In the past week, the Trump administration threw its weight behind two frontal assaults on flagship liberal social policies. First, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, Jeff Sessions' Justice Department will scrutinize affirmative action in higher education with the aim of gutting policies that it sees as discriminating against white or Asian applicants. Second, Trump gave a press conference endorsing a Senate bill, co-sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, that would significantly reduce legal immigration into the United States.
The media has mostly treated these two stories as distinct and unrelated, except insofar as they both represent the Trump Administration's consistently right-wing approach to racial issues. In reality, the relationship goes much deeper than that. Mass immigration, and America's proliferating racial and ethnic categories generally, represent the most vexing issue for proponents of race-based affirmative action, which was of course invented in a far less diverse country and aimed specifically at remedying the country's enslavement and oppression of native blacks, but now arguably discriminates against a different minority group. Meanwhile, affirmative action for ethnic minorities likely heightens white resistance to mass immigration due to the perception that newcomers won't only compete with natives for finite resources but will get a head start in that competition. If affirmative action goes down, it will be in no small part due to the influence of mass immigration; if immigration levels are slashed, the pervasiveness of affirmative action will probably have played a role.
Comment: Ex-spy chief lambastes Microsoft for leaving Windows XP users vulnerable to cyberattacks
Update (July 5): Bail for Hutchins has been set at $30,000: See also: WannaCry researcher arrest sends chills through the cybersecurity community