Melting Pots and Critical Masses

Reihan has written an interesting print article about rethinking immigration policy, and how an updated “melting pot” approach might attract support for immigration restriction. His main point is that long-term mass immigration of a given ethnic group is bad for members of that group who are already here:

The ongoing influx of less-skilled immigrant workers puts economic pressure on the less-skilled immigrants who already reside in our country, and it reinforces their cultural separation from Americans who belong to other ethnic groups.

The first part is certainly true; it’s why Cesar Chavez was an anti-immigration hawk. The second part is equally commonsensical: If people from the old country keep streaming in, you tend to hang out with them instead of mixing with the culture at large. Both of these reasons support the conclusion that restricting immigration benefits both immigrants and the native-born — though I’m less optimistic than Reihan is that a message amounting to “We’ll help you by keeping your relatives out” will turn immigrants into Republicans.

Here’s the part I found particularly interesting, though:

In 2007, Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State and Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell found that over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply, a development they attribute to rising immigration. As the size of an ethnic group increases, in-group contact and interaction increases. This in turn strengthens in-group ethnic solidarity while reducing intermarriage.

This is a common observation in many areas of life: Outsiders will mix with the dominant group as long as there aren’t enough of them to form a subgroup. Yet it seems diametrically opposed to the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), allowing the University of Michigan Law School to give preference in admission to African Americans. In that case, the worry was that a race-blind policy would admit too few African Americans:

By enrolling a “critical mass” of underrepresented minority students, the policy seeks to ensure their ability to contribute to the Law School’s character and to the legal profession.

In other words: Too few “minority students” and they’re marginalized, too many and they’re standoffish. Admissions quotas sure can be tricky, eh? So how about this: Instead of constantly seeking some magic intermediate number that will maximize the potential for social engineering, why not just admit those who are best equipped to learn about the law?

In fact, it’s worth examining the phrase “critical mass” a little more closely. In nuclear physics, if you have a large enough and pure enough sample (a “critical mass”) of a radioactive substance, almost all the radiation will get bottled up inside the sample instead of escaping to the outside. This stimulates more and more radiation within the sample, and pretty soon the whole thing explodes. In view of what’s happening on today’s college campuses, the metaphor may be more apt than its users intend.

The last sentence of the Bollinger decision reads: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” It’s now 2016, so more than half that period has expired, but today’s universities and students are doing their level best to get an extension on that deadline.