David Frum

Right now, about 93 million Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants.

That's almost a third of the country.

It's a different country than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed or when the affirmative actions programs of the 1970s began to be devised.

In the half century since those affirmative action programs have come to be devised, the racial fabric of America has been reinvented in many ways.

And one of the questions that we're all left in the 2020s is whether these programs of racial restitution continue to make sense in a country that is so different from the country that existed when these programs were put into place.

Now, it has fallen to the Trump administration.

It has fallen in the Trump administration's time to respond to these changes.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in important decisions that it is more and more skeptical of programs of racial preference to correct for past racial injustice.

In 2023, a pair of cases ruled that preferential treatment of undergraduates seeking admission to colleges is probably almost always illegal.

And the Trump administration, in one of its more normal actions, something that you would expect from a more normal kind of government, has followed up or responded to the lead of the Supreme Court by issuing executive orders, rolling back preferential treatment in many areas of employment and hiring.

And many American companies have responded by changing their approach to equal opportunity.

They are ending the practice of trying to ameliorate past injustice by having preferences in the present and moving toward an approach that treats all applicants more equally than they have been treated in the recent past.

I must say, I regard this as progress.

I think this is the right way to go.

I think it's the only way to go in a country where, as I say, 93 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants to whom America's tortured racial history was something that happened before their families arrived on these shores.

And they don't understand why their life chances should be abridged or artificially boosted because of something that happened in a past that was not their own familial personal past.

It's not sustainable in such a country to treat people from certain backgrounds more favorably and people from other backgrounds less favorably.

It's not sustainable.

And it will only inflame feelings that are already touchy enough.

But the administration that has the job of bringing us to a more perfect union, of restoring more equal treatment