GOP woo Americans of Asian descent with the desire to end positive action

A legal battle around the use of the breed by Harvard University starting Monday will strengthen the Trump administration's fight against positive action, a game based from the president who also highlights a Republican attempt to win the racial group's allegiance to the country's fastest growing.

Harvard is fighting for a lawsuit that claims the race's consideration by the elite school in its ultra-competitive admission process is unfair to American applicants of Asian descent. The Trump administration supported the complaint and opened its own investigation into allegations that the Ivy League school discriminated against Americans of Asian origin – measures that could GOP to win a new group of angry voters.

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Americans of Asian descent have long supported the Democrats, tending to favor gun control, the pathways to citizenship – and even to positive action. But a growing segment of the US-Asian population is fed up with the use of race in admissions, which they say requires Americans of Asian descent to outdo each other, unlike in the US. other groups – and some Republicans see an opportunity to start courting a new block. supporters. GOP candidates at least two races in Congress this year opposed affirmative action in explicit offers for American voters of Asian descent.

Americans of Asian ancestry unhappy with the use of race "have a listening ear because they occupy a rather unique place in American politics: it is non-white voters who oppose Positive action, "said Janelle Wong, professor of Asian American Studies. at the University of Maryland, which supports positive action.

Polls show that the group still overwhelmingly supports the Democrats and largely disapproves of President Donald Trump. But for Democrats, said Wong, it is "time to sound the alarm bell".

"If Americans of Asian descent are turning to the GOP, it's the end of the" rainbow coalition "in the United States and it's a problem for Democrats," she said.

The lawsuit filed against Harvard, headed by Edward Blum, a long-time activist opposing affirmative action, is considered by many to be the next opening for banning the admissions race – and his journey begins right after Trump has added a Fifth Conservative Judge at the Supreme Court, where the case is likely to end.

The Blum group (Students for Fair Admissions) filed a lawsuit against Harvard in 2014 and the Justice Department joined this summer, accusing Harvard of discrimination in lawsuits. The Department of Justice has stated that "the Harvard race-based admission process significantly disadvantages US applicants of Asian descent compared to candidates from other racial groups – including white applicants and applicants. candidates from other racial minority groups. "

"No American should be denied entry to school because of his race," said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement.

This is only one element of the repression of positive action by the Trump administration. The DOJ has initiated separate investigations into admission policies at Harvard and Yale, to which the Department of Education Civil Rights Office has adhered. And the two agencies, this summer, have overruled the Obama era guidelines that called on school superintendents and colleges to consider race in an attempt to diversify their campuses.

Civil rights groups see this as a coordinated initiative to end positive action.

"It's very unusual for them to be involved in this way," said Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of the Civil and Human Rights Leadership Conference, which headed the UN Human Rights Division. DOJ under the Obama administration. "They are looking very early to be very involved and involved – and potentially even behind the wheel – in a case that could be brought before the Supreme Court.It is a much more aggressive attitude for the Department of Justice.C & # 39; is an unprecedented aggressive posture. "

The Trump administration's investigations were prompted by complaints from the US-Asian Coalition for Education, a relatively new organization whose goal is to end positive discrimination. The group has 20,000 individual supporters and lists more than 130 organizations as partners on its website.

AACE says she is apolitical, but Swan Lee, co-founder and director of AACE's board, said in an interview that Republicans had been quicker to hear his arguments. The group initially filed its complaints under the Obama administration.

"For a very long time, when we complained about discrimination, they said" no problem "or did not do anything like" you just have to accept it, "she said. "We are open to supporting any politician, but it is interesting to note that it is still the Republican politicians who seem to care more about racial equality."

The Harvard case is important as it targets an admission policy that has been praised by the Supreme Court as a model. The High Court has repeatedly confirmed affirmative action in college admissions. But with Justice Brett Kavanaugh in place of Anthony Kennedy – a key vote that wrote the latest opinion approving the use of the race – the court is less likely to give the go-ahead to the practice.

"Harvard's approach to global admissions has been widely adopted in higher education," wrote the American Council of Education, the country's leading lobbying group for higher education, on behalf of 37 college groups. "A win for the applicant could overcome this evolved and evolving system."

The lawsuit marks a new approach for Blum, the founder of SFFA, who pushed court challenges to positive discrimination, including a lawsuit against the University of Texas at Austin. This complaint, which was brought before the Supreme Court, was in the name of Abigail Fisher, a white woman who claimed that the rejection of her candidacy by the university in 2008 violated the equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court disagreed and in 2016 made a 4-3 decision in favor of UT.

The decision built on years of precedence. In a landmark ruling in 1978, the court banned racial quotas, but said that race could still be considered one of the many factors behind admissions. In two separate decisions concerning court challenges to the use of the breed by the University of Michigan and its law faculty, the court again approved affirmative action, while continuing to restrict possibilities of use.

In the last legal fight, Students for Fair Admissions will present four arguments: Harvard intentionally discriminates Americans of Asian descent; that he is engaging in illegal racial balancing; Harvard's use of the breed does not fall within the purview of the Supreme Court; and that Harvard does not need to consider the breed to form his freshman class.

Harvard said that the SFFA's lawsuit was based on an "extremely imperfect statistical analysis" and presented a "misleading narrative". He described the Justice Department's memo supporting the SFFA "barely veiled attack" against the Supreme Court's "indiscriminate adoption of the flawed SFFA narrative".

Civil rights groups argue that positive actions actually benefit US applicants of Asian descent, to whom benefits for Harvard are detrimental to inherited white students, recruited athletes and children of staff and faculty , and not by race. They point out that the Asian-American student population has risen sharply in recent years and that Americans of Asian descent now make up over 20% of Harvard's student population, compared to about 6% of the US population.

Ed Blum is simply trying to use Asian Americans as a cover for his real program of changing policies that will ultimately benefit white students who already enjoy the most important benefits in the admissions process. and in life, "said Nicole Ochi, senior lawyer at Asian Americans. Advancing Justice – Los Angeles, a group that helps defend Harvard at trial.

Blum said such claims "are weak and intellectually lazy, and hundreds of Asian-American advocacy groups have joined our efforts to end Harvard's discriminatory admission policies."

Polls show that Americans of Asian descent still largely support positive action. A 2018 survey conducted by AAPI Data, a program led by Karthick Ramakrishnan of the University of California at Riverside, from American voters of Asian origin, found that 58 percent of Americans of Asian origin that affirmative action programs are a "good thing".

But this support does not extend to all subgroups of the diverse Asian-American population. According to the survey, only 38% of Americans of Chinese origin think that positive action is a good thing. About 36% of Chinese-Americans are undecided, while more than a quarter decided it was a bad thing. Americans of Vietnamese descent are also skeptical, with just 40% saying that positive action is a good thing.

But Kham Moua, associate director of politics and advocacy at OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates, said that "the reality is that the majority of Americans of Asian descent support the program or are indifferent to it."

The civil rights group started as an organization of Sino-Americans in 1973, but has recently been renamed. Moua said that despite the group's longstanding support for the use of race in admissions, it now has "small pockets that vocally oppose positive discrimination".

Many of these opponents of affirmative action are richer and newer immigrants from China, said OyYan Poon, assistant professor of leadership in higher education at Colorado State University, who has studied the trend. Many have attended elite colleges in China and have come to the United States to pursue higher education, she said.

"This particular group of the population represents only a very small minority of the population – they attract a lot of media attention, they basically create a public show that attracts a lot of attention", a- she declared.

This includes Republicans. The campaign for Rep. Mimi Walters, a Republican fighting for re-election in Orange County, California, recently sent a letter highlighting the GM's investigation at Yale. The mail editor said Walters wanted the House to launch its own investigation into "discrimination against American students of Asian descent at Ivy League and other major universities."

Democrats hoped that a growing American-born American population could help them win the historically-red district, and Walters aims to remove some of that support as several polls show that Democratic challenger Katie Porter is leading the tight race.

In Virginia, Corey Stewart, a Republican who is trying to overthrow Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, promised to introduce a bill banning universities from considering race if they were receiving federal money. He visited an American-Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church, a suburb of Washington, where Americans of Asian descent are the second largest racial group, with 10% of the population.

Stewart, who follows Kaine significantly in the polls, told Fox News that Sino-US residents had asked him why they objected to the positive action: "I've always known that race was a factor of admission to the university, it was until the citizens evoked it, "he said.