Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Hugh Davis Graham

Quote by Hugh Davis Graham

“Page 9: Whereas civil rights reform was driven by a mass-based social movement and was characterized by intense controversy, polarized voting blocs, regional tension, and high media visibility, immigration reform was primarily an inside-the-beltway effort, engineered by policy elites largely in the absence of public demand or controversy.”

Quote by Hugh Davis Graham

Work

Author

Hugh Davis Graham

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Hugh Davis Graham. more

You May Also Like

“Quoting page 32: Third, the riots spurred aggressive efforts by federal officials to dampen the violence by speeding delivery of benefits, especially jobs paying good wages, to urban minorities who found little payoff in the civil right legislation of 1964-65. The Small Business Administration (SBA), seeking to aid proprietors of riot-damaged stores and to encourage minority ownership in urban rebuilding efforts, established in 1968 the section 8(a) program. Targeted to aid heavily damaged core areas through grants and subsidized business loans, the 8(a) program avoided the racial quota taboo by funneling aid to “socially disadvantaged” persons, not to minorities per se. But most participants in the 8(a) program were minority business entrepreneurs.”

“Page 207 In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks. Page 208 At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!”

“Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.”

“Quoting page 63: The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the conservative nature of the immigration reform, noted on October 4, 1965, that the family preference priorities would ensure that “the new immigration system would not stray radically from the old one.” The historically restrictionist American Legion Magazine agreed, reassured by the promises of continuity. As Senator Edward Kennedy had pledged in the Senate hearings on immigration, first, “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same,” and second, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”

“Quoting page 63: Business interests not surprisingly supported the [1965 immigration reform] bill as well, but were not a driving force behind it. Because the baby boom was pouring new workers into the economy, and the assault on racial discrimination promised to feed millions of underemployed blacks into the workforce as well, employers did not seem to be looking for workers overseas. Even the growers were quiet. Sponsors of the Bracero farm worker program that had imported hundreds of thousands of mostly Mexican contract workers since 1942—the program averaged 430,000 guestworkers a year from Mexico during its peak 1955-60 years—the growers had been attacked by organized labor, religious, and civil rights organization for exploiting foreign workers and depressing labor standards. The same liberal coalition that backed the civil rights and immigration reforms of 1964-65 had persuaded Congress to terminate the Bracero program in 1964. … The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the conservative nature of the immigration reform, noted on October 4, 1965, that the family preference priorities would ensure that “the new immigration system would not stray radically from the old one.” The historically restrictionist American Legion Magazine agreed, reassured by the promises of continuity. As Senator Edward Kennedy had pledged in the Senate hearings on immigration, first, “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same,” and second, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”

“Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. … The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency… To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.”

“Quoting page 74-75: The ability of the minority rights interest groups to win control of the new agencies of civil rights enforcement established in the 1960s followed a traditional pattern in the politics of regulation that students of public administration called “clientele capture.” The practice is as old as Jacksonian democracy, which set the American tradition wherein party patronage ruled the civil service and mission agencies were expected to cater to the needs of their organized constituencies: farmers, veterans, laborers, and business interests. By the 1960s, journalists referred to these arrangements as iron triangles.” They were three-way coalitions of mutual back-scratching, operating in Washington and in state and municipal governments throughout America. Three points of the triangle were organized interests which lobbied legislators to establish or expand programs beneficial to their members; legislative committees, which obliged the lobbyists by authorizing and funding programs for the mission agencies to manage; and government bureaucrats, who expanded their empire building service programs to benefit the interest groups. To complete the triangular cycle, interest groups supported the legislators. … because environmental and consumer protection regulation is cross-cutting and horizontal—covering pollution, for example, from all industrial sources, rather than single industry and vertical … it is a difficult target for capture. The new agencies of civil right regulation, however, were different in ways that made them highly vulnerable to capture. Most important, the cost-benefit structure of civil right regulation is the opposite of that found in environmental and consumer protection regulation. Benefits (jobs, promotions, admissions, contract set-asides) are narrowly concentrated among protected-class clienteles (racial and ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped). Costs, on the other hand, are widely distributed (government and corporate budgets).”

“Quoting page 85: The OCR [Office for Civil Rights] in the early 1970s in effect experienced an internal capture shift. The black agenda activists who had dominated the office between 1965 and 1970 were joined and to some extend displaced by a new cadre of Latino activists. Not content with the transitional model of bilingual education, which used native-language instruction as a bridge to English language proficiency, the Latino nationalists called for Spanish-based cultural maintenance programs of indefinite duration. La Raza Unida’s 1967 founding statement captured the Chicano spirit of cultural nationalism and linguistic ethnocentrism: “The time of subjugation, exploitation, and abuse of human rights of La Raza in the United States is hereby ended forever,” the manifesto proclaimed. “[We] affirm the magnificence of La Raza, the greatness of our heritage, our history, our language, our traditions, our contributions to humanity and culture.”

“Page 111: Workplace bullying directly affects one in six U.S. workers. It poses an occupational health hazard. Yet few targeted individuals complain. That is because existing laws either require harassment to be discriminatory or the standard of outrageous conduct is rarely met in the courts. Gender, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sex, age, or sexual orientation define protected status groups. In order for mistreatment to be discriminatory and illegal, the Target must have “protected status” and the bully cannot be a member. But when the bully also is a member, as in woman-on-woman bullying (over 40 percent of all bullying reported in the Institute survey), the Target cannot file a lawsuit to force the employer to believe her or to punish the perpetrator. Research by the Institute and others shows that two-thirds of all harassment is “status-blind” and therefore legal.”