What Groups Need Affirmative Action?

Two economists — Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton — embarked on an ambitious project more than a decade ago. They wanted to know how the trajectory of immigrants to the United States had changed since the 1800s. To do so, Abramitzky and Boustan collected millions of tax filings, census records and other data and analyzed upward mobility over time.

Their findings, published in a 2022 book titled “Streets of Gold,” received widespread attention. The data showed that recent immigrant families had climbed the country’s ladder at a strikingly similar pace to immigrant families from long ago, even as the profile of those immigrants has changed. “The American dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia 100 years ago,” Abramitzky and Boustan wrote.

As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor, as many do. But as in the past, their children usually make up ground rapidly, regardless of where they come from. Within a generation or two, immigrant families resemble native families in economic terms. (See graphics that explain the research.)

The findings were surprising partly because the American economy has been so disappointing over the past few decades. Overall upward mobility has declined sharply. Immigrants and their descendants, however, have been a glorious exception. For a mix of reasons — including their willingness to move to U.S. regions with strong economies — immigrant families have kept climbing society’s ladder.

This encouraging pattern obviously challenges the dark view of recent immigrants that conservatives sometimes offer. Yet it also challenges one part of the liberal consensus — about affirmative action.

Until the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last year, many beneficiaries were descendants of recent immigrants, from Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But if immigrant families are making progress more than the average American family, did they need affirmative action? And now that the old policy is gone, which groups of Americans are truly vulnerable?

Fairness vs. diversity

I thought about these questions while reading a new Times Magazine essay on affirmative action by my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones. She tells the story of the policy’s beginnings in the 1960s and makes a point that is sometimes forgotten. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson created affirmative action, they did not do so in the name of diversity. Only later did diversity become the policy’s main rationale, largely because of a 1978 Supreme Court decision.

Affirmative action was created in the name of fairness — to address the oppression of Black Americans. That oppression has spanned not only centuries of slavery, but also policies that continued into the 20th century, such as segregation of jobs, schools and neighborhoods and whites-only mortgage subsidies. The white-Black wealth gap remains so large today partly as a result.

As Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”

At the time, the U.S. was about 95 percent white or Black and only about 5 percent Asian or Latino. In 1965, though, a new immigration law passed, leading to a surge in immigrants. Soon, affirmative action grew to include many of them and their descendants.

It became a program of “diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice,” Nikole writes. Progressive groups, she notes, began to use the term “people of color.”

There are certainly arguments for this approach. Many immigrants did, and do, experience discrimination. Of course, the same was once true of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, and their families nonetheless climbed society’s ladder. The research by Abramitzky and Boustan shows Asian and Hispanic immigrants are following a similar path. (Affirmative action itself has been too narrow a policy to be a major reason, and some versions of it already excluded Asian Americans before the Supreme Court decision.)

The continued existence of anti-Asian or anti-Hispanic hate — or antisemitism, which is on the rise, as Franklin Foer documents in The Atlantic — is outrageous. But it does not necessarily justify affirmative action for these groups. All of them fare markedly better on many metrics than Black Americans, or Native Americans, who have also endured centuries of oppression. Consider life expectancy:

What now?

Affirmative action is a thorny issue, and reasonable people will have different views. Whatever your view, Nikole’s essay highlights a point worth mulling: The demise of the old version of affirmative action is likely to affect some of its previous beneficiaries much more than others. Given this country’s treatment of Black and Native Americans, they are at particular risk.

For more: I recommend you make time for the essay this weekend. In it, Nikole suggests a version of affirmative action specifically for the descendants of enslaved people.

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