A new argument against liberalized immigration has recently emerged: more immigration will increase affirmative action. There are two arguments for why more immigration could increase the scale and scope of affirmative action. The first is that most immigrants are not white. As a result, they would benefit from affirmative action and, thus, demand it. The second is that immigrants mostly vote for Democrats who support expanding affirmative action. To answer whether more immigration is correlated with affirmative action, we look at whether a larger immigrant population on the state level is correlated with affirmative action policies.

Dominique J. Baker, assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, wrote a paper examining why some states ban affirmative action in state universities, government agencies, and public contracts. She uses a statistical method called discrete-time survival analysis to analyze a data set of 47 states from 1995 to 2012 to investigate which variables predict a state’s likelihood of adopting a statewide affirmative action ban. She concludes that a paucity of spots in higher education for white students is a good predictor of affirmative action bans. In other words, she finds that states are less likely to ban affirmative action when whites are a higher proportion of students in state flagship universities.

This blog post borrows Baker’s methods to analyze how immigration affects whether states ban affirmative action. We identified the nine states with affirmative action bans from Baker’s paper. They are California, Texas, Washington, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. Baker studied 47 states, excluding Texas, Hawaii, and Alaska. We included those three states in a separate analysis but they did not change the results, so we stuck with the 47 states that she used for this blog post to make the findings more comparable. Baker excluded Texas because after it banned affirmative action, the ban was then reversed by a court decision resulting in two Texas public universities restarting affirmative action admissions policies. We also extended the time horizon studied by Baker to the end of 2019. We then included data on the percentage of non-citizens, the share of the population that was white, and diversity as measured by a fractionalization index on the state level based on data from the IPUMS American Community Survey (ACS). Data are not available for intercensal years, so we linearly interpolated missing years to impute the annual share of non-citizens by state.

We ran a multi-record parametric model with adopting a ban as the failure condition. Once a state adopts a ban on affirmative action, it does not “survive” and it exits the model. We code all 47 states as entering the dataset in 1995 and the observation period ends in 2019. For all three of the potential determinants (diversity, share non-citizens, and share whites), we run the model with no lag and with lags of 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, and 5 years. We use no controls.

Our results differ from Baker’s results. The share of the white population is not statistically significant in any specification and the diversity measure is only significant at the 10 percent level in the 3‑and-5-year lags (Table 1). As the number of lags increases, the coefficient on the share of the population that is foreign-born climbs in significance and generally in magnitude. The share of a state’s population who are non-citizens is significant at the 1 percent level in every lag. The magnitude of the coefficient on the share of non-citizens stays within a range of 0.27–0.34, meaning that a 1 percent increase in the share of non-citizens is associated with a 27–34 percent increase in the probability of the state banning affirmative action.

How the non-citizen share of the population is correlated with states banning affirmative action is particularly interesting as non-citizens are usually the newest immigrants, here on temporary residency visas, or illegal immigrants. Thus, they are most recently arrived and voters may react more strongly to the presence of more recently arrived immigrants. This is consistent with other research that finds that immigrant flows are more politically salient than immigrant stocks.

Figure 1 shows that the average foreign-born percent of the population in states where affirmative action is banned is about 14 percent, while the naturalized foreign-born percentage is 6 percent and the non-naturalized portion is 8 percent. In each category and subcategory, the average foreign-born share of the population is higher in states that banned affirmative action than it is in states where affirmative action is still legal.

The simple analysis above shows that there is good reason to suspect that states ban affirmative action when the foreign-born shares of their populations increase. Assuming the relationship is causal, there are several reasons why this might occur. First, Americans don’t want immigrants to benefit from affirmative action. This is consistent with the view that affirmative action is like other welfare benefits. There is a large literature that finds more ethnic diversity and birthplace diversity reduces support for welfare policies. This could also explain why federal affirmative action was created in a series of three executive orders in the 1960s (10925, 11246, and 11375) when the foreign-born population of the United States was the lowest in history. Not coincidentally, Congress created the Great Society programs during that decade too.

The low immigrant share of the population and virtually closed borders removed immigration as a politically powerful counterargument against affirmative action and the Great Society. In the 1960s, it wasn’t politically relevant to argue that immigrants and their descendants would be the beneficiaries of these policies because there were historically small numbers of immigrants at the time and the borders were closed. However, that changed after the Immigration Act of 1965 went into effect in 1968. Shortly thereafter, affirmative action slowly shrank just as growth in the size of government also slowed. Affirmative action is generally unpopular with Americans according to the General Social Survey, but it seems that affirmative action is less disliked when black Americans are viewed as the primary beneficiaries. When the issue is complicated by immigration and the perception that immigrants and their descendants could benefit too then that may diminish support along crucial margins.

A second reason is that some immigrant groups would be disadvantaged by affirmative action. In the recent debate over California’s Proposition 16, which would have reestablished affirmative action, opponents of the law pointed out that Asian students applying to the state’s university system would be less likely to be admitted. A majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action according to a recent poll, but those opposed were possibly more intense in their beliefs than supporters. There is also an accurate sense among some Asian Americans that many universities discriminate against them while pursuing affirmative action policies, as evidenced by the recent case of Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. These factors may also reduce support for affirmative action in states with large immigrant populations.

States don’t need large foreign-born populations to ban affirmative action. Nebraska, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire banned affirmative action in 2008, 2012, and 2012, respectively, even though they have foreign-born shares of the population below the national average. However, states with a higher non-naturalized or non-citizen share of the population are more likely to ban affirmative action. Rather than a hindrance to repealing affirmative action, more immigration seems to help achieve that goal.