The New York Times, which said that anything negative about the Biden family was Russian disinformation, jumped immediately on a story regarding the progressive on track to be New York City’s next mayor: “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application”.
The implication of the article is that it would have been righteous for Zohran Mamdani to check the “I am Black” box for a race-based preference if he had actually been Ugandan rather than part of an immigrant population from India.
Today’s question is why it would have been fair for a recent immigrant from Uganda, even one with the correct skin color, to receive preference in college admissions or hiring. America’s race-based college admissions and jobs allocation systems were advertised as reparations for past discrimination and slavery. If someone who shows up in the U.S. five minutes ago scoops up these preferences doesn’t that prevent the preferences from going to the people for whom they were intended? What discrimination could an actual Black Ugandan who arrived in the U.S. yesterday, for example, have suffered at the hands of the bad people (i.e., white Americans)?
The idea of affirmative action (race-based discrimination by do-gooders or white-/Asian-haters, depending on your perspective) was started by President Lyndon Johnson via Executive Order 11246 in 1965. This was, coincidentally, at a point when immigrants weren’t a significant percentage of the U.S. population (Pew):
(Note that the open borders of the Biden-Harris administration made the above 2015 forecast inaccurate. The U.S. became 15.8 percent foreign-born in 2025 (CIS).)
Even though Donald Trump has gotten the federal government out of the race-based discrimination business we still have private corporations and universities engaging in it. The question for today: Why are race-based preferences available to immigrants?
My intuition is that there isn’t a thorough Q&A-type process when policies are made. Since politicians are exceptional at reading public sentiment and leveraging it for their own gain, policies, it seems to me, depend heavily on public sentiment. Note that this sentiment is some mix of emotion (subjectivity) and rationality (objectivity), which together form the basis of public policy.
IMO, your question seems to assume a model similar to how physics (or science in general) works, where you have mathematical models for everything. In other words, it assumes the whole system can be modeled using software. This doesn’t happen in public policy. In physics, there’s no involvement of emotion: apart from the axioms (which are based on experiments and can be verified), it is purely objective. In public policy, there are too many “axioms” like: “I need to stay in power”, “What will my opponents do if I do this?”, “Can I shift the responsibility to the previous or next president?”, etc. These considerations are irrelevant in science, so good answers to these questions are possible.
The racial quotas are confused. Somewhere I read that the racial quotas for blacks at Yale Law School were primarily filed by Nigerians, i.e. recent immigrants with an abundance of melanin. And then there are or were racial preferences for Latinos who were not subject to legal disabilities. Latinos were given preference because they were considered “brown” but Indians whose skin pigmentation can be a lot darker than many American blacks are not given preferences. Barack Obama presumably was given preferences over native born whites notwithstanding that his mother was a white woman from Kansas and his African father apparently only once even foot in this country. And then there is Kamala, who like Obama decided to identify with the race of her father rather than her mother (notwithstanding that she looks a lot more Indian than black) and thereby obtain preferences. The discriminatory racial categorization of DEI will someday be seen as insanity similar to the antebellum US and Nuremburg laws on racial classification & miscegenation.