Steve Phillips, New York Times, Feb. 15; original article contains links.
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The White House is assertively working to make America white again, and
Democrats are too afraid to speak that truth. The aggressive pace of deportations of
immigrants of color, the elimination of the DACA program protecting immigrant
children and the proposals propounded by the anti-immigration voices in the
administration will all have the undeniable effect of slowing the rapid racial
diversification of the United States population. Despite this sweeping attempt at
racial social engineering, few voices in progressive and Democratic circles are
responding with the kinds of outrage that one would expect.
The pro-white preferences of Donald Trump and his administration, especially
when it comes to immigration, are legion. From the day he opened his presidential
campaign in 2015 by demonizing Mexicans to the enthusiasm generated by the calls
for building a wall along the Mexican border to aggressively ramping up
deportations of immigrants of color to eliminating DACA to vulgarly denigrating
African nations and Haiti, this administration has been quite clear about its
preference for white people.
It should be no surprise, then, that the immigration policies championed by the
White House would all have the effect of reducing the number of people of color
coming into the country. A recent study by The Washington Post found that the
administration’s proposals to curtail legal immigration by limiting family
reunification would slightly delay the date when whites become a minority. “By
greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants entering
America, this proposal would reshape the future United States,” the economist
Michael Clemens said.
“Decades ahead,” he added, “many fewer of us would be nonwhite or have
nonwhite people in our families.”
The administration’s focus is not random. Nor is it illogical, if one’s goal is to
maximize the influence of white people. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration
and Naturalization Act, the chromatic composition of the country’s population has
undergone a fundamental transformation. People of color used to make up 12
percent of the United States population in 1965, and that percentage has more than
tripled over the past several decades to the point where nonwhite people are nearly
39 percent of the residents of the United States (it is no accident that the country’s
first African-American president was elected when he was elected). Mr. Trump’s
team understands that the specific laws it seeks to eliminate have played a
significant role in that demographic revolution.
As distasteful as many people find unapologetic advocacy for public policies that
favor white people, the truth of the matter is that immigration laws have been among
the longest-standing and most strongly defended cornerstones of our government.
The very first immigration law passed, the Naturalization Act of 1790, declared that
to become a citizen, one had to be a “free white person.” That demarcation was the
explicit law of the land for the next 162 years, until 1952. There are 20th-century
Supreme Court cases explicitly holding that Asian immigrants could not become
United States citizens because they were not white. Even after 1952, the practical
effect of immigration policy continued to promote white people above others
through mechanisms such as the Asia Pacific Triangle, which restricted immigration
from Asian countries.
Most people would probably like to believe that the era of widespread public support
for white supremacist policies is over, but you wouldn’t know it from the timidity
and rhetorical reticence of progressive and Democratic leaders. When they had the
leverage to demand a vote on protections for the Dreamers, Democrats surrendered
that influence because they feared the electoral consequences of being seen as
fighting for the rights of immigrants. The assessment was that white voters in swing
states would retaliate against Democratic candidates, imperiling the prospects for
taking back Congress.
Setting aside the morality of the matter, these Democratic electoral calculations
are flawed in two fundamental respects. First, they underestimate the capacity of
white people to rise above racism and stand for justice and equality. Mr. Trump’s
presidential campaign was a very thinly veiled appeal to racial anxiety and
grievances of white people in America. Study after study has confirmed that racial
anxiety, sometimes described as cultural discomfort, was the motivating factor
among many of Mr. Trump’s supporters. And yet the fact that Mr. Trump still
needed to speak mostly in code shows that there are limits to the effect of explicit
racial appeals. In the 2017 elections in Virginia and Alabama, the increase in support
among white voters for Ralph Northam for governor and Doug Jones’s Senate
candidacy affirmed that racial pandering also alienates whites.
The second Democratic miscalculation is that they overlook the political
potential and power of the swelling ranks of nonwhite voters in America. Democrats
need to win two Republican-held seats to flip control of the United States Senate,
and based on the 2016 election results, the two most likely pickups are in Arizona
and Nevada. In both of those states, Latino voters hold the balance of power. Hillary
Clinton lost Arizona by about 91,000 votes, and there were more than 600,000
Latinos who were eligible to vote but didn’t cast ballots in 2016. Democrats won
Nevada in the last three presidential elections, so the primary task is bringing those
voters back to the polls for the midterm elections. The protective cushion in Nevada
can come from the pool of 150,000 eligible, nonvoting Latinos; the incumbent
Republican won his last election by less than 12,000 votes.
To inspire enthusiasm among the voters they need, however, Democrats should
be publicly fighting the good fight in the corridors of Congress and simultaneously
shouting from rooftops their solidarity with the growing sectors of the population.
Instead, too many are so afraid of alarming conservative white voters that they are
creeping around in private whispering protestations of loyalty and love that may one
distant day be realized in public.
The big-picture reality of this moment is that Mr. Trump is too late. His
attempts to make America whiter are doomed to fail because the demographic
revolution is now irreversible. The driving force of the browning of America is no
longer immigration but birth and death rates. A majority of babies being born are of
color, and a majority of people dying are white. Whites are already a minority of all
children under age 5, so if all immigration ceased tomorrow, the country is still
inexorably on a path to a new multiracial reality.
Perhaps understanding the math of the matter can inspire Democrats to carry
themselves with courage and the confidence that resisting Mr. Trump’s pro-white
public policies is not only morally right but also squarely places them on the right
side of history.
Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color and a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress, is the author of “Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic
Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.”
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