Collision Course The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America by Hugh Davis Graham Oxford University Press, 246 pp., $30 ON JUNE 6 FLORIDA GOVERNOR Jeb Bush signed into law a sleepy-sounding bill called the Florida Minority Business Loan Mobilization Program. The new law allows certified minority businesses–those that are at least 51 percent owned by Florida residents who are African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Native American, or non-minority women–to request an advance of up to 10 percent on state-contract payments to facilitate their projects. Despite the law’s shrewdly nondiscriminatory appearance (the loan applicant must win the contract first), Florida’s plan for helping minorities shows the color-consciousness of Jeb Bush’s One Florida, which was touted as eliminating affirmative action in state hiring, contracts, and college admissions. More, it joins a vast array of government programs for minorities that lack both narrow tailoring and a cohesive rationale for the groups they include. One of the most contentious aspects of race-conscious minority set-asides or assistance programs like Florida’s is that their beneficiaries are nearly always a laundry list of broad ethnic categories. Take Florida’s list of those eligible for minority-business status, which is typical of many local, state, and federal lists. Asian Americans certainly include Japanese Americans, but also Cambodians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Malaysians. African Americans are descendants of slavery, but recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean potentially qualify as well. Non-minority women and Hispanics can be recent immigrants or longtime citizens, desperately poor or exceedingly rich. In “Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America,” the recently deceased historian Hugh Davis Graham teases out the immigration and racial classification aspects of this bizarre ethnic dynamic that makes a mockery of the sole reasonable justification for race-conscious preferences –past discrimination in America. Graham elaborates on a trend noted by other scholars of immigration and affirmative action, focusing tightly on the policies, rather than the judicial decisions, that have made minority preferences what they are today. Graham begins by insisting that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act were well intended. Over time, though, the enforcement of those colorblind laws fell to government officials forced to grapple with real-world race relations and politicians with upcoming reelections. In 1969 President Richard Nixon resurrected the Philadelphia Plan, a defunct Johnson Labor Department attempt to redefine fair employment practices as those that yield proportional representation of minorities. For Johnson the Philadelphia Plan was a response to rioting urban minorities in the 1960s, but for Nixon it served a political purpose. By using the plan to target skilled crafts unions, where minorities were few and seniority mattered, Nixon fractured the labor-civil rights Democratic coalition. Also toward this end, he established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise in the Commerce Department. On Nixon’s watch the Commerce Department for the first time named groups of minorities–Asians, blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians–that it considered “presumptively eligible” for its small-business assistance program. After Nixon, Jimmy Carter expanded set-asides for minorities, though instances of overt discrimination had been plummeting for several years. Congress joined the preferences movement in 1977, burying in a public works appropriation bill a clause that required a percentage of the bill’s $4 billion in contracts go to minority businesses. This time, Eskimos and Aleuts were included in the ethnic mix. As Graham points out, the philosophical justification for affirmative action–the now familiar terms like “disparate impact” and “institutional racism”–emerged only after the nondiscrimination policies of the Civil Rights Act were working. But if the logic behind affirmative action for African Americans was not immediately obvious, the logic for including other groups was even more obscure. Back in 1956, government contractors were asked to enumerate their “Negro” employees, as separate from the categories of “other minority” and “total” employees. Graham puts the fallout this way: “Once minority groups started getting named on the government’s civil rights compliance forms, the ethnic organizations kicked into play.” Organizations like the Mexican-American Political Action Committee and the Japanese-American Citizens League argued that their constituencies too faced discrimination. Against these powerful lobbies and their supportive members of Congress, agencies like Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance barely protested, even while, Graham makes clear, they “provided no rationale to justify their racial and ethnic categories.” They likewise failed to ponder how the forces of intermarriage and especially immigration would factor in, or how elusive their categories really were. The unexpected convergence of affirmative action and immigration becomes apparent in one simple statistic: Eighty percent of new immigrants to the United States today are eligible for affirmative-action programs. In some cases citizenship is not even necessary to qualify for race-based assistance. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, with its curbing of immigration from European nations and emphasis on family reunification visas over skilled worker visas, contributed neatly to this phenomenon. More immigrants every year come from Asia and Mexico, and the law grants their families priority in visa attainment. The color of their skin puts them on par with native workers, many of them poor blacks, in seeking jobs and education. And it is a little-admitted fact that certain employers favor Asian and Hispanic immigrants–typed as industrious and willing to work for low pay–over African Americans. But what the presumptive-eligibility model employed by federal agencies inadvertently says to recent U.S. immigrants is that they will be discriminated against. Graham believes this message is in opposition to the American promise. Central to the argument in “Collision Course” are the multiplying reasons why affirmative action no longer makes sense. Interracial marriages complicate citizen categorization, and federal agencies’ continued granting of minority eligibility to well-organized lobbies works against the effectiveness of preference programs. Affirmative action never reached down to pick up the black underclass it was designed to help. Being able to receive most affirmative-action remedies or diversity preferences, such as an extra points in college admissions or federal construction contracts, requires some level of skill. The poorest individuals in any ethnic group often are too destitute to compete. Immigration scholar Peter Skerry has called the collision of 1960s immigration and civil rights reforms a “historical accident.” Hugh Davis Graham fleshes out this observation, detailing how as immigration increased the number of protected “minority groups” expanded. His account of this phenomenon is excellent. But until politicians like Richard Nixon–or Jeb Bush, for that matter–no longer perceive racial politicking as politically profitable, they will drive wedges between groups where they can, with the same unintended results from which we suffer today. Beth Henary is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
