Whites and Asians together?

A very interesting post from Steve Sailer of www.vdare.com on a possible political alliance. Comments?

Memo To White America—Asian Voters Go With Winners.
By Steve Sailer
I’m continuing to think about how the Republican Party—or, more accurately a generic patriotic party that reflects traditional American values—can win national elections if current immigration policy is not altered and the racial balance of the U.S. continues to be shifted by the federal government. I’ve argued that simple arithmetic proves the untried “Sailer Strategy”—by which the Republican Party would worry less about “outreach” to hostile minorities and more about “inreach” to mobilize its natural white base—will be viable for a surprisingly long time, despite current immigration policy. I’ve also argued that the current Census category of “Asian”, which encourages anti-white rent-seeking by groups that otherwise have very little in common, should be abolished.Today, I want to address that “Asian” vote, in as far as that’s possible given the weaknesses of the Census definition.Until now, the Asian vote hasn’t received much attention. After all, Asians only cast 2.5 percent of the vote in 2008.Although Asian immigration rates are high, their turnout rate is low. Only 47 percent of Asian citizens bothered to vote in 2008 versus over 65 percent for whites and blacks.Moreover, their total fertility rate is fairly low: in California in 2005, only 1.4 babies per American-born Asian woman’s lifetime, and 2.0 for Asian immigrants—compared to 2.2 for American-born Latinas and a startling 3.7 for immigrant Latinas.Still, if current policy is left in place, the Asian share of the vote is likely to about double over the next four decades—making them almost as important as Latinos are now.If you take a simplistic model of partisanship, in which Democrats, as the tax-and-spend party, appeal more to those who get more out of government spending than they put in, then Asians should tend toward the Republicans.Moreover, with some specific exceptions such as Small Business Administration loans, Asians are net losers from affirmative action, which Democrats support. (Republicans, however, have never spoken up on this issue and have largely dropped it in recent years.)And, in fact, Asians apparently once did vote Republican. Exit polling of Asians only goes back to 1992, when George H.W. Bush is said to have done significantly better among Asians (winning 55 percent in that three way race with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot) than among whites (only 40 percent). Of course, the sample size then was really too small to trust.Asians, however, have voted solidly Democratic in the last three Presidential elections. Obama drubbed McCain 62-35.Some of this is due to demographic change among Asians. For example, in 1992 Chinese-American citizens were largely anti-Communist Republicans with roots in Taiwan. But most recent Chinese immigrants are from the mainland. Moreover, Indian-Americans make up an ever-larger fraction of the Asian total. And, although there are a number of (allegedly) conservative Indian pundits, South Asians appear to vote even more Democratic than East Asians.Also, the GOP hasn’t helped itself by paying little attention to issues of particular importance to Asians. For instance, Asians dislike big urban school districts, because they lack the votes to get the schools to spend heavily on Advanced Placement courses for their children rather than on remedial courses for blacks and Latinos. Case in point: Asian parents in Los Angeles County have largely moved out of the huge Los Angeles Unified School District and into smaller surrounding municipalities, such as Arcadia, where they do have the votes to get the local schools to serve their kids.Passing state laws to make it easier for parts of big school districts to secede would be popular with Asian voters. But it hasn’t been on GOP radar screens—because the secession issue is ultimately all about race, which Republicans are terrified to think about.Overall, though, I believe the trend to East Asians voting Democrat stems largely from Democrats winning in the struggle to be chic among elite whites. East Asians tend to be rather conformist. They take quickly to mouthing a society’s dominant platitudes, which in America are increasingly liberal.I’m reminded of something that surprised me in the late 1990s. My wife worked with a Korean immigrant lady named (unsurprisingly) Ms. Kim. The poor woman’s husband had died in a car crash a few years before, leaving her with two small children to raise.I was startled to learn that Ms. Kim referred to herself as a "single mother" rather than as a "widow," which seemed to me to be the more accurate and more respectable term.But that just showed what an out-of-date fuddy-duddy I was. As a relative newcomer to America in the Age of Oprah, Ms. Kim had noticed what I hadn’t: that it’s now uncool for modern American widows to attempt to distinguish themselves from unwed mothers. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.This doesn’t mean that, in her heart, Ms. Kim agreed with contemporary American mores. After all she grew up in a culture that stigmatizes illegitimacy as strongly as any in the developed world. In 2007, only 1.6 percent of babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, versus a staggering 39.7 percent in the U.S. (That’s 72 percent illegitimacy among blacks, 51 percent among Hispanics, 28 percent among whites, and 17 percent among Asians).But East Asians are used to hypocrisy. If the rich and respectable in America demand certain pro forma declarations, well, that’s a small price to be paid to not be excluded from polite society.Granted, American hypocrisy is bizarrely inverted—rather than pretending to be better than she is, fashionable Americans want Ms. Kim to pretend to be worse than she is. But if that’s what the socially-influential whites in America say they want to hear, well, lip service is cheap.Hu’s Rule, invented by journalist Arthur Hu in the 1990s, is that Asians tend to be slightly more conservative than their white neighbors—but they tend to choose liberal white neighbors. At the beginning of the decade, 45% of all Asian-born immigrants lived in three heavily-Democratic metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Although Asian voters tend to live in the more conservative parts of the megalopolises, such as the staid San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles rather than the trendy Westside, it’s still Southern California rather than, say, Northern Texas.After the 2004 election, I calculated that 76 percent of Asians lived in states that voted for John F. Kerry.Asians tend to emulate upscale whites. But, as Andrew Gelman pointed out in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, a key difference between Republican states and Democratic states is that, in Republican states, wealthy white voters are more likely to be Republicans than downscale white voters. That’s not true in Democratic states, where social status among whites doesn’t correlate with voting Republican.Thus in, say, Arkansas, respectable people (in the eyes of local Asians) vote Republican. But not many Asians live in states like Arkansas. Because Asians are concentrated on the coasts, they are exposed more to Democratic than Republican role models. And they tend to conform to the norms of the rich and powerful,Moreover, Asians strive energetically to be accepted to the most elite (and thus most dogmatically liberal) universities. But they tend to lack the intellectually ornery streak that helps student resist indoctrination. John Derbyshire, author of the scintillating new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, whose father-in-law was a member of the Chinese Communist Party, told me:"Asian American freshmen may be particularly susceptible to campus radicalization. Youngsters from Asian families often have parents with little connection with American political life. So Asian-American youngsters, who spent their high school careers accumulating stellar grades in math and science, come relatively innocent to the professional multicultural evangelists in the universities."But what about the strong family values of Asians? This isn’t a myth, as it is in the case of Hispanics—Asians really do have, for example, much lower illegitimacy rates than any other race in America. So why don’t those values make Asians vote Republican?My explanation for this paradox: many Asian immigrants cocoon their children so thoroughly that they don't need much help from the federal government in insulating their kids from anti-family cultural threats. In contrast, white parents, lacking these webs of extended family and customs, fear that their children are more at risk from a corrosive culture. They therefore want their elected officials to validate the norms helpful in raising their children.In a way, the GOP’s Asian problem is a subset of its white problem. The Republicans’ fundamental problem in California, for example, is not that McCain only captured 35 percent of the Asian vote—but that he won only 46 percent of the white vote in the state.A self-confident party that can win the 70 percent of the white vote it needs for long-term survival would likely be able to win close to half of the Asian vote.Of course, at present, Asians can see that the opposite holds true. In modern America, Whites are as out of fashion as widows. And because the GOP is, whether it likes it or not, inevitably viewed as the white guy’s party, it’s out of fashion, too.For example, consider how Asian politicians in California spin an issue that Asian voters care very much about: the technicalities of admission to the taxpayer-subsidized University of California. Recently, the UC administrators have proposed reforms that fall into two categories:First, in order to weasel around Proposition 209, which outlaws racial preferences, the UC administrators want to increase the number of students automatically admitted from each high school in the state from the top 4 percent by GPA to the top 9 percent.This would increase admissions of blacks and Hispanics from slum high schools who lack adequate test scores.Second, having used its power as the College Board’s largest customer to force the expansion of the basic SAT test to include a Writing test and tougher math questions, the UC system now, sensibly enough, wants to drop its requirement that applicants take not only the SAT but also three SAT Subject tests.After all, the new SAT is a three-hour-and-forty-five-minute monster that incorporates much that the UC liked about the Subject tests.But this simplification of the application process would likely hurt Asian high schoolers because their parents are more likely than other students' parents to get them signed up in time to take all these superfluous tests.Figuring out the various ideal points in your child’s high school career at which he or she should take each of the three SAT Subject tests is the kind of complicated strategizing that Asian parents are most likely to obsess over.The California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus (who seem, significantly, to be all Democratic state legislators—the Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus is part of the California Democrats website) wrote an angry letter to the chairman of the UC Board of Regents denouncing the reforms.Here’s what’s interesting: The Asian-Pacific Islanders could have framed their argument as an attack on the UC’s illegal attempt to get around the ban on racial preferences in the California constitution. Theoretically, they could have allied themselves with the other victims of affirmative action: whites.Needless to say, there is no White Caucus for the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus to ally themselves with—at least, not yet. Right now, indeed, if the Asian politicians had made an appeal to white self-interest on this issue, it would have been publicly greeted by the white elite in California with incomprehension and horror.So, not surprisingly, the Asian Caucus chose to cast their argument against the proposed changes as if they represented all minorities standing shoulder to shoulder against white oppression:"According to the ‘low end’ projections of 2007-2008 admitted students provided by the UC, the total percentage of African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, and Asian American students would decrease from 60 percent to 53 percent … whereas, the percentage of White students would increase from 34 percent to 41 percent." [Letter, February 3, 2009 (PDF)]Of course, this is deeply dishonest argument that assumes African Americans, Hispanics, etc can’t count. Their numbers would go up under the proposed reform—but the Asian numbers would go down enough to ensure that the non-white total goes down.But attacking whites is what pays off these days. And America gets more of what it pays for.My view: Asians will continue to hop on the anti-white bandwagon until such time as whites get up the backbone to tell them to stop. After that, whites and Asians should get along reasonably well.Part of the problem is that Americans lack a useful vocabulary for discussing issues like Affirmative Action in colleges. The breakdown is definitely not whites v. minorities, because Asians gets few breaks.One small but potentially significant step toward changing the political culture: popularize the acronym "NAM," which stands for "Non-Asian Minority:" e.g., blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and so forth (basically, any group with lower average test scores and higher average crime rates, who thus benefits from Affirmative Action).Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with as catchy an acronym for those who pay for racial preferences. "Whites and Asians," for example, comes out "WaA", which just sounds infantile.But using the term NAMs would be a good start.[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here..]

Whites and Asians together?

A very interesting post from Steve Sailer of www.vdare.com on a possible political alliance. Comments?

Memo To White America—Asian Voters Go With Winners.
By Steve Sailer
I’m continuing to think about how the Republican Party—or, more accurately a generic patriotic party that reflects traditional American values—can win national elections if current immigration policy is not altered and the racial balance of the U.S. continues to be shifted by the federal government. I’ve argued that simple arithmetic proves the untried “Sailer Strategy”—by which the Republican Party would worry less about “outreach” to hostile minorities and more about “inreach” to mobilize its natural white base—will be viable for a surprisingly long time, despite current immigration policy. I’ve also argued that the current Census category of “Asian”, which encourages anti-white rent-seeking by groups that otherwise have very little in common, should be abolished.
Today, I want to address that “Asian” vote, in as far as that’s possible given the weaknesses of the Census definition.
Until now, the Asian vote hasn’t received much attention. After all, Asians only cast 2.5 percent of the vote in 2008.
Although Asian immigration rates are high, their turnout rate is low. Only 47 percent of Asian citizens bothered to vote in 2008 versus over 65 percent for whites and blacks.
Moreover, their total fertility rate is fairly low: in California in 2005, only 1.4 babies per American-born Asian woman’s lifetime, and 2.0 for Asian immigrants—compared to 2.2 for American-born Latinas and a startling 3.7 for immigrant Latinas.
Still, if current policy is left in place, the Asian share of the vote is likely to about double over the next four decades—making them almost as important as Latinos are now.
If you take a simplistic model of partisanship, in which Democrats, as the tax-and-spend party, appeal more to those who get more out of government spending than they put in, then Asians should tend toward the Republicans.
Moreover, with some specific exceptions such as Small Business Administration loans, Asians are net losers from affirmative action, which Democrats support. (Republicans, however, have never spoken up on this issue and have largely dropped it in recent years.)
And, in fact, Asians apparently once did vote Republican. Exit polling of Asians only goes back to 1992, when George H.W. Bush is said to have done significantly better among Asians (winning 55 percent in that three way race with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot) than among whites (only 40 percent). Of course, the sample size then was really too small to trust.
Asians, however, have voted solidly Democratic in the last three Presidential elections. Obama drubbed McCain 62-35.
Some of this is due to demographic change among Asians. For example, in 1992 Chinese-American citizens were largely anti-Communist Republicans with roots in Taiwan. But most recent Chinese immigrants are from the mainland. Moreover, Indian-Americans make up an ever-larger fraction of the Asian total. And, although there are a number of (allegedly) conservative Indian pundits, South Asians appear to vote even more Democratic than East Asians.
Also, the GOP hasn’t helped itself by paying little attention to issues of particular importance to Asians. For instance, Asians dislike big urban school districts, because they lack the votes to get the schools to spend heavily on Advanced Placement courses for their children rather than on remedial courses for blacks and Latinos. Case in point: Asian parents in Los Angeles County have largely moved out of the huge Los Angeles Unified School District and into smaller surrounding municipalities, such as Arcadia, where they do have the votes to get the local schools to serve their kids.
Passing state laws to make it easier for parts of big school districts to secede would be popular with Asian voters. But it hasn’t been on GOP radar screens—because the secession issue is ultimately all about race, which Republicans are terrified to think about.
Overall, though, I believe the trend to East Asians voting Democrat stems largely from Democrats winning in the struggle to be chic among elite whites. East Asians tend to be rather conformist. They take quickly to mouthing a society’s dominant platitudes, which in America are increasingly liberal.
I’m reminded of something that surprised me in the late 1990s. My wife worked with a Korean immigrant lady named (unsurprisingly) Ms. Kim. The poor woman’s husband had died in a car crash a few years before, leaving her with two small children to raise.
I was startled to learn that Ms. Kim referred to herself as a "single mother" rather than as a "widow," which seemed to me to be the more accurate and more respectable term.
But that just showed what an out-of-date fuddy-duddy I was. As a relative newcomer to America in the Age of Oprah, Ms. Kim had noticed what I hadn’t: that it’s now uncool for modern American widows to attempt to distinguish themselves from unwed mothers. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.
This doesn’t mean that, in her heart, Ms. Kim agreed with contemporary American mores. After all she grew up in a culture that stigmatizes illegitimacy as strongly as any in the developed world. In 2007, only 1.6 percent of babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, versus a staggering 39.7 percent in the U.S. (That’s 72 percent illegitimacy among blacks, 51 percent among Hispanics, 28 percent among whites, and 17 percent among Asians).
But East Asians are used to hypocrisy. If the rich and respectable in America demand certain pro forma declarations, well, that’s a small price to be paid to not be excluded from polite society.
Granted, American hypocrisy is bizarrely inverted—rather than pretending to be better than she is, fashionable Americans want Ms. Kim to pretend to be worse than she is. But if that’s what the socially-influential whites in America say they want to hear, well, lip service is cheap.
Hu’s Rule, invented by journalist Arthur Hu in the 1990s, is that Asians tend to be slightly more conservative than their white neighbors—but they tend to choose liberal white neighbors.
At the beginning of the decade, 45% of all Asian-born immigrants lived in three heavily-Democratic metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Although Asian voters tend to live in the more conservative parts of the megalopolises, such as the staid San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles rather than the trendy Westside, it’s still Southern California rather than, say, Northern Texas.
After the 2004 election, I calculated that 76 percent of Asians lived in states that voted for John F. Kerry.
Asians tend to emulate upscale whites. But, as Andrew Gelman pointed out in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, a key difference between Republican states and Democratic states is that, in Republican states, wealthy white voters are more likely to be Republicans than downscale white voters. That’s not true in Democratic states, where social status among whites doesn’t correlate with voting Republican.
Thus in, say, Arkansas, respectable people (in the eyes of local Asians) vote Republican. But not many Asians live in states like Arkansas. Because Asians are concentrated on the coasts, they are exposed more to Democratic than Republican role models. And they tend to conform to the norms of the rich and powerful,
Moreover, Asians strive energetically to be accepted to the most elite (and thus most dogmatically liberal) universities. But they tend to lack the intellectually ornery streak that helps student resist indoctrination. John Derbyshire, author of the scintillating new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, whose father-in-law was a member of the Chinese Communist Party, told me:
"Asian American freshmen may be particularly susceptible to campus radicalization. Youngsters from Asian families often have parents with little connection with American political life. So Asian-American youngsters, who spent their high school careers accumulating stellar grades in math and science, come relatively innocent to the professional multicultural evangelists in the universities."
But what about the strong family values of Asians? This isn’t a myth, as it is in the case of Hispanics—Asians really do have, for example, much lower illegitimacy rates than any other race in America. So why don’t those values make Asians vote Republican?
My explanation for this paradox: many Asian immigrants cocoon their children so thoroughly that they don't need much help from the federal government in insulating their kids from anti-family cultural threats.
In contrast, white parents, lacking these webs of extended family and customs, fear that their children are more at risk from a corrosive culture. They therefore want their elected officials to validate the norms helpful in raising their children.
In a way, the GOP’s Asian problem is a subset of its white problem. The Republicans’ fundamental problem in California, for example, is not that McCain only captured 35 percent of the Asian vote—but that he won only 46 percent of the white vote in the state.
A self-confident party that can win the 70 percent of the white vote it needs for long-term survival would likely be able to win close to half of the Asian vote.
Of course, at present, Asians can see that the opposite holds true. In modern America, Whites are as out of fashion as widows. And because the GOP is, whether it likes it or not, inevitably viewed as the white guy’s party, it’s out of fashion, too.
For example, consider how Asian politicians in California spin an issue that Asian voters care very much about: the technicalities of admission to the taxpayer-subsidized University of California.
Recently, the UC administrators have proposed reforms that fall into two categories:
First, in order to weasel around Proposition 209, which outlaws racial preferences, the UC administrators want to increase the number of students automatically admitted from each high school in the state from the top 4 percent by GPA to the top 9 percent.
This would increase admissions of blacks and Hispanics from slum high schools who lack adequate test scores.
Second, having used its power as the College Board’s largest customer to force the expansion of the basic SAT test to include a Writing test and tougher math questions, the UC system now, sensibly enough, wants to drop its requirement that applicants take not only the SAT but also three SAT Subject tests.
After all, the new SAT is a three-hour-and-forty-five-minute monster that incorporates much that the UC liked about the Subject tests.
But this simplification of the application process would likely hurt Asian high schoolers because their parents are more likely than other students' parents to get them signed up in time to take all these superfluous tests.
Figuring out the various ideal points in your child’s high school career at which he or she should take each of the three SAT Subject tests is the kind of complicated strategizing that Asian parents are most likely to obsess over.
The California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus (who seem, significantly, to be all Democratic state legislators—the Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus is part of the California Democrats website) wrote an angry letter to the chairman of the UC Board of Regents denouncing the reforms.
Here’s what’s interesting: The Asian-Pacific Islanders could have framed their argument as an attack on the UC’s illegal attempt to get around the ban on racial preferences in the California constitution. Theoretically, they could have allied themselves with the other victims of affirmative action: whites.
Needless to say, there is no White Caucus for the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus to ally themselves with—at least, not yet. Right now, indeed, if the Asian politicians had made an appeal to white self-interest on this issue, it would have been publicly greeted by the white elite in California with incomprehension and horror.
So, not surprisingly, the Asian Caucus chose to cast their argument against the proposed changes as if they represented all minorities standing shoulder to shoulder against white oppression:
"According to the ‘low end’ projections of 2007-2008 admitted students provided by the UC, the total percentage of African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, and Asian American students would decrease from 60 percent to 53 percent … whereas, the percentage of White students would increase from 34 percent to 41 percent." [Letter, February 3, 2009 (PDF)]
Of course, this is deeply dishonest argument that assumes African Americans, Hispanics, etc can’t count. Their numbers would go up under the proposed reform—but the Asian numbers would go down enough to ensure that the non-white total goes down.
But attacking whites is what pays off these days. And America gets more of what it pays for.
My view: Asians will continue to hop on the anti-white bandwagon until such time as whites get up the backbone to tell them to stop. After that, whites and Asians should get along reasonably well.
Part of the problem is that Americans lack a useful vocabulary for discussing issues like Affirmative Action in colleges. The breakdown is definitely not whites v. minorities, because Asians gets few breaks.
One small but potentially significant step toward changing the political culture: popularize the acronym "NAM," which stands for "Non-Asian Minority:" e.g., blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and so forth (basically, any group with lower average test scores and higher average crime rates, who thus benefits from Affirmative Action).
Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with as catchy an acronym for those who pay for racial preferences. "Whites and Asians," for example, comes out "WaA", which just sounds infantile.
But using the term NAMs would be a good start.
[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here..]

Who Are “Asians” Anyway—And Why Are We Giving Them Affirmative Action Benefits?

A follow up from here about a possible future GOP strategy! This is from the insightful Steve Sailer of http://www.vdare.com/.

Who Are “Asians” Anyway—And Why Are We Giving Them Affirmative Action Benefits?
By Steve Sailer
The Republican Party should worry less about “outreach” to hostile minorities and more about “inreach” to mobilize its natural white base—will be viable for a surprisingly long time, despite current immigration policy.But it will obviously help if some minorities can be persuaded to be less enthusiastic about the Democrats. In devising any long-term strategy for preventing one-party Democrat rule in America, the Asian vote, which went for Obama 62-35 over McCain, must be analyzed especially closely.A generation from now, Hispanics will have an abundance of votes, but Asians will have plenty of money and brainpower. Hispanics will naturally continue to gravitate toward the tax-and-spend party, but Asians are more unpredictable. With their higher earning power, Asians, in theory, might not prove hostile to a party advocating limited government. On the other hand, if Asians continue their current shift to the left, their talents will magnify the impact of their numbers.I’ll discuss the Asian vote in detail in an upcoming column, but today’s essay will merely explore the political implications of one basic question:Who are “Asians” anyway?Asia is an awfully big place. It has four billion people inhabitants. Is everybody from Asia an “Asian” according to U.S. government regulations?For instance, everybody would agree that, say, Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Senator from Hawaii for the last 46 years, is Asian because his parents were Japanese.But what about Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana and a potential 2012 Presidential candidate? Is the blue-eyed Daniels an Asian? After all, he is of Syrian Christian descent, and Syria is in Asia.Well, of course not! Everybody knows that West Asians aren’t whom we are talking about when we talk about “Asians”.Then, how about Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana? He is of Asian Indian descent. Does that make him an “Asian” Asian?Funny you should ask. See, Jindal was officially Caucasian for the first decade of his life. But then the Reagan Administration changed him to an Asian. So now he’s an Asian.To begin at the beginning: originally, the concoction of the overall “Asian” category was another folly of the Nixon Administration. Rather than simply continuing to tabulate separately each of the mutually antagonistic East Asian nationalities, with their lurid histories of aggression and atrocity against each other, Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget lumped them together into the single racial category of “Oriental Americans”, making them a legally-protected class able to sue for disparate impact.Nixon’s creation of an “Oriental” category (later changed to “Asian” to entrap unfashionable people who fail to keep up with the latest PC nomenclature shifts) inevitably called into existence a pan-East Asian class of activists to protect and extend their racial privileges.As I argued when reviewing Sandra Day O’Connor’s disastrous, Bush-backed, majority opinion in the Grutter quota case, if the government announced that people born on Wednesdays were now a legally preferred class, there would soon spring up pressure groups with names like The Children of Woe to lobby for more Wednesdaytarian power. PBS would run Wednesday Pride documentaries during Wednesday History Month about esteem-building people born on Wednesdays, such as Jimmy Carter, Bruce Lee, and Rosie O’Donnell.Of course, the (relatively) good news about “Asians” is that since they tend toward competence, they benefit from fewer quotas than blacks and Hispanics. Thus the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s notorious Four-Fifths Rule for detecting disparate impact results in de facto quotas for Asians much less often than for Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs).Still, those Asian activists are in action. Thus, back in the 1970s when Gov. Jindal was a child, Indian and Pakistani immigrants and their offspring were legally considered racially Caucasian, in accordance with the general findings of physical and genetic anthropology. But then, Indian immigrant businessmen clamored for the Small Business Administration’s low-interest minority business development loans. So, in 1982, the Reagan Administration lumped immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in with East Asians, declaring them all to be “socially or economically disadvantaged” Asians.This is the result: Imagine you are a Taliban terrorist from the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. You immigrate to America. If you are from the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass, you are now officially “Asian”, and you qualify for taxpayer-subsidized low-interest loans. But if you are from the Afghanistan side, you are officially white and are out of luck at getting a government loan.Got it?Lumping together East Asians and South Asians is transparently bogus. Pyong Gap Min, a professor at Queens College in New York City, pointed out:"[Asian] is a political term used by Asian-American activists and enhanced by governmental treatment. In terms of culture, physical characteristics, and pre-migrant historical experiences, I have argued, South and East Asians do not have commonalities and as a result, they do not maintain close ties in terms of friendship, intermarriage or sharing neighborhoods."The Reagan Administration’s attempt to bribe a talented pressure group, the Indians, by declaring them legally nonwhite is another example of the shallow short-term thinking about race that has left the Republican Party with its future in doubt.It’s absolutely nuts for Republicans to expand a system under which immigrants can win money and prizes by declaring themselves victims of whites.You don’t make friends that way, you make enemies. It’s basic human nature.Unfortunately, almost everybody thinks about diversity in only the most abstract terms: e.g., If we give Group X the special benefits their leaders demand, they will vote for us more. I mean, their politicians wouldn’t have ulterior motives, now would they?But, in reality, to understand the effects of diversity, you have to think about how individuals actually act, about how they feel when they act. You have to put yourself in their shoes.Consider this example. In 2005, the Office of the Inspector General sent a report to the SBA: Criteria for Overcoming the Presumption of Social Disadvantage is [sic] Needed. A whistle-blowing citizen had filed a complaint about an Asian businessman in his mid-20s who had qualified for the SBA’s 8(a) minority business development programs. The whistle-blower argued that the entrepreneur was not really disadvantaged.See, in theory you don’t qualify for taxpayer-subsidized loans just by being “Asian”. No, you have to be a socially or economically disadvantaged Asian. And how do you demonstrate you are disadvantaged? You fill out a form about how you’ve suffered under the lash of white bigotry.Thus this Asian entrepreneur related a tale of woe on his application, including:“I then watched as young, less experienced white men got the promotions and salary increases that I had been promised.”The Inspector General’s office discovered, however, that in the company where the victim toiled, his father was a senior officer and shareholder. In fact, this young martyr to social and economic disadvantage:1. came from a wealthy family; e.g., according to a newspaper article, since 1996, three companies his parents founded and were affiliated with were sold for approximately $3 billion;2. was raised in his parents’ home, which had an assessed value of $5.2 million as of January 1, 2005; …5. was gainfully employed by the United States Senate, Goldman Sachs International … among others.As the title of the 2005 report points out, after decades of handing out loans to each and every Asian who submitted a form claiming to be “socially or economically disadvantaged”, the federal government still hadn’t gotten around to developing criteria for “overcoming the presumption of social disadvantage”.In other words, if you are Asian, the government just takes your word for it.Consider the psychological effect of the government prodding you to lie about white persecution. Sure, this Asian applicant no doubt knew he was fibbing the first time the government asked him to complain about being discriminated against by whites in order to qualify for quotas. Yet, as the years go by, and he keeps having to fill out these forms to get more advantages over whites, and keeps donating to ethnic lobbies to preserve his privileges, it will only be natural for him to start believing his cover story about how he’s the real victim and thus he deserves his loot.If you pay people to exploit you, they will come to believe you deserve it.In fact, maybe you do.The policy implications are twofold.First, the next time the Republicans get any power, they need to abolish all programs that treat “Asians” as victims deserving special treatment.If Asians are put on a basis of legal equality with whites, they will get along well enough with them—and cease to identify with the people, and the party, benefitting from quotasSure, there will be a short-term political price to pay. But if you don’t do it now, when will you do it? When Asian voters are more numerous?Second, South Asians must be reclassified back to Caucasian, and the “Asian” category renamed “East Asian” (if not Oriental).It was particularly shortsighted of the Reagan Administration to declare South Asians officially nonwhite. South Asians tend (especially compared to East Asians) to be extraverted, loquacious in English, interested in politics and argument, and intellectually venturesome. There are already far more South Asian than East Asian pundits in America. Policies that incline these Indians to the left could turn out to be disastrous.There are some grounds for hope. One of the main reasons for anti-white feelings among East Asian men is that white men are much more likely to marry East Asian women than East Asian men are to marry white women, leaving a lot of cranky East Asian bachelors left over. This is less of a problem for South Asian men, who keep their womenfolk on tighter leashes. Arranged marriages are still common among South Asians in America.Because the GOP is inevitably destined to be considered the white party, it would be best to have the Indians, as Lyndon Johnson vulgarly but memorably said of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “inside the tent p-----g out than outside p-----g in”.And it’s not at all too late to rectify the Asian definition to detach Indians. The current categories are hardly set in stone. For example, in 1997, the OMB broke apart the silly “Asian or Pacific Islander” group into “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander”.Note, however, why this was done. Right now, only minority activists pay attention to the federal definitions of race and ethnicity. Thus the “Asian or Pacific Islander” group was split not because it was plainly stupid to lump massive Samoans in with wiry Vietnamese—and certainly not because it was good for America. Instead, it happened because Native Hawaiian groups felt that being aggregated with Asians was slowing their endless campaign to badger Congress into treating them like American Indians (for instance, let them have casinos to cater to gambling-crazed Chinese tourists).Asians are richer than Pacific Islanders. So lumping them together statistically diminished the Polynesians’ claims of victimization.Bottom line: American whites have long subcontracted out to minority pressure groups the question of how Washington develops the racial categories used to award legal privileges and perquisites.When whites made up an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population, as they did during the Nixon Administration, that heedlessness may have seemed trivial.But as whites lose their numeric dominance because Washington’s immigration policy, they will have to learn to play these grubby games, too.
[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]