Libertarian law professor Ilya Somin previously wrote this article in regards to Amy Wax and her preference for white immigration:
Her support for racially discriminatory immigration policies is just the tip of a much broader iceberg of conservative support for discrimination in immigration policy of a kind they would reject in other contexts.
reason.com
Anyway, please allow me to respond to it here bit by bit:
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax faces investigation and possible sanctions from her university, as a result of her statement that "as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration." Her support for racial discrimination in immigration policy is not an isolated remark. At the 2019 National Conservatism conference, Wax said much the same thing about non-white immigrants generally, arguing for "the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites."
On the issue of sanctions, I largely agree with the Academic Freedom Alliance's letter about this case, emphasizing the principle that universities should not punish faculty for out-of-class political speech (I am a member of AFA myself, but was not involved in the drafting of this letter). Penn is a private university, so the First Amendment does not apply. Nonetheless, I don't think university administrators can be trusted to enact such speech restrictions or to enforce them fairly. Any attempts to do so is likely to undermine academic freedom, and reduce the quality of intellectual discourse.
Nothing objectionable here, frankly.
That said, Wax's statements on immigration are deeply problematic, and deserve severe criticism. Worse, they are symptomatic of a broader pattern on the right. All too many conservatives support discrimination and injustice in immigration policy of a kind they would reject elsewhere.
Wax and her supporters defend her comments on immigration by emphasizing that her objections to Asian immigrants and non-white ones generally are not about biological race, as such, but merely about their political and cultural values. If Asian immigrants voted for Republicans, rather than Democrats, she would perhaps be happy to take more of them.
But this defense doesn't cut it. Wax is still advocating large-scale racial and ethnic discrimination. The fact that she wants to use race and ethnicity as crude proxies for other characteristics doesn't make it right. Conservatives, including Wax herself, readily see that when it comes to racial preferences in college admissions, defended on the grounds that African-American applicants, for example, are more likely to have been victims of racial injustice or to contribute to "diversity" on campus. The idea that blacks are, on average, more likely to have experienced racism in American society than whites, is likely true. Nonetheless, Wax rejects such rationales for racial preferences, on principle, and instead (correctly, in my view) advocates color-blind admissions.
Frankly, the reason that I myself reject racial preferences at universities is because I don't actually believe that racism significantly holds back black Americans nowadays. Rather, I believe that the lion's share of the black-white average IQ gap in the US is due to genetic differences rather than due to environmental differences. (Ditto for the US Jewish-gentile white average IQ gap, of course.) A secondary reason as to why I'm wary of affirmative action, including economic affirmative action, is that this tends to create an incentive for employers to discriminate based on race since graduates of universities of certain races and ethnicities would, on average, be duller than graduates of the same universities of certain other races and ethnicities. Thus, smart members of underachieving groups who would have still gotten into these universities meritocratically might be wrongly dismissed by potential employers as affirmative action admits and thus underqualified. Charles Murray previously made this point somewhere, I believe.
But if there is a compelling interest for the state to discriminate based on race and the desired goal can't be achieved in any other way and also this discrimination is narrowly tailored to achieve this goal, then discriminated based on race would probably be justified. If, for instance, one could establish that racial/ethnic/religious profiling by law authorities significantly reduced crime and/or terrorism in a way that no other method could do, then I would personally probably believe that racial/ethnic/religious profiling by law authorities would be justified even if I myself was affected by this. After all, if I was a black person in the US, I'd prefer slightly higher odds of dying at police hands (a risk that I can mitigate anyway by avoiding doing anything stupid and/or suspicious when I'm interacting with the police) than much higher odds of dying at the hands of other, criminal blacks.
The very same logic should dictate color-blindness - and rejection of ethnic and national-origin discrimination - in immigration policy, as well. Indeed, racial and ethnic discrimination in immigration policy is a far greater injustice than affirmative action preferences in university admissions. Most victims of the latter still get to go to college in the US, usually at universities only modestly less prestigious than the ones that rejected them. By contrast, many victims of racial and ethnic discrimination in immigration policy are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression in their countries of origin.
Would Ilya Somin prefer a complete and total immigration moratorium or racially selective immigration policies? Because sometimes the people who prefer racially selective immigration policies might have a complete and total immigration moratorium as their second preference.
Think of it this way: Yes, it was unfair that the US generally refused to allow non-white immigrants to move to the US between the 1920s and 1960s, thus preventing some or even many non-whites from escaping poverty, misery, and oppression. However, at least the US allowed some whites, such as some European Jews, who were fleeing poverty, misery, oppression, and the impending Holocaust to move to the US during this time. Would a complete and total immigration moratorium between the 1920s and 1960s have really been better than real life's historical course? It certainly wouldn't have been for the 90,000 or so German Jews who did, in fact, successfully manage to immigrate to the US during the Nazi era and before the start of the Holocaust.
If the reason to oppose racial and ethnic discrimination in college admissions is that government and university bureaucrats can't be trusted to craft such policies fairly, the same point applies in spades to immigration policy. Indeed, anti-Asian discrimination in the former is often motivated by the same sorts of crude stereotypes as the latter.
Certainly, the government should be extremely wary when engaging in racial/ethnic/religious discrimination since such power can be easily abused. No doubt about that. That doesn't mean that it's
never justified, of course.
To the extent that (as in Wax's case) rationales for discrimination in immigration are based on generalizations about the political views of various racial and ethnic groups, they also run up against principles of freedom of speech. It is striking that many of the same conservatives who advocate viewpoint-based immigration restrictions are also deeply angry about "cancel culture" and government attempts to combat supposed "misinformation" online. If we can't trust government and university officials to properly regulate speech on social media or that of academics like Wax, why should we trust the government to decide which would-be immigrants' political views are acceptable, or which ones have bad cultural values?
Restrictions on free speech and freedom of religion prevent a society from evolving its views on various issues and thus prevents society from making "course corrections" on these issues. Immigration restrictions don't actually do this. A society can still evolve its views on various issues even if it restricts immigrants, but it's astronomically harder for a society to do this if it restricts speech and religion. Thus, restricting speech and religion should be viewed much more skeptically than restricting immigrants based on their political views. And to the extent that one opposes cancel culture, it is really wise to support bringing in immigrants who and/or whose descendants will support cancel culture and/or vote for politicians who support or at least are indifferent towards cancel culture?
And for what it's worth, I don't believe that the government is categorically clueless in regards to determining which immigrants' political viewpoints are bad. Most Westerners would say that supporting the death penalty for apostasy, supporting jailing and/or murdering people over Muhammad cartoons and/or over other "Islamophobic" speech, supporting misogyny, supporting anti-Semitism, supporting homophobia, et cetera are all bad political views. To the extent that one does not want such views spreading in one's country, it's entirely reasonable to keep out immigrants with such views. Even if such immigrants will be denied the right to vote for their entire lives, their US-born descendants will automatically get the right to vote once they will become adults due to birthright citizenship. And I'm not a believer in huge and total assimilation, especially if the US's recent immigrant descent population will eventually number in the hundreds of millions or more like open borders libertarians apparently want. And of course immigrants can threaten valued rights even if they are denied the right to vote, such as Samuel Paty's murderer demonstrated when he murdered Mr. Paty over Mr. Paty showing some Muhammad cartoons to his class (though I'm unsure if in his specific case he actually had French citizenship and voting rights in France). Is Ilya Somin going to deny that the Chechen immigrant who murdered Samuel Paty had bad cultural values?
That's especially true if we are talking about excluding people not based on their actual views, but merely based on crude generalizations about the views of members of their racial or ethnic group. If Wax ends up getting punished for her statements, it will at least be for things she actually said. It would be much worse if she were sanctioned merely because she is white, and university administrators concluded that whites, on average, are more likely to have reprehensible views on racial issues than members of other groups.
Some argue that this kind of double standard is acceptable because would-be immigrants don't have a right to come to the US. I deny the latter premise. Indeed, most immigration restrictions are unjust for much the same reasons as domestic racial discrimination is, and standard rationales for a general right of governments to exclude immigrants collapse upon close inspection.
But even if you accept the conventional wisdom that governments have a general right to exclude migrants, it doesn't follow they can do so based on racial and ethnic discrimination. Racial discrimination in government policy is wrong even with respect to institutions from which the government can bar people for other reasons. For example, the government isn't required to admit any particular applicant to a public university, or even to establish such schools at all. But racial discrimination in state university admissions is still unjust (and outrages conservatives, including Amy Wax).
The same goes for discrimination based on political views. A state university that admitted only Democrats (or only Republicans) would be an affront to freedom of speech. Conservatives would be among the first to object to it.
Does Ilya Somin believe that it should be illegal for a public university and/or the US government to deny tenure and/or a job to someone who openly has white nationalist views even if they are otherwise fully qualified for this job/position? That's also government political viewpoint discrimination, is it not?
There is no good reason to exempt immigration restrictions from moral constraints that apply to other government policies. And that especially goes for restrictions based on crude racial and ethnic stereotypes, such as lumping together all Asians and all non-whites, ignoring the vast diversity within both categories.
If these kinds of double-standards were unique to Wax, they wouldn't matter much. But, sadly, such views are common on much of the political right. Many of them cheered Donald Trump's stigmatization of Mexican immigrants, his advocacy of banning migration from "shithole countries" (all of them majority non-white), and his travel bans openly directed at Muslims, in a way conservatives rightly denounce as unconstitutional and unjust in the domestic context. More generally, all too many on the right support a jurisprudence under which immigration restrictions are largely exempted from constitutional constraints that apply to virtually all other government policies, including freedom of speech, and rules against racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination.
The political left has its own flaws, when it comes to racial and ethnic discrimination, including anti-Asian bias in admissions at various elite educational institutions, which I have condemned. But their flaws are no excuse for egregious conservative double standards on immigration.
If you truly support principles like color-blindness and freedom of speech and religion, you can't chuck them out the window when the subject turns to immigration policy. Conservatives would do well to remember that.
Indeed, experience shows that promoting invidious discrimination in one area of government policy increases the risk that it will spread to others. Historically, racist immigration policies were closely tied to similar bigotry at home, with each feeding off the other. Anti-Asian immigration restrictions in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries coincided with discriminatory policies against those same groups within the United States; the two were mutually reinforcing. The same pattern could well recur today.
FWIW, I myself think that it's much better to select immigrants based on their political views rather than based on their race/ethnicity/religion. To the extent that this is possible to do, this should be done. But I want to make a caveat here: For someone who votes Republican, it's worth noting that sometimes even minorities with conservative political views vote based on their race rather than based on their political views:
When it comes to Israel the US, Ben Shapiro is color-blind. He explains: \
www.unz.com
So, in this regard, selecting immigrants based on their race could unfortunately make sense for Republicans, unless of course you're going to ask immigrants about their preferred party affiliation or something like that and actually trust them to honestly answer this question. A race-selective immigration policy, however unfortuante, would still be better for aspiring immigrants than a complete and total immigration moratorium, after all. So long as Democrats are going to continue to remain the pro-cancel culture, pro-Wokeness, and anti-free speech party, it's entirely reasonable for Republicans not to want to import additional Democrats and/or the ancestors of future additional Democrats. And for those, like Ilya Somin, who say that the government cannot make racial/ethnic/religious discriminations in immigration policy without also making these distinctions domestically, well, Israel's first several decades of its existence have proven him wrong. While Israel is definitely going in the wrong direction right now, some or even many liberal Zionists do, in fact, believe in racial/ethnic/religious discrimination in immigration policy for Israel while opposing equivalent discrimination in the domestic context, at least not without an extremely compelling reason (such as having Arabs become a majority of Israel's total population exclusively as a result of higher birth rates or something like that). So, Yes, Mr. Somin, it is possible!