintessential Chinese American immigrant success story. Shen, who is 39, moved to San Francisco with his family last fall, an English-speaking future in mind for his 9-year-old daughter. His first stop was Chinatown, where he found an instant community and help with job and immigration problems.

But lately, Yu has been seeing a shift; rather than coming, her clients have been going—in pursuit of what might be called the Chinese Dream.

“Now the American Dream is broken,” Shen tells me one evening at the career center, his fingers drumming restlessly on the table; he speaks mostly in Mandarin, and Yu helps me translate. Shen has mostly been unemployed, picking up part-time work when he can find it. Back in China, he worked as a veterinarian and at a school of traditional Chinese culture. “In China, people live more comfortably: in a big house, with a good job. Life is definitely better there.” On his fingers, he counts out several people he knows who have gone back since he came to the United States. When I ask him if he thinks about returning to China, he glances at his daughter, who is sitting nearby, then looks me in the eye. “My daughter is thriving,” he says, carefully. “But I think about it every day.”

Recent years have seen stories of Chinese “sea turtles”—those who are educated overseas and migrate back to China—lured by Chinese-government incentives that include financial aid, cash bonuses, tax breaks, and housing assistance. In 2008, Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist at Princeton, turned down a prestigious $10 million research grant to return to China and become the dean of life sciences at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “My postdocs are getting great offers,” says Robert H. Austin, a physics professor at Princeton.

But unskilled laborers are going back, too. Labor shortages in China have led to both higher wages and more options in where they can work. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, published a paper on China’s demography through 2030 that says thinking of migration as moving in just one direction is a mistake: the flows are actually much more dynamic. “Migration, the way we understand it in the U.S., is about people coming, staying, and dying in our country. The reality is that it has never been that way,” says the institute’s president, Demetrios Papademetriou. “Historically, over 50 percent of the people who came here in the first half of the 20th century left. In the second half, the return migration slowed down to 25, 30 percent. But today, when we talk about China, what you’re actually seeing is more people going back … This may still be a trickle, in terms of our data being able to capture it—there’s always going to be a lag time of a couple of years—but with the combination of bad labor conditions in the U.S. and sustained or better conditions back in China, increasing numbers of people will go home.”

In the past five years, the number of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. has been on the decline, from a peak of 87,307 in 2006 to 70,863 in 2010. Because Chinatowns are where working-class immigrants have traditionally gathered for support, the rise of China—and the slowing of immigrant flows—all but ensures the end of Chinatowns.

Smaller Chinatowns have been fading for years—just look at Washington, D.C., where Chinatown is down to a few blocks marked by an ornate welcome gate and populated mostly by chains like Starbucks and Hooters, with signs in Chinese. But now the Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York are depopulating, becoming less residential and more service-oriented. When the initial 2010 U.S. census results were released in March, they revealed drops in core areas of San Francisco’s Chinatown. In Manhattan, the census showed a decline in Chinatown’s population for the first time in recent memory—almost 9 percent overall, and a 14 percent decline in the Asian population.

The exodus from Chinatown is happening partly because the working class is getting priced out of this traditional community and heading to the “ethnoburbs”; development continues to push residents out of the neighborhood and into other, secondary enclaves like Flushing, Queens, in New York. But the influx of migrants who need the networks that Chinatown provides is itself slowing down. Notably, the percentage of foreign-born Chinese New Yorkers fell from about 75 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2009.

Chinatowns almost died once before, in the first half of the 20th century, when various exclusion acts limited immigration. Philip Choy, a retired architect and historian who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, has observed the neighborhood population of Chinese immigrants being replaced by new generations of Chinese Americans. “Chinatown might have disappeared if it weren’t for the changing immigration policies,” he told me recently. Only after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act lifted quotas did the Chinese revive Chinatowns all across the country—especially those communities in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Of course, since the days of the Gold Rush, the Chinese always thought they were going to move back to China after earning their fortune elsewhere. As Papademetriou told me, what came before often happens again. Only now, fortune can be found at home.

This departure portends the loss of a place once so integral to Chinese America that Victor Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, in their 1973 book, Longtime Californ’, noted that “virtually every Chinese living in San Francisco has something to do with Chinatown.” Two years ago, when I was on tour for my book about Chinatowns—a kind of love letter to the neighborhood that accepted my family when it first arrived in the United States—the future of these enclaves was an open question. But if China continues to boom, Chinatowns will lose their reason for being, as vital ports of entry for working-class immigrants. These workers will have better things to do than come to America.

See the December issue of The Atlantic.

See “The Conversation” in the March issue of The Atlantic.