Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy blog, has a good idea: reform immigration law and get rid of racial quotas and preferences (aka “affirmative action”). Politically, he says it’s a natural bargain: Democrats get expanded legal immigration, Republicans get rid of quotas. In policy terms, it makes sense too. Why should people we classify as Hispanics be given preferred status when they and their ancestors never suffered discrimination in this country? And certainly not the kind of institutionalized, state-imposed discrimination — slavery and segregation — that was imposed on the ancestors of most American blacks.
At the same time, as Rosenkranz points out, Asians are subjected to the opposite of racial preferences. His example: a Hispanic applicant to the University of Wisconsin law school with respectable grades and test scores would have a 62 percent chance of admission, while an Asian applicant with identical credentials would have a 16 percent chance. Thus it’s hardly a surprise that Asian applicants are suing Harvard for racial discrimination. At foxnews.com writer Maxim Lott points out that the Princeton Review, a college guide, advises Asian applicants: “Don’t attach a photograph to your application and don’t answer the optional question about your ethnic background,” and for any required essay, “Write about something entirely unrelated to your ethnic background.” My guess is that it’s easier to get away with this if your last name is Lee than if it is Chen or Gupta.
Back in November 2012 tech entrepreneur and blogger Ron Unz pointed out that, as he wrote more recently, “Over the last twenty years, America’s population of college-age Asians has roughly doubled and Asian academic achievement has reached new heights, but there has been no increase whatsoever in Asian enrollment in those elite universities and indeed substantial declines at Harvard and several other Ivies. Meanwhile, other top colleges such as Caltech that admit students based on a strictly meritocratic and objective standard have seen Asian numbers increase fully in line with the growth of the Asian population.” The evidence is overwhelming that Harvard and other elite schools are imposing quotas on Asians just as they imposed quotas on Jews from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Traditional Asian advocacy groups deny this, in solidarity with other groups purporting to represent “people of color.” But Asian parents have noticed. When the Democratic-controlled California state Senate passed a bill to put on the ballot a measure to reverse the state’s voter-passed ban on racial discrimination in state higher education, it was expected that the Democratic-controlled Assembly would go along. But thousands of Asian parents started calling their Assembly members, and the measure was dropped. Many high-skill Asians move to the United States in the hopes that their children will get into elite colleges and universities. I wonder how many are deterred from doing so by the fear that racial quotas and preferences will keep them out.
The education establishment and corporate America are not going to stop using racial quotas and preferences. They provide corporations with a defense against attacks from the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and they provide, I think, some important measure of self-congratulation to college and university administrators. And Democrats are interested in legalizing illegal immigrants who, they think, will provide them with future votes. Very few Democratic or Republican politicians — Jeb Bush is one exception — have come out for something like my proposal that we revise our immigration laws to favor high-skill immigrants, as Canada and Australia have done with great success. And come to think of it, one possible effect of such a measure, over the long term at least, would be to create a larger constituency against racial quotas and preferences which tend to disadvantage Asians. Some ideas are so good that they are never going to happen.
