The Center for Immigration Studies has recently issued a report documenting the decline of diversity among America’s immigrant population.
During the 1990s the immigrant populaton grew by 11.3 million, which the report claims is “faster than at any other time in our history.” One country, Mexico, accounted for 43% of that growth. In 1990, Mexico accounted for 22% of the total foreign born in the U.S.; by 2000, Mexican immigrants accounted for 30 percent of the total.
If we took the “diversity” argument seriously, it would be necessary to revise our immigration laws to “take ethnicity into account.” As Steven A. Camarota, CIS’s Director of Research and co-author of the report, stated,
the most serious potential problem associated with a larger and less diverse immigrant population is that it may hinder the assimilation and integration of immigrants by creating the critical mass necessary to foster linguistic and spatial isolation. In contrast, a more diverse immigrant population may increase incentives to learn English or become familiar with American cultural more generally.
Hmm. Maybe what Michigan meant by the “critical mass” it claimed necessary to promote “diversity” was a number of each group (although for some reason it applied only to one group) large enough to support separate organizations and living and eating arrangements.
If we were to revise our immigration laws along the lines of Michigan’s admissions policy, advocates of “diversity” on campus would predictably charge that we were discriminating against Hispanics and reviving the hated quota system of the discredited 1924 immigration restriction act.
But no Supreme Court — at least no Supreme Court with Sandra Day O’Connor on it — is likely to be persuaded by this argument. Thanks to the University of Michigan and its diversiphile allies, the Court has been brought to understand that discrimination to promote “diversity” is not really discrimination at all, that no one (especially aliens, one suspects) has any sort of “right” to be free from burdens imposed on the basis of race or ethnicity.
Diversiphiles have argued that “quota” is a canard. Maybe it will become a pétard on which they will be hoisted.
