Proposed policies take us back to a dark era

Each year, approximately 4.5 million visitors travel to Ellis Island, stand before the Statue of Liberty and read Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed at the statue’s base.

The iconic words we all know well are etched into the collective psyche of generations of immigrants who have found refuge on our shores, and the opportunity to live out their American dreams.

But for the descendants of Africans who were brought to America as slaves, Lazarus’ beautifully written poem, for far too long, belied an ugly truth. Racial and social barriers, the legacy of Jim Crow and a segregated south, had become nearly impenetrable, necessitating bold government intervention to help African Americans seeking to overcome the vestiges of slavery.

Affirmative action was an essential component of that intervention. Yet in a short-sighted and cynically calculated move, the Trump administration has launched a two-pronged attack seeking to undermine the legal immigration of largely brown immigrants while eroding the laws that guarantee and protect opportunity and access for African Americans.

The Trump administration’s justification for its immigration strategy surrounds the premise that low-skilled non-English speaking immigrants take jobs from Americans. The ‘RAISE Act’, introduced by Republican lawmakers and backed by the White House, would establish a NEW system, giving preference to immigrants who speak English and hold advanced degrees.

Concurrently, Trump’s Department of Justice has launched an attack on affirmative action ordering the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and consider suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies. Not only does this threaten to undo the progress made over the past several decades to ensure that every child in America — regardless of race or ethnicity — has an equal opportunity to succeed, but it also flies directly in the face of settled legal precedent upholding the constitutional validity of affirmative action programs in higher education.

Both approaches being advanced by the Trump Administration are deeply flawed and portray a cynical disregard for the values that make America great.

With respect to immigration, a 2016 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine finds immigrants have “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers,” and calls immigration “integral to the nation’s economic growth.”

And the notion that affirmative action is no longer needed to ensure African Americans and other minorities with equal access to higher education is not borne out by the facts.

We have already seen the effects of university admissions policies that do not address racial disparities in accessing higher education. From 1997 to 2004, affirmative action in admissions at the University of Texas was barred by the infamous Fifth Circuit decision in Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th. Cir. 1996).

As a result of the University of Texas’s inability to consider a qualified applicant’s race in the admissions process, between 1997 and 2004 African-American students never comprised more than 4.5 percent of the entering class — far below the 13 percent of Texas high school graduates who are African Americans.

According to a 2014 Pew Research study, African-American undergraduate populations at top-tier universities has remained flat for 20 years, with African-American undergraduate populations averaging 6 percent, less than half of what their share of the population might suggest.

The Trump administration says it wants to help minorities find better jobs, but rolling back affirmative action protections will have the opposite effect. Vast inequities in hiring practices still remain. Data from the National Science Foundation shows that African Americans comprise 6.2 percent of people with degrees in engineering and science but make up just 3 percent of the workforce. Today, there are only six African-American Fortune 500 CEOs, down from seven in 2007.

Like all Americans, I would like to live in a society where there is an equal opportunity to succeed regardless of race, creed, religion or national origin. But we are not there yet, and that is why affirmative action is still needed. Trump’s two-pronged attack to undermine legal immigration while peeling away protections to correct the vestiges of racial discrimination is dog-whistle politics designed to reawaken and exploit a dark chapter in America’s history.