Black and Tan Fantasy. - "Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America" - book review

Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, by Hugh Davis Graham (Oxford, 256 pp., $30)

In June 1965, President Johnson gave a speech at Howard University that laid the theoretical groundwork for the transformation of civil rights into affirmative action: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You're free to compete with all the others,' and justly believe that you have been completely fair."

A few years later, President Nixon turned the theory of minority preference into reality through the Philadelphia Plan, which -- for the first time -- imposed racial "goals and timetables" on government contractors, in an effort both to foster "black capitalism" and to split the Democrats' civil-rights/labor coalition.

The unspoken assumption underlying the birth of affirmative action was that it would be focused almost exclusively on black Americans. After all, the other minority groups listed among the "protected classes" covered by affirmative action -- people of Latin American and Asian origin -- were added by bureaucrats almost as afterthoughts; they were very few in number, nor were their numbers expected to grow.

What a difference an immigration wave makes.

The interaction of racial preferences and the immigration boom is the subject of this new book by Hugh Davis Graham, a Vanderbilt historian who died in March, shortly after completing it. Graham, whose previous books include The Civil Rights Era and Civil Rights and the Presidency, here concisely traces the separate paths of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration Act of 1965 -- and examines the wreck when their progeny collided in the 1980s.

Both pieces of legislation were outgrowths of the civil rights movement's appeal to the better angels of America's nature: They argued for colorblindness in public policy. The Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and public accommodations (followed by the Voting Rights Act a year later), while the Immigration Act eliminated ethnic distinctions we had been making among prospective newcomers since 1921. Both acts promised a better, colorblind America that would heal the wounds of the past; the promise of neither was fulfilled.

Contrary to the repeated assurances of civil rights champions, the ideology of colorblindness morphed into the explicitly racialist policies of what Graham calls "hard" affirmative action. Meanwhile, the immigration changes of 1965, which were supposed simply to remove the embarrassing national-origins quotas without increasing immigration, instead sparked the greatest immigration wave in American history -- made up overwhelmingly of people who would in turn be covered by the new affirmative-action policies.

Collision Course is the first book to address this topic, and is long overdue. I hope I'm not boasting (okay, I'm boasting) when I point out that a piece I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 1989 was perhaps the first time anyone pointed out in print the conflict between affirmative action and immigration. The only reporter to explore the issue was the underappreciated Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service in 1993, and the only previous extended examination was a 1995 paper by James S. Robb (which he summarized in a National Review article in November of that year). Other than that, though, no one has touched this issue with a ten-foot pole: The collision between affirmative action and immigration seems to have given rise to cognitive dissonance in the media and the professoriate, which instinctively support both policies. Graham points out that neither President Clinton's 1995 review of affirmative-action policies nor his National Dialogue on Race discussed the issue; nor did the National Academy of Sciences' magisterial examination of immigration; nor did the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform's final report in 1997.

But the most contemptible silence of all comes from the black leadership. Leaving aside the question of whether hard affirmative action actually helps blacks (the civil rights groups obviously answer "yes"), there's no question that America's black leadership has known for more than 20 years that affirmative action's black-centered rationale -- as compensation for slavery and Jim Crow -- is undermined by mass immigration. And yet they've kept supporting high levels of immigration anyway, in order to maintain a people-of-color coalition with the Hispanic Caucus and groups like the National Council of La Raza.

In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- then chaired by Eleanor Holmes Norton -- filed a lawsuit against a Chicago manufacturing firm specifically to prevent blacks from being crowded out by immigrants. It was clear, at that point, that the affirmative- action apparatus recognized the threat immigration posed to the perceived interests of blacks. The EEOC lost the lawsuit, and a subsequent one along the same lines; this ended what Graham calls a "campaign to protect black workers from the surging tides of immigrant competition." Since then, black leaders seem to have given up on their ostensible constituents.