Demographic Changes Upset Affirmative Action

Race-based affirmative action is doomed. Not because of the Bush administration's recent ma- neuvering on the subject. Nor because the U.S. Supreme Court may reverse its 1978 Bakke decision allowing universities and colleges to consider race as a factor in admitting students. Rather, its demise is more the consequence of last week's historic announcement by the Census Bureau that Latinos have officially surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority.

Just as the civil rights movement derived its moral authority from specific historical circumstances, so too did its programs owe their political viability to a demographic calculus. In the 1960s, non-Hispanic whites made up more than 85% of the U.S. population, and blacks, the sole group for whom affirmative action was initially intended, made up one in 10 Americans.

But as enormous post-1970 immigration ethnically diversified America, the traditional divide between black and white evolved into one between whites and nonwhites. In the early 1970s, Mexican Americans, who had long been officially classified as "white" by the federal government, gained new status in the courts as "identifiable minorities." They, too, were included in affirmative action programs. At that time, the addition of Mexican Americans was largely justifiable on the grounds that a majority of them were third- or later-generation Americans. Furthermore, many Mexican Americans, particularly in Texas, suffered from a legacy of school segregation and unequal educational opportunities.

But 30 years ago, no one could have imagined how a generation of large-scale immigration would redefine the Hispanic American experience. Once an overwhelmingly native-born population, by 2000 nearly two-thirds of adult Latinos nationwide were foreign-born. Within a decade, a program designed to remedy past discrimination began to benefit recently arrived immigrants and their children.

As the civil rights umbrella sheltered more and more groups, the rationale for affirmative action shifted. No longer was it primarily considered a remedy for past discrimination. Instead, affirmative action programs targeted contemporary discrimination. By the late 1990s, political battles forced universities to develop yet another rationale for racial preferences. The University of Michigan, whose admissions policies will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in April, justifies its affirmative action program on the grounds that it promotes "diversity" on campus, which reputedly makes for a richer education environment. Once merely a means to a noble end, diversity became the end.