Racial Preference Policies Favor Foreigners

A couple of years ago, bouncing off an article in the New York Times, I wrote:

One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich — that has been known if not advertised for a good while — but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. Eight percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still “underrepresented,” says [Harvard Law prof Lani] Guinier), but “the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.”

That article went on to discuss research being conducted by sociologists at Princeton and Penn. That research, according to an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, has now been published.

The paper draws on a study of 1,051 black students who enrolled at 28 selective institutions in 1999….

Of those 1,051 students, 27 percent were born outside the United States or had at least one parent who was born outside the United States — most commonly in Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, Trinidad, or Ghana. By contrast, only 13 percent of the general population of 18- and 19-year-old black Americans in 1999 were first- or second-generation immigrants, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey….

At the most selective of the 28 schools, the ratios for non-native black students were even higher. The study included four Ivy League universities — Columbia, Penn, Princeton, and Yale — and at those universities, 41 percent of black students were first- or second-generation immigrants.

These foreign preference beneficiaries:

• were much more likely than native-born black students to have at least one parent who has earned an advanced degree;

• were significantly less likely to have grown up in segregated black neighborhoods and significantly more likely to have attended a private high school;
• had significantly higher average SAT scores than did the native-born black students — 1250, versus 1193, respectively.

Curiously, these foreign preferees do not seem to have performed better than their native-American minority peers. The authors speculate that this may be because “immigrant black students are more likely to choose certain majors — particularly engineering — where grade-point averages are relatively low across the board.”

The authors apparently do not discuss the implications of their findings for the debate over racial preference, but they are obviously aware of at least some of them. In an interview, one of the authors, Camille Z. Charles, an associate professor of sociology at Penn, said:

“If you’re a purist” — that is, if you view affirmative action as restitution for the harm done by American slavery and segregation — “then you’ll think that this is not in the spirit of affirmative action,” Ms. Charles continued. “But if you’re a diversity purist, and your idea is to expose everybody to as many different kinds of people as possible, then you’ll think this is great.”

Even if you’re a “diversity purist,” however, you might still think that importing into selective colleges a large number of the sons and daughters of professionals “most commonly [from] Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, Trinidad, or Ghana” is not the best way “to expose everybody to as many different kinds of people as possible.”

Finally, but not altogether surprisingly, Prof. Charles neglected to mention us equality purists, who believe that racial preference is wrong whether it is for “restitution” or “diversity.”

UPDATE

Referring to the Princeton-Penn study of foreign beneficiaries of affirmative action preferences, today Inside Higher Ed quotes Lani Guinier’s comments on the foreign black students at Harvard at a reunion of black Harvard alumni in 2003:

Guinier, a Harvard law professor, was quoted in The Boston Globe at the time as saying that most minority students at elite colleges were “voluntary immigrants,” not descended from slaves. “If you look around Harvard College today, how many young people will you find who grew up in urban environments and went to public high schools and public junior high schools?” she said. “I don’t think, in the name of affirmative action, we should be admitting people because they look like us, but then they don’t identify with us.”

The Princeton-Penn study defined the foreign minority students it studied as “immigrants or the children of immigrants.” Prof. Guinier’s father was born in Jamaica, graduated from Harvard, and had a professional degree (and, for what it’s worth, her mother was Jewish). She attended a magnet junior high school.

Look like “us,” identify with “us”?

At least Prof. Guinier opposes, or seems here to oppose, preferences based on color, and that’s a start.

UPDATE II [5 Feb.]

Thanks to Jian Li for informing me of an error: Ewart Guinier, Lani’s father, attended Harvard but wound up getting his degree from CUNY. The following, from an article in the Montgomery Advertiser, explains the details:

As one of three daughters growing up in the Guinier’s pre-civil rights household, she watched her father recover from much greater political rejections. When he entered Harvard University in 1929, the university denied him financial aid because only one Negro could receive it at a time, and someone already had filled the quota. Two years later, Ewart Guinier dropped out of Harvard for lack of finances. His daughter, Lani, recently told this story and described her father as the victim of a “quota of one.”

After dropping out of Harvard, Ewart Guinier joined the labor movement. During the 1940s as secretary-treasury of the American Public Workers Union (APWU), Guinier fought for and won the first skilled positions ever held by black employees at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Because of his union work and his association with Paul Robeson and other individuals accused of being Communists, he became the subject of a congressional investigation. These McCarthy Era investigations by the Senate Judiciary Committee for “un-American and subversive activity” would destroy both Guinier and his union.

In the early 1950s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, APWU’s parent organization, expelled it for being “communist controlled.” After his union work, Guinier graduated from law school and passed the New York Bar, but was denied admittance because of “bad character.”

Politically and professionally abandoned, Ewart Guinier sold real estate — Lani says they struggled throughout her childhood. Her mother, Genii Guinier, white and Jewish, taught her daughters to see themselves as “bridge people.” She raised them in the black world of their father, teaching them how to “endure slights, racial or otherwise,” without becoming angry, a lesson Lani Guinier learned from her mother well.