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Abstract

Asian American opponents of affirmative action have received both credit and blame for their pivotal role in toppling racial preferences in university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA). Allied conservatives highlighted evidence of discrimination against Asian American applicants as a compelling reason to dismantle affirmative action; liberals either denied this discrimination existed or tolerated it as an acceptable cost of helping other minority applicants. But largely unacknowledged is the precipitating history of the Supreme Court’s marginalization of Asian American applicants and its decades of tacit approval of their exclusion from affirmative action programs. This unwritten history is essential to understanding how the Court’s affirmative action decisions from Bakke to Fisher contributed to the eventual demise of racial preferences in admissions. As such, it is a chapter of Asian American and affirmative action history that needs telling.

This intertwined history also illuminates a path for improving diversity on college campuses in a post-affirmative action era: the consideration of volunteered immigration histories in the admissions process. Immigration histories are not limited by race or nationality and offer a more specific, nuanced, and personal window into the incredible diversity within each ethnic group than broad demographic categories. As a case in point, Asian Americans constitute a highly diverse demographic; yet under previous affirmative action programs, their diversity was largely invisibilized as they were lumped together as an overrepresented monolithic minority. Allowing applicants to reflect on their personal or family immigration histories would reveal diversity within other ethnicities as well, while abiding by SFFA’s newly articulated equality principles—equality of opportunity and equality of treatment across races.

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