Opposition to affirmative action shows, once again, that Chinese and Indians are natural constituents of the Republican Party

In November of 2012, in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's victory over Mitt Romney, many of the so-called pundits in the mainstream media opined that the Republican Party was doomed unless it attempted to broaden its support among blacks and Latinos. One way to do this, according to the pundits, was to support an immigration bill that, among other things, provided a general amnesty to illegal Latino aliens in the US. In a blog post from that time, I pointed out that it would be suicidal for the Republican Party to support citizenship for a group that would eventually find its home in the Democratic Party. Rather, I wrote, the Republican Party should seek to gain support among ethnic groups that were more natural constituencies of the Republican Party:

In my opinion, [immigrants from India, China, and Russia] are natural constituents of the Republican Party. My experience is that they have conservative family values. They believe that one should get ahead through hard work, not government handouts. They understand the financial mess the US finds itself in and find it repugnant. Their value system is decidedly entrepreneurial and meritocratic. Statements like President Obama's "You didn't build that" are counterintuitive to them. ... In sum, the Republican Party should forget about pandering to Latinos and blacks and instead promote real, global diversity by advocating for more non-Latino, non-black immigration into Northern California. Once these new immigrants from Asia and Europe are absorbed into the American melting pot, they will be far more likely to support the many strands of conservative thought that find their natural home in the Republican Party.

The potential that the Republican Party has to increase support among voters of Chinese, Indian, and Eastern European descent has once again become evident as the California Democratic Party has sought to reintroduce affirmative action into the admission process at California public universities through constitutional amendment SCA-5. Anyone familiar with the demographic makeup of the University of California knows that students of Chinese and Indian descent are vastly overrepresented relative to their numbers in the general population. This overrepresentation is not the result of affirmative action, but of the strong support of parents and the hard work and academic excellence of students who come from the families of these ethnic groups. The amendment being pushed by the Democratic Party threatens to reintroduce other considerations besides meritocratic ones into the admissions process. If Chinese and Indians are overrepresented now, it is guaranteed that their enrollment numbers will fall if race-based considerations are reintroduced into the admissions process. For that reason, there has been an outcry of opposition from the Asian-American community against SCA-5, causing it to be tabled. As reported by the San Jose Mercury:

Constitutional Amendment 5 passed the state Senate in late January on a party-line vote [that is, with Democrats voting in favor, and Republicans voting against], but ran into an unexpected wave of resistance -- mostly, from Asian-Americans concerned that affirmative action policies would unfairly disadvantage Asian applicants to the intensely competitive University of California system. ...

After an about-face by three Asian-American senators who voted for the bill in January, Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is putting the bill on hold -- and making no promises about its revival.

"I'd like to bring it back," Hernandez said. "I believe in it. I believe we need to make sure there's equal opportunity for everyone in the state of California."

Last week, saying they had received thousands of calls and emails from constituents, Senators Leland Yee, D-San Francisco; Ted Lieu, D-Torrance; and Carol Liu, D-La Cañada/Flintridge asked Assembly Speaker John Perez to stop the bill from advancing any further.

"As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children," they wrote in a letter to Perez. ...

Hernandez and others have said that misinformation about what affirmative action would mean -- such as racial quotas for new freshmen -- spread quickly, stoking parents' fears about their children's chances getting into UC, the state's public research university system.

We may conclude from this story that the California Democratic Party has an ongoing desire to "bring back" affirmative action and that they believe that Asians are so dumb that they can be convinced that they have been duped by "misinformation" about what the reintroduction of affirmative action would actually mean for their children.

The fact that Democrats believe that Asians are so dumb is just another aspect of the general prejudice against Asian- and Indian-Americans that permeates the Democratic Party and its supporters on the left. This prejudice manifests itself in a couple of other ways:

1. An unwillingness to consider Asian diversity to be real diversity. To Democrats, the fact that there are so many Asians at the University of California is something not to be celebrated, but to be condemned, since higher numbers of Asian students work to the disadvantage of Democrats' preferred victim groups, blacks and Latinos.
2. The attitude that young high-tech engineers, many of whom are young Asian or Indian or Eastern European men, are not successful contributors to be welcomed to the community, but just increase "income inequality," drive up housing prices, and clog traffic by driving around in "google buses." See my blog post I have to wonder about Rebecca Solnit for an example of just this kind of racist xenophobia about "newcomers" arriving on visas from one of the leading lights of the San Francisco Left.

Of course, Asians would be wise to ignore suggestions by Democratic leaders that they have been misinformed and don't really know where their advantage lies. Instead, they should consider following the advice of Mei Mei Ho, president of a Los Angeles County GOP group:

The safeguard against SCA 5 ever passing is to diminish the Democrats' legislative majority, said Mei Mei Ho, president of a Los Angeles County GOP group. Republican legislators oppose SCA 5. She suggested Silicon Valley Chinese-Americans "adopt" GOP candidates -- sending them contributions -- in the Central Valley and Southern California swing districts.

And Republican leaders would be wise to encourage Asian- and Indian-Americans to reconsider their party affiliation in general and to think hard about which party represents the principles and virtues that are more closely aligned with their own.