Not What We Had in Mind, But. ..

Hugh Davis Graham. Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 256 pp. Notes and index. $30.00.

Two of the most prominent transformations of American life in the last third of the twentieth century blatantly contradicted the intentions of the congressional enactments that facilitated them. One was the development of preferential treatment for ethnoracial minorities. Federal agencies and courts justified this in relation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that act's promoters had promised solemnly and with manifest sincerity that it would never lead to group preferences of any kind. The second was the ethno-demographic transformation of American society by massive immigration from Asia and Latin America. But the sponsors and backers of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had won passage on the basis of their widely proclaimed and undoubtedly honest belief that the act would not significantly change the number of immigrants or their predominantly European points of origin.

Each of these radical departures from the Great Society's clearly expressed intentions is historically remarkable in its own right. But the two departures, once in motion, acted upon each other in ways that rendered the consequences of each even more at variance with legislative intent. This dialectic of unintended consequences diminished the already precarious public tolerance for affirmative action and the massive immigration of non-Europeans. Yet, paradoxically, this dialectic ended up serving enough powerful interests that Congress was reluctant to intervene against either of the two departures. And most remarkably of all, this dialectic ended up making about 80 percent of the 35 million immigrants who entered the United States between 1970 and 2000 eligible for entitlements that had been designed with native-born African-Americans in mind.

How and why did all this happen? In Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, Hugh Davis Graham details and explains these events, which are among the most important and complicated in the recent history of the United States. Graham builds upon studies by John David Skrentny and others, who have shown how central Republican leadership was to the original acceptance and even the later growth of group preferences. In dealing with the increase of immigration, Graham builds on the work of David Reimers and others, who have shown that the chief avenues for the unexpected increase in immigration from Asia and Latin America in the 1970s and after were the family-unification provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The act was designed primarily to remove the "national origins" elements of traditional immigration law, which had proved embarrassing in the context of a Cold War struggle for friends abroad. But the family-unification provisions allowed a naturalized immigrant to bring to the United States not only a spouse and children, but also any number of siblings, which turned out to be very numerous indeed. These siblings, upon becoming citizens, could do the same, creating vast chain migrations. The framers of the act did not calculate how rapidly the extensive kinship networks of a single immigrant from countries with high birth rates could produce huge numbers of legal immigrants.

But no one before Graham has analyzed both immigration and group preferences with such persistent and perspicacious attention to the terms of their interaction. Collision Course is a lucid, straightforward book that confirms Graham's standing as one of the finest American political historians of his generation.

Graham focuses on the stunning fact that without congressional approval and without even a national debate on the issue, 26 million late-twentieth-century immigrants—the number, as it happens, of African-Americans in the United States in 1980—found themselves eligible for at least some affirmative action benefits. This reality undercut dramatically the rationale for affirmative action programs. Partly for that reason the growth of the preference-eligible immigrant population was not widely discussed when its significance...