What People Get Wrong About Birthright Citizenship

27:51Coleman Hughes:And this leads to one question is like, so you talked about 19th century immigration, early 20th century immigration, and how it worked. Did it work? I mean, you could argue it led to a massive backlash, which is why we closed the borders and effectively closed the borders almost in the early 1920s. There were lots of complaints about crime from immigrant groups, which led to tough on crime policies in places like New York. And so would you consider that a successful example of immigration or the type that led exactly to backlash? Well, there's always a backlash to immigration, I will tell you, at least in a certain portion of the population.

28:40It's almost human nature. You know, we don't really know if we like people who look different from us, who have different, you know, customs than we do, may not speak our language. There's not necessarily anything racist about it intuitively. It can become racist. But there was a backlash to every large wave of immigrant groups. And you asked me about assimilation earlier and I'll talk about it in the context of the difference between earlier forms of assimilation and current assimilation. I think you hit the nail on the head when you suggested in some ways assimilating now is easier than it has ever been because of, you know, our exposure to American culture because we have virtual cultural hegemony, certainly in terms of pop culture throughout the world.

29:32And so people are continuing to assimilate. We did have periods where people, as I say, I mentioned earlier, the mothers didn't always learn to speak English, but the kids went to school and they learned English. The same thing is happening today. And there is a difference between today and previous generations in that a huge portion of the people coming to the United States come from Latin America and speak one language, Spanish. And so in the past, in the early 20th century, people were coming speaking Yiddish and Italian and Greek and Spanish and, you know, dozens of other languages. And so having a common language, learning English allowed them to communicate with each other.

30:22And now there are so many Spanish speakers coming that it is quite possible to live an isolated life and not necessarily learn English. So that's one of the barriers. But all of the studies that have been done suggest there is no difference between the assimilation rates today and the past. And if anything, people may be assimilating slightly faster now because of the proliferation of mass media, which is a tremendous avenue to learn a language. So assimilation is taking place. One of the reasons we don't necessarily recognize it is we have had this constant influx of newcomers. There's a difference between somebody who's been here five years and five days.

31:07By five years, you expect them to know a little English, and they mostly do. Five days, maybe not so much.

31:15Coleman Hughes:Yeah, this was Brian Kaplan's other point, is that if you just look at, for all the complaints about assimilation, if you look at the data on the children of Hispanic immigrants, the children speak English. And quite often, the grandchildren don't even speak Spanish. I mean, that would be, I would be a case study of that. Like, I learned Spanish in school because I liked it. I would not have naturally learned Spanish despite both my two parents being Puerto Rican and having weak English, right? Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And in fact, you know, people see the name Chavez and assume, well, you must be bilingual.

31:54No. Well, my family's been here a little bit longer. They came in the 1600s. So they did by the middle of the 19th century when New Mexico became part of the United States. My ancestors were already speaking English. So, but yeah, grandchildren of immigrants, by and large, not only do they speak English, but English may be not only their preferred language, but their only language. They don't retain that native language.

32:24Coleman Hughes:So do you think English should be the official language? I advocated for that when I was the president of the U.S. English. I don't think it would be bad to have English as the official language. Lots of countries have languages as their official language. I don't think it would make a whole lot of difference in the way we lead our lives. We're always going to have to provide certain services in multiple languages, emergency services. You don't really want to live in a country where when you dial 911, if you don't speak English, you don't get any help. That's a danger not just to the individual, but to the society.

33:08If you're reporting a fire, for example, you want people there to be able to speak that language. So we're always going to have some services. But I do think it is absolutely important for all immigrants, and especially their children, to learn to be at least proficient in spoken English.

33:31Coleman Hughes:Okay, what do you make of the argument that immigrants, by definition, if they're working class, they compete with working class Americans. And so there is a, you know, if politicians have a sort of fiduciary duty, as it were, to American citizens, they should restrict working class immigration because it brings down wages. Well, I know a lot about this because for a number of years, I was a director on one of the largest chicken producers in the country, Pilgrim's Pride. We employed a lot of immigrants in that job, and it is absolutely true that those immigrants often replace Native workers who had done the jobs for generations before.

34:21But there isn't really a one-for-one correlation here. It isn't that they replace that native worker and that person then ends up on welfare or destitute or whatever. Often it produces opportunities for that person to move up the economic ladder. And George Borjas is probably the most famous economist who's argued for the case that you're making, that the competition between immigrants and the native-born is to the disadvantage of the native-born. Turns out that it's not quite right. What really happens is there's competition between recent immigrants and immigrants who've been here a little bit longer.

35:02The native-born, by and large, do not do the jobs that low-skilled immigrants do. Working on a poultry line, for example, cleaning toilets in office buildings, taking care of babies, doing landscaping work. Those are jobs that are entry-level jobs for many immigrants. They will, over time, will probably move up the economic ladder. but for sure their children will move up the economic ladder as they get more education. So I don't think that's a good argument for restricting low-skilled immigration. I would like our immigration system to be more based on the concept of skills, not just family reunification as it is now.

35:50But we need people at both ends of the spectrum. We don't produce enough engineers or computer software people or doctors for that matter. and we don't produce enough people who are willing to take fairly low-skilled jobs. So we ought to have a system that allows us to admit the people that we need. And by the way, we need about a million and a half to two million people every year legally if we are going to continue to grow as a nation and if we're going to continue to see our gross domestic product grow. The fact that we've had lower immigration in the last couple of years has not been good for our economy.

36:31Yeah.

36:32Coleman Hughes:So what do you make of the Trump administration on immigration this term? I'll give you my own opinion first, which is that I was very happy to see that the border crisis virtually overnight ended when Biden handed the keys over to Trump. I think that illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border is a disaster for a variety of reasons. First of all, the backlash, which is inevitable and justified. I think that itself is a good reason. The idea that immigration isn't under democratic control, I think, instigates political instability. Like when the voters don't feel that they have any control over who comes in the country, that anger is going to find a different outlet if it can't find a democratic outlet.

37:35Coleman Hughes:And then obviously there's like the first order problem of actually who is coming over. Are we able to keep out elements of the criminal gangs that have made certain areas of northern Mexico almost uninhabitable? Like, we want to keep those elements out. They would have an economic incentive to come over in some way. We want to keep drugs out. We want to keep certain people out. So there's all that. And I was very happy to see Trump put a stop to that. I was equally unhappy to see him send ICE into places like Minnesota with an apparent mandate to basically do whatever they felt was necessary to get every illegal immigrant out of ICE, no matter how ugly the process was, no matter how much they antagonized the local population or trampled on actual rights.

38:38the way in the way I've seen ice officers you know treat American protesters that are just

38:47Coleman Hughes:filming them for inch for instance like you have a right to film any police interaction peacefully and to take that as as if you're being doxed and then to then respond as if you know you're you're being attacked as an officer is to me crazy. And Trump's, I do hold Trump responsible for the chaos he's unleashed there in terms of not training these officers enough, giving them, through his rhetoric and through his proxies, through Department of Homeland Security, a sense of impunity. And so that's my overall take on Trump on immigration so far. I really want to find a middle ground where obviously we retain the right to deport illegal immigrants.

39:38Coleman Hughes:We focus on those who have committed violent or other crimes here. And then we focus on having a border that is secure. So that's my take. What's your overall picture? Well, there's very little that you said that I disagree with. First of all, I think that the question of the border and securing the border is absolutely paramount and important. What happened in the last couple of years before Trump in the Biden administration was a disaster of enormous proportions. And you're absolutely right. I think that it sparked the kind of backlash that led to people saying mass deportation now because they were seeing the country literally being flooded.

40:26I mean, at one point, I mean, one of the years, I think it was 2.7 million people came into the country illegally. Now, by the way, they don't all stay. The peak number of illegal immigrants living in the country, the best estimates are about 14 million. And that was the highest in U.S. history. It was higher than the previous peak, which was during the Clinton years, 1995 to 2000, when about 12 and a half million people lived here. But we do need to have some say in who comes. I mean, we're a sovereign nation. Every nation has the right to say who gets to come and who gets to stay. The problem is that our laws are so outdated and so backward that they don't give us the opportunity to bring in people whom we need here.

41:18As I say, we need anywhere between 1.5 and 2 million people a year just basically to renew us and to be able to take jobs that we need doing and that Americans either cannot do or are unwilling to do. But in order to do that, you have to have laws that make sense. And right now, our laws do not make sense. We have an asylum law that is entirely broken. Asylum is a good thing as a country that has been humanitarian for most of our existence. We want to be able to give people asylum who truly need it, but they should be facing real persecution in their country, either because the country is persecuting them for their religious or their political beliefs, or the country is at war and And they cannot remain there.

42:12But there ought to be ways to determine that. And unfortunately, our existing asylum law, which, by the way, the Democrats and the Republicans agreed to change that law right before the election. And the person who said, no, don't vote for that was Donald Trump because he wanted to keep the immigration issue alive. So it was a disaster. We had people flooding in. We didn't know who they were. And we couldn't accommodate them. You know, there weren't jobs. First of all, if you come over as an asylee, this is one of the things that I objected to in Ms. Shriver's book was this notion that people ought to be working if they come here for asylum.

42:54Yeah, I agree. The problem is the law doesn't allow them to. You don't actually get a chance to work until you've been here. I think it's 180 days. It may even be longer now under Trump. So Trump managed to close the border. We have about a quarter of a million encounters now going on every year. That is the lowest in 50 years. And there's never going to be nothing. It's never going to be zero. So that he did a good job on. His overall policy, which is to restrict not just illegal immigration by deporting people and deporting people en masse rather than concentrating on criminals, people who have actually broken our laws once here, or people who are a danger or going to become a burden in some way to the country.

43:41They're just willy-nilly going out and grabbing people off the streets who they think might be in the country illegally, who have brown skin or have an accent or are hanging around a Home Depot. That's a disaster. and they're doing it extrajudicially. In order to come into somebody's house, you need a warrant. And they are going into households where they suspect they're illegal immigrants without judicial warrants. That's just wrong. It violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. So they're going about it all wrong. And as a result, I think people are sort of waking up and seeing, gee, I didn't think Jose, hey, you know, who works down at my local restaurant, or Maria, you know, who cleans my neighbor's house.

44:29I didn't think they were going to get them. I thought they were just going after the bad guys. So there's been a backlash, and his policies are not very popular.

44:38Coleman Hughes:Yeah, it's enormously short-sighted because if a Democrat wins almost two years from now, two and a half years from now, it's very possible the country may be so polarized that they just go back to the same Biden-era policies that led to the border crisis to begin with, and we're on a kind of seesaw of extreme policies rather than finding the reasonable middle. We need legal immigration reform, but it takes a willingness of people to step across the aisle and to work together. We used to have that. We had proposed bills in the mid-2000, 2007. We had legislation in 2013. We had legislation proposed.

45:20But it became such a polarizing issue that it was never passed. And we've got to get beyond that. We've got to look at this rationally. We've got to do what's best for this country. And that means having a generous legal immigration program, but one that does admit people legally as opposed to just letting people cross the border.

45:43Coleman Hughes:Okay, so I want to ask you this as well. From the perspective of progressive ideology, Trump's appeal to Hispanics has always been a paradox. In other words, if you're Hispanic, according to progressive identity politics, you're supposed to be very motivated by advancing your ethnic politics broadly construed so that if Trump says something like, you know, the people coming from Mexico, they're not bringing their best, they're criminals, they're rapists, etc. All of the things that Trump has famously said about immigrants, that's supposed to be an animating issue for you so that you'd expect Hispanics all to vote against Trump or to vote against Trump largely.

46:29Coleman Hughes:In reality, what we've seen is that Trump's appeal with Hispanics has always been pretty strong. And it's been growing over the three times that he's run for president. To some extent, that's true among African Americans as well, that it's been small but growing and much stronger than previous Republicans. So what do you make of that seeming paradox from the progressive point of view? Well, first of all, it's not a paradox to me. I wrote a book back in 1991, published a book called Out of the Barrio Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. And in it, I describe the way in which Hispanics have been a natural constituency for conservative ideas.

47:15And in fact, Richard M. Nixon, in his reelection bid in 1972, won a third of all Mexican-American votes. Ronald Reagan won almost half of Mexican and other Hispanic votes in his reelection in 1984. George W. Bush, similarly one in the high 40s. So Hispanics have been voting Republican for a long time. And primarily they vote Republican because some of their social values are conservative, but also because particularly immigrants want economic opportunity. They want to be able to start a business, to be able to not to have to pay high taxes, not to be burdened by red tape. And the Republican Party has traditionally stood for that.

48:03When you saw those districts on the border areas in Texas that went largely Hispanic, that went for Donald Trump, they weren't voting for him based on his rhetoric. They were voting for him based on what they saw as a good economy pre-COVID that he presided over. And so they were hoping, I think, that they were going to see that same kind of economy when he came back in. You're now seeing a turn on that because while immigration is not the single most important voting issue for Hispanic voters, I think economic issues are. nonetheless the kind of anti-immigration rhetoric and what they've been seeing in terms of the mass deportation does frighten them because these are people they know they may be family members you know you have more than four million um illegal immigrants are married to u.s citizens so they're you know they're they're these are breaking up families in some cases and many of them also have U.S.-born children because of birthright citizenship.

49:13Coleman Hughes:So one of your thoughtful criticisms of my podcast with Lionel Shriver was when I said that, I said something like, you know, almost no country in the world has birthright citizenship except America. And you point out to me that this isn't true. And I looked into it, and you are definitely right. The reason that I came away with that impression is I think I was, whenever I was looking into that issue, I was looking at our peer countries that experience mass economic immigration. So I was thinking America, Western Europe, Australia. And I think it is true that none of those, or almost none of those countries have a law, have law akin to the United States and the great majority that do have some kind of birthright citizenship are largely in South America.

50:09In the Western Hemisphere, not just South America, Canada has it as well. Yeah, and it is a sort of new world phenomena, although it came from England. England, it did have, the United Kingdom had birthright citizenship until 1983. And there's, you know, some historical reasons why I think it changed in part having to do with Hong Kong and Hong Kong's relationship to the United Kingdom when it was given back to China. But be that as it may, birthright citizenship has been a part of this nation from its origins through the common law. And then in the 14th Amendment, it was incorporated into the amendment.

50:58Coleman Hughes:Yeah, so from my perspective, so for instance, take the Second Amendment as an analogy. I've always thought it made a lot of sense that if you're talking about the Second Amendment, you're talking about a time where there was only muskets. And in a time where you have AR-15s, let's see what technology is like in 100 years. You know, you really should revisit amendments based on how technology changes in ways that the framers of that amendment were very unlikely to have foreseen. And so with birthright citizenship, you know, whether, okay, we're talking about UK common law. Okay, well, the United Kingdom's an island.

51:46Coleman Hughes:And when that common law developed, it was in a context where they couldn't have possibly foreseen two or three million immigrants coming over the, pouring into the island in a single year, nor the phenomenon of anchor babies, that it could be a realistic strategy for a totally normal and understandable strategy for a woman who is pregnant to go over at a strategic time and anchor yourself in what is a much better country than the one that you're coming from. And so to me, it makes for the fact that we have birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment to be like the argument that ends the argument to me has made as little sense to me as the Second Amendment being the end of all arguments about gun regulation.

52:42Coleman Hughes:And so I think that's the better version of the point that I wanted to make there to line. Well, let me argue with you about that. So the 14th Amendment was passed at a time of extraordinarily high immigration to the United States. Five and a half million immigrants were living in the United States at the time that the 14th Amendment was passed. That was in a nation of 31 million people. So it was one of the highest periods of immigration. And there are those who argue that the 14th Amendment was only about former slaves and ensuring that states could not pass laws that would restrict citizenship to people based on their race or former condition of slavery.

53:32In fact, there was a whole debate during the 14th Amendment consideration on the Senate floor about immigration and whether the children of immigrants were going to be given birthright citizenship. It was argued, and those who opposed birthright citizenship didn't win the argument. The people who claim that the 14th Amendment language that says that it's all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof somehow excludes the children of illegal immigrants. Well, of course, at the time of the 14th Amendment, we were an open borders country. We didn't have laws restricting immigration.

54:16People who got here basically were allowed to stay. It was only later in the 19th century when we started putting qualifications having to do with literacy, having to do with health, etc. But at the time the amendment was passed, basically you got here, you stepped foot on U.S. soil, and you were allowed to stay. So this was considered, and it was determined that the children of immigrants were, in fact, going to be given citizenship. And it was taken up not too long after, at the end of the 19th century, in a case called Wong Kim Ark, which was after the first restriction on immigration had been passed, the Chinese Exclusion Act.

55:02And the court, again, looked at this decision. And if Wong Kim Ark can be looked at in terms of his actual circumstances, by the time that that case came to court, his parents had left the United States. They left after the Chinese Exclusion Law and went back to China. Wong Kim Ark himself went back to China and lived there for a number of years before coming back, and it was only on the second time that he returned that he was denied entry. So this is not terribly unlike the situation of people illegally in the country. And it was determined that, in fact, Wong Kim Ark was entitled to birthright citizenship based on the fact that he was born in San Francisco to parents who were temporarily living in the United States.

55:54So I think the decision as a matter of law is closed. We will find out the Supreme Court's considering this and is going to hand down a decision on the Trump executive order. Whether as a matter of policy, we ought to rethink that. That, I, you know, I allow you to have whatever opinion you have and argue the case, but it's going to take amending the Constitution, not just passing a law, and certainly not just signing an executive order, in my view.

56:25Coleman Hughes:Right. Do you think it's a material difference or a distinction without a difference that the millions of immigrants we were getting in the 19th century were coming into Ellis Island and giving their name and often changing their name? But they weren't. They weren't. That was Later. That was later. Ellis Island was really later. No, they were just, they were showing up. They were coming by boat or crossing the Canadian or Mexican border into the United States. There was absolutely almost no restriction at all. I mean, we didn't question people. People who had immigrated from another country in some states were even allowed to vote.

57:07They didn't have to be naturalized citizens. They could just state their intention of naturalizing at some point to be allowed to vote in some elections. So it was very loosey-goosey back in the 19th century when it comes to immigration and what rights immigrants had.

57:27Coleman Hughes:So what did you make of the controversy about the Super Bowl halftime show being in Spanish? I mean, there was a lot of funny memes because a lot of Spanish speakers actually also had no idea what Bad Bunny was saying because he speaks modern Puerto Rican slang. Right, right. Yeah, Boricua. Yeah, exactly. But what was your—and just to remind people, like, Republicans organized a contesting halftime show featuring Kid Rock. and it inspired like a lot more outrage and controversy than I would have ever expected. And I ended up mostly upset that our country is so culturally polarized that we can't just be easygoing about a Super Bowl halftime show, that even that inspires such division and vitriol and feels so high stakes to people.

58:28Coleman Hughes:Anyway, so what did you think of that? Well, I have to tell you, I did watch it. I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but I did watch the halftime. I felt an obligation to do so. I enjoyed the music. I am not fluent in Spanish, so I didn't understand most of the lyrics. But I liked the vibe, if you will. I like Latin music. I liked the dancing. I liked the way in which it portrayed communities. I thought that it was very family-oriented. And now I'm told by some people that some of the lyrics of some of the songs may not have been the lyrics that were sung during the Super Bowl, but some of them are not really very family-oriented.

59:07So there might have been people who objected on moral grounds. But I thought it was much ado about nothing. I mean, really, we have important issues in this country to deal with. And this was certainly not the hill I would have wanted to die on.

59:24Coleman Hughes:yeah and i think uh i mean some people pointed out that a lot of america a lot of the people angry about the super bowl wouldn't have been angry if uh you know a british citizen like paul mccartney had played the super bowl right it's like is that american i don't know you can you can make a lot of arguments rolling stones do it one year am i wrong about that that could be true we've had a lot of foreign uh and and by the way he's a bad bunny's not foreign uh as you know So being Puerto Rican, you are a citizen by birth. Yep. And that's why my grandparents were able to come here in the 1950s. It is though, I think it is sad that our culture has become so polarized that we can't just relax and enjoy like a non-politicized Super Bowl.

1:00:17I think there is, you know, it's really the number of stories I've had people telling me on my podcast.

1:00:28Coleman Hughes:You know, I can't even go talk to my family. We argue every Thanksgiving, yada, yada, yada. I mean, this is not what it was like to grow up in America before I was, you know, like 20 years old. This is not, it's just not what it was like. You could have lighthearted political arguments and disagreements. You would never think twice about going on a date with someone who had different politics than you. And we really have—the character of the country has changed in that respect, and I don't think it's a change that is for the better. I agree. I mean, I think we are, in many ways, we are way too political.

1:01:14And even though we are so political, we sort of ignore some of the bigger issues. I mean, people fight about ridiculous things. And I just, I find that distressing. I don't like the fact that you cannot sit down and break bread with somebody who voted for a different candidate for president. I mean, that's just nonsense. And it means that we're, if you can't do that, if you can't solve these problems, if you can't be civil to each other in families, in communities, how do you expect to have a civil society? I mean, it just doesn't work.

1:01:50Coleman Hughes:So I wanted to ask you this earlier, but forgot. Do you think that if you, I mean, suspend disbelief on what would have to be different for this theoretical scenario to pan out? But if you had sheltered an illegal immigrant or taken an illegal immigrant today, would that require you to step down from a similar nomination for office? Well, I don't know. Looking at this current cabinet, there are people who were confirmed who did a lot of things that I think were far more egregious than that. And it shouldn't look. I don't totally hold myself blameless in this. The question is, what would have happened if I had told the people who were vetting me that I had done this?

1:02:43Would I have still been nominated? I don't know the answer to that. It's one of those unknowable questions. I do think that it's very hard to live life in the kind of fishbowl that you have to if you want to, you know, assume public office either by election or being appointed. We do want to have people who have basic integrity. We want to have people who are not going to have conflicts of interest, etc. etc. But, you know, if we make every indiscretion, everything we've done or said, no matter how many years ago or how minor it was, disqualification, I think you're going to eliminate a lot of good people.

1:03:29Coleman Hughes:Right. Okay, finally, I want to talk to you about affirmative action. You've been an opponent of affirmative action, as have I, throughout my career, shorter than yours, though it may be. And I think we've hit on at least one of the same arguments against it, which is the mismatch problem. In my book, I wrote about a study from Duke University economists, a little dated at this point, maybe 10 years, which found, a very clever study found that Black students admitted under lower standards. And not just Black students, but all students admitted under lower standards, including legacy admits or student athletes, they all ended up either with much lower GPAs, lower graduation rates than normal, but also many of them actually transferred out of harder majors into easier majors.

1:04:29Coleman Hughes:And this had the effect of hiding the lower graduation rates because in many cases you see similar graduation rates, but it's because Because, you know, the 18-year-old black kid who went in wanting to be an engineer found he was in the bottom 5 % of every class because he's mismatched with his peers, ends up switching to a liberal arts major where he can basically survive. And that's also, you know, that was hidden in a lot of statistics on affirmative action. But it's a real cost because that was someone who would have likely become an engineer had he gone to still a good school, but, you know, not MIT, right?

1:05:16Coleman Hughes:Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right, Coleman. So I founded the Center for Equal Opportunity in 1995, and my whole goal in doing it was to take a look at true equal opportunity, colorblind equal opportunity. What happens when you give racial preference to this group or that group? Is it a benefit even to the so-called beneficiaries? Does it help them? And I started it because I have a long history in this. You alluded to that. I actually started teaching in affirmative action programs when I was a young graduate student, first at the University of Colorado and then at UCLA. And what I discovered was this was at the very advent of these programs, was that they admitted a whole lot of students who could not meet the qualifications to get into either of those schools.

1:06:07And then at the University of Colorado, I actually helped devise a program to teach them the basic skills that they had missed out in high school. And they were going to be in that program for an extra year. They were going to get extra help for the first year and then go on into the university. Didn't last long. It didn't last long for political reasons. People found that objectionable. They didn't like the students having to take remedial classes. So they abandoned that approach. At UCLA, they didn't even try that approach. They basically just sort of threw them in the mix. And what happened was these were students who couldn't compete.

1:06:44I had one couple in one of my classes at UCLA. They happened to be Native American. They were a married couple who read at about the fourth grade education level. You can't succeed at UCLA if you read at the fourth grade education level. These were hardworking people. They were people who, if they had been put into some remedial classes, if they had started at a community college, for example, they might have been able to succeed. Fact is, they couldn't succeed. And so my Center for Equal Opportunity has done studies at 80 universities, and we've taken a look at what happens to students who are admitted with lower grades in test courts.

1:07:23And what you described is exactly right. They drop out, they move to another school, or they end up in majors. that are not as remunerative. So we're not helping them. And there have actually been studies done once California got rid of racial preferences in admissions, and there was a kind of cascade effect. Students that might have gotten into Berkeley or UCLA ended up at Riverside or Santa Barbara in the UC system. Turns out they then graduated. And because they were competing with people who had similar backgrounds, the education that they were offered was basically geared towards their skill level, and they succeeded.

1:08:06So we're not doing favors to black and brown students by bringing them into these situations. And I'm very thankful for the Students for Fair Admissions study against Harvard and University of North Carolina that basically found these programs unconstitutional. on.

1:08:24Coleman Hughes:One thing I was surprised by, and I agree with you, I was happy about that Supreme Court decision. One thing that surprised me was the lack of outrage on the left at that decision compared to what I expected. I'm not saying there was no outrage, but if you had asked me in like 2021, okay, Supreme Court rules against affirmative action. How do people on the left react? I would have said there would have been something like a women's march, you know, hundreds of thousands of people descending on cities all over the country. But really, it was rather quiet. And I wondered about that. I wondered if, you know, what that said about how people really felt about affirmative action because, you know, I've, the, the statistic I always pull out on this issue is, um, Thomas, uh, Espen Shade or Epson Shade, um, sociologist at Princeton, you've probably heard of.

1:09:28Coleman Hughes:He, he is repeated the fact, surprising fact that only 1 % of black 18 year olds in any given year get into college because of affirmative action. The other 99 % either don't graduate high school, do graduate high school, but don't go to college. Go to a state college or a college that doesn't require affirmative action. And so that's almost everybody. And then there's a small elite that has a stake in affirmative action. And it turns out if you get rid of that policy, it's like, it doesn't affect 99 % of people. How are you going to get hundreds of thousands of people into the street when this has always actually been a policy that only a small elite cares about one way or the other.

1:10:21Coleman Hughes:And it has been portrayed as if it's a great equalizer, right? As if it's a policy for the masses of people of color that many of whom actually are poor and are struggling, right? It's been talked about in that language, but it's just never been that? Well, it is very much a program aimed at the elite and not at the average person. One of the things it's done is that it has diminished the achievement of black and brown people who do succeed on their own because they sort of carry this affirmative action burden over their head. You know, well, you wouldn't have gotten that job if you hadn't been Mexican, or you wouldn't have gotten that job if you hadn't been black, or you wouldn't have gotten that job if you hadn't been a woman.

1:11:09And so it casts suspicion, which is very, very bad. But I will say the one thing not to get too complacent in thinking that everything's great now that the Supreme Court has handed down the decision. There is a lot of indication, again, my center for equal opportunity studies this, that some universities are looking for proxies for race that they can use and substitute so that they're still planning on doing much of the same thing. And again, I think it'll fail. Letting people in with lower grades and lower test scores who cannot compete at the same level as their peers is not going to benefit either the institution or the students that you're aiming on helping.

1:11:56Yeah.

1:11:57Coleman Hughes:Okay, that's the end of my questions for now. Thank you for doing this, and can I point my listeners in the direction of your think tank. Where can they find you and what work should they look at? I will give a couple of plugs here. One is for my Center for Equal Opportunity. The website is ceousa.org. And the other is I have my own podcast. I don't want to be competition here only, but I've got a podcast for the Renew Democracy Initiative called Older Wiser. And And you can check that out as well. Thank you, Linda. Thank you.