Why Trump Supporters Distrust Immigration and Diversity

But is he addressing legitimate interest-group concerns or is he pandering to racial fears? There is a rather one-sided debate over what motivates Mr. Trump and his supporters. A wave of new books and articles still invoke stereotypes trotted out on election night: Mr. Trump’s “angry white voters” were motivated by racism, resentment, “whitelash,” declining economic or social status, irrational fears of economic or demographic change, or all of the above. They are deluded, confused “Strangers in Their Own Land,” as suggested by the title of a book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild.

.. “the diversity machine.” This powerful policy juggernaut has quietly and questionably blended together two trends that threaten working- and middle-class whites.

.. It’s the old story of costs and benefits of building America on the backs of cheap immigrant labor.

.. Economic competition fuels ethnic antagonism — and nativism, racism and the like.

.. There has been very little scholarly or public attention paid to a second policy trend that intensified the antagonism born of this ethnically split labor market. In the 1990s, affirmative action’s original mission to right past wrongs against African-Americans was transformed into an expanded list of preferences in the workplace and in higher education for immigrant subgroups (for example, Hispanics, Asians or Pacific Islanders).

..Instead of redressing past discrimination, the more ambitious diversity mission was to achieve proportional, “look like America” institutions that allegedly would perform better by reflecting the country’s demographic change. Preferences for blacks were controversial, but even critics had to admit that they had some degree of historical and moral authority. Not so the expansion of preferences to members of ill-defined, grab-bag racial and ethnic categories. (For example, “Hispanic” could include first-through-fourth-generation Americans of Cuban, Mexican, Guatemalan, Bolivian, Chilean, Salvadoran, Colombian and other Latin American ancestry.)

..A 2016 Gallup poll on affirmative action was typical in finding majorities of all groups (76 percent of whites) who believed that merit alone should determine college admissions, with race or ethnicity playing a relatively minor role.

.. from 2013 to 2016, medical schools in the United States accepted 94 percent of blacks, 83 percent of Hispanics, 63 percent of whites and 58 percent of Asians with top MCAT scores of 30 to 32 and grade-point averages of 3.6 to 3.8;

.. The presidential candidates in 2016 were largely silent on affirmative action, but Mr. Trump said in 2015 that he was “fine with it” though “it’s coming to a time when maybe we don’t need it.”

.. Institutional racism remains a problem, as does immigration and the balancing of assimilation and pluralism. But identity politics and identity policies may have become too divisive and complicated in both theory and practice.