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HERE IS THE FULL TEXT OF UPENN LAW PROFESSOR AMY WAS’s REMARKED ON IMMIGRATION ( you tell me if it was “racist” ):

SOURCE: https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/26/heres-amy-wax-really-said-immigration/
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Well, thank you very much for having me here. My task in these few minutes is to address the question of how American immigration should be structured to support a constructive American national identity—American greatness, as I put it in the title. My argument is that mainstream conservatives should take much more seriously the case for reducing and slowing our current levels of immigration. I will not address the economic reasons for curtailing immigration, although I myself believe they are, on balance, fairly compelling. Rather my focus will be on what I term the cultural case for restriction, a much thornier topic.

My position here is that conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that best serves and preserves our country’s status and identity as a relatively high-functioning, at least for now, Western and First World nation. That status will not automatically maintain itself. It is fragile. It is precarious and vulnerable to erosion. We ought to worry more about its fragility than we do.

In a recent paper in a Georgetown Journal, I distinguished two versions of a cultural nationalist position on immigration policy. The first I termed creedal nationalism based on the belief that American identity and culture are mainly propositional. They depend on fealty to abstract ideals, concepts, and principles such as human rights, property rights, the rule of law, honest government, capitalism, et cetera.

Some creedal nationalists maintain that because it is open to anyone, at least in principle, to believe and support these ideas, there is no reason to favor immigrants from one background or another. I don’t think that conclusion necessarily follows. Many, indeed most, inhabitants of the Third World, don’t necessarily share our ideas and beliefs; others pay lip service, but don’t really comprehend them. There are exceptions of course, but most people are not exceptional. Thus, creedal nationalism could support a low and slow approach to immigration.

But the second type of nationalism is what I want to concentrate on. I term it cultural distance nationalism, and it goes further. It is based on the insight and understanding that people’s background culture can affect their ability to fit into a modern advanced society and to perform the roles needed to support and maintain it – civic, occupational, economic, technical, and the like.

According to this view, we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the First World, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance. The obstacles to making the case for this cultural distance nationalism are formidable. No surprise.

This position requires forthrightly acknowledging the stark differences between the First and the Third Worlds, their deep roots, and being honest about the homegrown conditions and failures that hold countries back—kleptocracy, corruption, lawlessness, weak institutions, and the inability or unwillingness of leaders to provide for their citizens’ basic needs, and also asking the very hard questions about why these conditions continue to persist. But these are toxic topics that lie outside the Overton window in polite society, as evidenced by the outraged reaction to Trump’s profane and grating question, “Why are we having all these people from sh-thole countries come here?” That needs to be regarded as a serious question and not just a rhetorical one.

There is currently tremendous resistance to thinking rigorously about the causes of persistently chaotic conditions in the Third World and to addressing the implications for immigration policy. Despite much ink spilled, the non-cultural explanations for chronic underdevelopment, and here it’s everything from colonialism, the all-purpose favorite, to geography, to lack of salt are routinely trotted out despite their evident implausibility, and their obvious foundation in PC strictures rather than facts.

And when it comes to immigration, few dare to challenge a pie-in-the-sky version of what the dissident right has called “the dogma of magic dirt.” People who come to the U.S., no matter from what cultural background, will quickly come to think, live, and act just like us. They will celebrate, embrace, and support our ways. They will function effectively to maintain them. Everyone is strictly equal in the potential to contribute to American life.

I admit that questioning the transformative power of “magic dirt” is hobbled by a lack of rigorous data and systematic study. But, in large part, that is because social scientists today don’t want to really confront the significance of cultural differences between the West and the rest, their stickiness, and their implications for immigration, yet these issues have commanded the attention of the rare, brave politician and a number of scholars.

Take Enoch Powell, a prophet without honor in the last century. He argued that a large influx of non-Anglo and non-Western immigrants would sow division in Britain and undermine its core Anglo-Protestant culture. He knew that numbers matter and that the way to maintain stability and dominating demography for the original peoples in a democratic society was through cautious immigration policy—a low and slow approach. As many of you may know, his name is mud today. He is an outcast, unjustly I think. He has a lot to teach us. Scholars such as Lawrence Harris and David Landis and Sam Huntington have expressed similar warnings about our own country.

Most recently, Larry Mead in his new book “The Burdens of Freedom” has argued that individualism, a key source of Western and American order, dynamism, and strength, is a distinctly First World attribute that is difficult to impart to outsiders and that it is key to maintaining our freedoms and prosperity. These insights are supported by the European experience with Muslim immigration as Dan Pipes recently spoke about and by the multi-generational trajectory of Hispanics in the United States.

The culturalist approach, the issues of cultural compatibility, were very much on the mind of the drafters of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as the debates in Congress revealed, and of course, that is the legislation that is with us today. Yet these culturalist ideas and the scholarship of these individuals is mostly ignored and marginalized in academia.

This marginalization is largely political, but let’s face it, it’s also methodological. We must acknowledge that there’s a lot of unknowns when it comes to culture and how it operates. Our convener, Yoram Hazony, tells us we should attend to the ways in which traditions and nations are formed and what it takes to strengthen them and maintain them. But it is striking how little we understand about where distinctive habits and traditions come from, how they are transmitted down the generations, and the conditions that are needed to preserve and protect them.

There are a lot of possible explanations. One I favor is that cultural transmission is importantly shaped by the small-bore interactions within families, or mother-child, and that flies under the radar screen of the big-think theorists who tell us about cultural significance. And if you doubt that, just go to the South of France where I was recently, and you watch three-year-olds sitting for two hours at the table, their mothers prodding them every step of the way. Somebody ought to study that.

Perhaps the most important reason that the cultural case for limited immigration remains underexplored has to do with that bête noire – race. Let us be candid. Europe and the First World, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white for now; and the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites. Well, that is the result anyway. So even if our immigration philosophy is grounded firmly in cultural concerns, doesn’t rely on race at all, and no matter how many times we repeat the mantra that correlation is not causation, these racial dimensions are enough to spook conservatives.

As a result, today we have an immigration policy driven by fear—the fear of being accused of racism, white supremacy, xenophobia—which has cowed and paralyzed opinion leaders, policymakers, politicians across the spectrum and impeded their ability to think clearly. That fear leads conservatives to avoid talking about cultural distance or questioning the happy fantasy of “magic dirt” or discussing forthrightly the practical difficulties of importing large numbers of people from backwards states into successful ones. And as long as these taboos exist and respectable mainstream conservatives defer to them, it will be hard, maybe impossible, to change course.

Our country’s future trajectory, however, will not be determined by political correctness, but by reality and facts on whether cultural differences really matter, whether they are stubborn, and whether they have consequences. And by the time that becomes clear and that dynamic plays out, it may be too late to turn the ship, and it may well be too late already.

Our legacy population is demoralized, beleaguered, and disorganized. They may no longer be able to serve as a model for anyone to emulate, which brings me to another important development which undergirds hostility to cultural distance thinking but also strengthens the case for taking it seriously. And this is, the rise of multicultural identity politics—topic for this conference, a hot topic for discussion among conservatives, and an ideology increasingly championed by minority and newcomer elites.

Multiculturalist elites resist the assimilation of immigrants to a uniform American way of life or to any Western prototype. But here’s the key point. This resistance is fueled by resentment of the First World’s primacy and hostility towards European dominance, traditions, and achievements. Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute calls this punitive multiculturalism. I prefer revenge or adversary multiculturalism. And for the definitive expression of this, look no further than the writings of Indian-American NYU journalism professor, Suketu Mehta. In his book, “This Land Is Our Land,” the author depicts the West success as entirely illicit, built on violence, on exploitation, built on theft from Third World peoples.

Ingenuity, honest effort, well-functioning institutions have nothing to do with it. Because the West is to blame for all the Third World ills, unlimited and unregulated mass Third World migration to the West is mete recompense for the victims and just comeuppance for Western crimes.

According to Mehta, immigrants should not join the mainstream or try and preserve and protect what makes America great, but should just take over from the “white power structure.” And of course he pays no attention, he is heedless to the task of keeping the goose alive that lays the golden eggs. It’s not hard to fathom the appeal of this philosophy. Insisting that the West’s advantages are ill-gotten is a convenient, face-saving device that explains Third World failure and avoids the burdens of assimilation. And although it’s hard to know how many average newcomers embrace Mehta’s narrative, the increasing dominance of revenge multiculturalism among immigrants rights leadership classes should be cause for concern.

I believe the conservatives need to push back against the ungrateful habit of blaming the West by pointing repeatedly to the self-inflicted wounds of the Third World. Admittedly, this is not considered nice. We have learned that from the response to Trump’s disparagements, but the alternative is to give free play to anti-Western moralizing that is unfair and grounded in falsehoods and dangerous to our country’s future.

Now, I want to make one additional point about immigration, which conservatives also do not emphasize enough and which frequently gets neglected in the immigration debate. We are told repeatedly it is our duty to rescue the inhabitants of poor, unstable places by allowing them to move to our well-functioning country. The United States must continue to play this rescue role. But as David Miller in his book “Strangers in Our Midst” has noted, and others as well, this imperative amounts to a vain and short-sighted rescue fantasy that hurts most Third World peoples. We cannot possibly help more than a tiny fraction of the world’s denizens.

Lately, there has been talk of reforming the law to favor skilled immigrants, as do countries like Canada and Australia. Although unskilled immigration should be reduced, I believe, replacing the less educated with higher-skilled foreigners is not the answer either. By draining talent and energy from places that desperately need them, and especially people who are educated at public expense abroad, an overly generous immigration policy will inevitably damage the countries left behind.

Once again, I would ask, what important conservative voices are emphasizing this point? Who is willing to fault the short-term thinking and moral preening behind our immigration regime, which however generous, cannot lift up the Third World, but only a fraction of the people from it? Who will emphasize that failed countries must, they have no choice but to, improve themselves by reforming cultural practices that impede progress, that instead of moving here, their citizens should concentrate on emulating what makes us great? This should become a central conservative theme. Thank you.