Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America

by Hugh Davis Graham

Book Overview

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 were passed, they were seen as triumphs of liberal reform applauded by the majority of Americans. But today, as Hugh Graham shows in Collision Course, affirmative action is foundering in the great waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America, leading to direct conflict for jobs, housing, education, and government preference programs.
How did two such well-intended...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195143183
• ISBN13: 9780195143188
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding history, frightening future

Graham was a distinguished historian and political scientist at Vanderbilt and UC Santa Barbara. Sadly, he died just as it was time to go do a book tour in promotion of Collision Course, so the book got little publicity. As an expert on Congress and the workings of the federal bureaucracy, he is able to recreate just how we managed to stumble unintentionally into the current, highly contradictory, immigration and affirmative action systems. At a time when the nation was finally intending to help African-Americans, why did it suddenly import tens of millions of low wage workers to drive blacks from many workplaces? And if affirmative action was intended as compensation for slavery and Jim Crow, why was it extended to new immigrants, even illegal ones? And what does this portend for the future, when the "racial ratio" of beneficiaries from quotas compared to those who must shoulder the burden mounts ever higher?