Affirmative Action Helps Black Immigrants, but Not Black Americans

At my college, many departments offer modest awards for the best black students. The college rejected one department’s selected winner, however, because the student was Jamaican. Students of recent Caribbean or African immigrants do not qualify.

This administrative decision points to a conundrum for colleges: how to respond to black immigrant students’ superior performance, on average, compared to those black students who trace their ancestry to the antebellum period. The immigrant students’ superior performance has resulted in their disproportional representation in the most selective schools. This outcome was first highlighted in 2004 when black Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard’s African-American studies department, said that somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the black Harvard students were “West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.” A few years later, Jeffrey Cord reported: “[F]irst- and second-generation black immigrants comprise 41 percent of all black students at Ivy League schools.” He lamented:

The large numbers of African immigrants on American college campuses, coupled with the remarkably small numbers of native blacks on those same campuses, calls into question the effectiveness of America’s affirmative action programs. While affirmative action started as a system to right the wrongs of slavery and institutional anti-black racism, helping wealthy immigrants who weren’t here for those struggles doesn’t serve any of the program’s original intentions.

The response of selective colleges was twofold. First, affirmative action was no longer justified as compensation for slavery and institutional racism, but solely for its potential impact on diversity. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, the most selective schools stopped reporting on the ethnicity of their black student population. Indeed, Tod Hamilton’s 2019 book “Immigration and the Remaking of Black America” does not make a single reference to the black immigrant student share at Ivy League colleges, including his own, Princeton.

This lack of data became an issue at Cornell University in 2017, when black students demanded that affirmative action be reserved for students who could trace their American ancestry back at least three generations. They noted that Cornell does not ask those who identify as black how many generations their families have lived in the United States. Under this system, the children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, who identify as black, count.

In a 2021 interview, a descendant of slavery, Mariah Norman, discussed how immigrants or children of immigrants dominate the black student environment at Harvard. She pointed to the Nigerian Students Association that claims 200 members, suggesting that one-third of Harvard’s black student body is in the club. More than 15 black affinity groups exist on campus, like the African Students Association and the Caribbean Club. And while the Black Students Association encompasses all, there wasn’t an organization solely for black students like Norman until students got together in 2021 and formed one. Norman believed that nothing would change until Harvard started reporting on the ethnic composition of its black student population. 

Affirmative action policies increasingly serve an affluent immigrant population—one more reason for the Supreme Court to reject the continuation of such policies. In addition, a comprehensive Carnegie Foundation study conducted by sociologists Stephen Cole and Eleanor Barber found that a large share of black students who had entered Ivy League colleges hoping to major in the sciences did not wind up doing so because of low freshmen grades, reflecting their weaker academic backgrounds. The researchers found that black students were more likely to pursue science fields successfully if they had attended state or historically black colleges. The Law School Admissions Council documented that among the 178 law schools surveyed, less than 10 percent of black students had first-year grades higher than the median white grade.

Just as importantly, developmental policies that prepare promising black students can help more to meet the skill demands they will face. The Army uses such policies to prepare black applicants who seek admissions to officers’ training programs and West Point. The American Economics Association runs summer programs to prepare black and Latino students for economics Ph.D. programs, and a joint Fisk-Vanderbilt masters’ program prepares black students for advanced science degrees. Similar programs have tripled Israeli Arabs’ enrollment at Technion Institute—Israel’s MIT—without adjusting admissions requirements. 

Unfortunately, most social justice advocates have given up on policies that would enable black students to meet necessary skill standards. Instead, they stress affirmative action programs, even though a large share of beneficiaries don’t belong to the demographic groups the original designers of these policies had in mind. The Supreme Court should end race-based affirmative action policies so that more effective strategies can be pursued to address college racial disparities.

Robert Cherry is a recently retired Brooklyn College economist and an American Enterprise Institute affiliate.