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Transcript of Q&A Following Panelist Remarks

Ryan Williams:

Alright. Well, thank you to the panelists. I just wanted to give you all an opportunity to talk amongst yourselves, if anyone felt so moved. Amy, did you want to add anything before we open it up to questions?

Amy Wax: I think this is the only conference in the continental United States where Enoch Powell gets two honorable mentions. That is a singularity.

Ryan Williams: Might make it the last.

Amy Wax: I hope not.

Ryan Williams: No, I’m joking. Scott.

Scott McConnell: I was going to also reference the NYU Indian professor, but that didn’t make the cut. But if I had gone over 17 minutes, he would have gotten in too—immigration as reparations, which I think is a very important idea. I mean, it’s confusing because I’m very sympathetic to a lot of what Luma said, but there’s also this political reality that immigration, even though they’re individuals and families and people with roots, as a group of people, they’ve become a political weight that is on balance, you know, on the far left, or on the moderate left, or somewhere on the left. And so I don’t really know how to square that circle, but I think it’s an interesting point.

Ryan Williams: Mike, If you might indulge me, just one question. You talk about defeating this identity politics regime. Where would you start? What’s the lowest hanging fruit politically or policy wise?

Mike Gonzales: Well, I would … Can you hear me? I don’t know if I’d say low-hanging fruit seeing how the census issue on citizenship went so badly. And by the way, that gives you some idea of how the left really understands the importance of the census. They were really prepared for this; conservatives were not. They threw the mother of all tantrums, and they kept it up for two years, and they were able to get rid of a very…I mean, this should have been the most boring, commonsensical addition to a census—”Hey, are you a citizen or not?”—talk about returning to the identity that matters—”Are you an American or not an American?”—which is obviously… citizenship and Americaness is a race-blind, colorblind issue.

But I will say that we do need to stop the census from A, creating categories. That’s not fair to the census either. It was OMB that created these categories, but the census is very involved in these categories. These categories are fictitious; they are synthetic; they are only… If you look at… Representative Roybal wrote a law in 1977, that is the only in the United States that describes an ethnicity. It says what Hispanics are, and if you look at it, and if you read it, the only thing they have in common is victimization. There’s no culture; there’s no DNA; there’s no language; there’s nothing else.

So I think that would be the lowest hanging fruit. I think taking away the economic incentives, the group adherence, is very important. But if you do these two things, believe me, I believe that they would go away as fast as they were created, and that was…but that took 40 years, 30-40 years, so I think it would be even faster, but these are the two things that I would target personally. Sorry for the long answer.

Amy Wax: Can I just comment on the future of ethnic identity politics? I think one of the biggest obstacles is what’s going on in the universities, and the entrenchment of diversity as the end-all be-all in academia, and of course, a fertile source of favoritism. Unless the Supreme Court decides to just backpedal totally on affirmative action, that diversity “compelling interest” is there now in the law, and nobody’s going to let go of it.

Mike Gonzales: I think that is the one that ripest to fall. The Hidden Tribes project did a very good study last year. Only 15% of Americans, one five, support racial preferences. So when you started, you were saying academia, I was wondering if you were talking about the use of identity politics in academia, which is pervasive. I see this as a problem of a factory polluting a river. And the first thing you do is you shut off the pipes polluting the rivers, and then after that, you go in, and you clean out the algae, you clean out the water, and all that. I would stop the census, and I would stop affirmative action, racial preferences, and all these… That is very important. The affirmative action part is completely important. Sorry, go ahead.

Ryan Williams: Luma?

Luma Simms: Yes?

Ryan Williams: Anything to add?

Luma Simms: About what you said, Scott, about the immigrants being a pol… What did you say? They’re causing political upheaval, or can you remind me?

Scott McConnell: Maybe they get molded by pre-existing forces, i.e., the activist who made the census Mike talked about, or other things, but objectively, they have become a force on the left, which is not necessarily the nature of most immigrants and immigrant individuals and families, but are somehow molded by the cultural left into a, you know, kind of anti-traditional American political force.

Luma Simms: Right.

Scott McConnell: As…the shock troops of diversity. And diversity has a…it’s kind of…I mean, it’s no longer revolutionary socialism; it’s revolutionary diversity.

Luma Simms: Well, I think the political left certainly uses immigrants. I don’t think they’re drawn to the political left from a social and cultural position, but more from an economic position, because the left is more willing, say, to give them handouts. So I think the economics is what drives a lot of it, and I’ve written before on what makes immigrants who are socially conservative vote Democratic, and it’s the economics that drives most of it. I mean, I know it, I live within a… And also, not every immigrant is the same, even within, say, the Iraqi community. You have the ones that lean more Republican, and the ones that lean more Democratic. So yeah.

Ryan Williams: Just quickly follow that up…

Amy Wax: Can I just comment? I do sort of question the notion that conservatives should try and turn America into a place where people can come from traditional societies and continue to be fully traditional in every sense. You know Norman Podhoretz spoke of the “brutal bargain.” The brutal bargain is this place between retaining some of your traditional commitments and fealties and becoming modern, becoming American, giving them up, accommodating to our culture which can be described in many different ways. I think conservatives should promote the brutal bargain, not say, you come from Iraqi to be Iraqi. Well, that just begs the question—why are you here? Why didn’t you stay?

Luma Simms: Yeah, well, first of all, we know why the Iraqis are here.

Audience Member 1: No, we don’t.

Amy Wax: Any nation, any other country.

Luma Simms: Okay. Let’s go to a different thing. You talked about that we shouldn’t expect for immigrants to come here and still want to live traditional lives.

Amy Wax: Fully, not fully.

Luma Simms: Okay, but let’s ask what does it mean to live traditionally? What I’m talking about is the value of family, the value of religion. Those things are what we…was talking about yesterday, right? That national conservatism wants to create an America that values family and values religion. Those used to be, for immigrants of yesteryears, those used to be two great points of contact between them coming over and the America that existed back then—an America that valued family, an America that valued religion. And so they had some points of contact where they can kind of come into the community and not feel ostracized and not feel like they’re going to lose their children to whatever, pornography and all these things in today’s society.

So I think we need to talk about what tradition means, what immigrants that come from traditional societies mean, and how America can be the kind of place that can give them roots. I’m not saying they don’t need to try. I’m not saying they shouldn’t learn the English language – absolutely. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have friends that are Americans, that they should keep exclusively to themselves. I do not believe that. I’m saying that’s the reality on the ground, and we have to understand, and we have to figure out how to come together, how to create a, for lack of a better phrase, the melting pot, I guess.

Ryan Williams: Okay. Let’s open it up to the audience. Yes, sir, right here in the middle.

Audience Member 2 [tapping mic]: It’s not on.

Ryan Williams: Yeah, it’s on.

Audience Member 2: Okay. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. Very good panel. Question, and it’s fairly fundamental, and maybe I’m the only one in the room that doesn’t know the answer. But we have at the border for, I don’t know, for a long time, but certainly this year, drug cartels, human trafficking, renting of children, overwhelming not only ports of entry, but a thousand people just crossing into El Paso in one day. What do we have? 400,000 illegals. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. We have emergency powers.

We have…why doesn’t the President of the United States have the power the say, you know, we are overwhelmed. We can’t care for these people. There are limits in everything in life, as opposed to just congressional delegations flying down to say, “Isn’t it terrible? And we won’t change the law, we won’t do anything.” Where is the political will in this country to defend the country?

Amy Wax: There isn’t any. Short answer. But this is…you know, the dominance of…I’m going to go back to the universities. I mean, I am a professor at, you know, an Ivy League university, and I see the ideology—the moralized, the highly moralized, globalist ideology that just pervades the place.

The president of my university, Amy Gutmann, I counted them, has issued over 25 ukases in the forms of emails to the entire university opposing every single aspect of Trump’s attempts to curtail and discipline the situation at the border. So the notion of neutrality, it’s just completely gone. And we’re influencing young minds. We’re propagating these ideas.

And many of the students at Penn and places like it, they are so far removed from the border. They are, they are protected from the wages of untrammeled diversity. In the summers, they go off to Stockbridge or the North Fork of Long Island or wherever the watering holes of the elites, and they write papers about the virtues of diversity. I mean that’s really what’s going on.

Mike Gonzales: Michael, in your long exhaustive list of why they come, you forgot the most important part, climate change. You’re not listening to NPR enough.

Ryan Williams: Yeah, here in the front. Michael, we’re almost out of time, so…

Audience Member 3: Hi, I’m from the great State of Michigan and a second-generation American, and I was really looking forward to the citizenship question on the census. Can you think of any other mechanism for determining the mix in the House of Representatives? Because I’d like to get some of the coastal representatives here in the Midwest.

Mike Gonzales: It’s open. It’s legal to do it anyway you want to. You don’t have to do total population. You can do citizenship population; you can do registered voters; you can do… The constitution is silent on that. All the court cases, the most recent being Evenwel, was silent. So the citizenship question would have given the state legislatures the data to create electoral maps any way they wanted to. So yeah, it doesn’t have to be total population. That’s the way it’s done now. It can be any number of things. I mean, it has to be, you know, reality, but I think registered voters, or eligible voters, or citizens, is something that would occur to many people.

Ryan Williams: Yes, Mr. [inaudible]. Wait for the mic, please.

Audience Member 4: So in France they’ve already banned the collection of racial statistics, and yet, it doesn’t seem like a model of racial harmony. Comment.

Mike Gonzales: Well, I mean France has also stepped away from assimilation, which is one of the reasons why we’re in the pickle that we are. And it’s got…France is the closest one to us in terms of assimilation as ethos, but it doesn’t quite have the history that we used to have with Scots-Irish, and Germans and Irish, and Armenians and Greeks.

So no, I disagree with you. And it’s not just the groups; it’s the fact that we have endowed them with real salience. But I would take…if I were to take…would I rather…which is the country that’s going to solve the problem first or more easily, Germany or France? I would say France. Or Italy or France? I would say France. France is the one that’s closest to it, and that’s one of the reasons why. I could go on, but I want to respect the audience…

Amy Wax: Can I just say? I think it’s going to be really hard to backpedal from these categorizations for all sorts of reasons, but I think the key is not to dole out goodies based on your group membership. Just to dial that back, right…is…that’s going to be enough of a challenge.

Mike Gonzales: I agree wholeheartedly with half of what she said, not with the first half.

Ryan Williams: In the middle there, you’ve been waiting patiently, sir.

Audience Member 5: Is this on? Hi, a number of you have spoken about the need for assimilation to get back to that, to get back to the melting pot, the evils of multiculturalism and identity politics. So, quick thought experiment.

Let’s say we’d had the Hart–Celler Act in 1965, and we’d had the same level of legal, and even of illegal, immigration since then, but somehow liberalism hadn’t gone nuts, and liberals still talked like Manny Celler and maybe even Phil Hart did, like Hubert Humphrey did. They still talked about the melting pot. They still talked about and pushed assimilation. We’d never heard about multiculturalism. How much of a problem would those levels of immigration be then?

Scott McConnell: Yeah, I think if you had levels like 500,000 a year, there’d be a lot of assimilation—what happened kind of naturally by kids going to school together or going out together and stuff like that. When you get to, what are we now? A million and a half a year? Two million a year? And with potentially…I mean, you now have a major political party essentially saying there should be no border enforcement at all. So you’re going to get above that. Then, any kind of natural assimilation thing isn’t going to work.

Luma Simms: I do want to add one thing, and that is, assimilation really works better when the people are coming here by choice. Those are the real immigrants, right? Rather than a lot of…we call them immigrants, but they’re really refugees these days, right? They’re here because they don’t want to die. They’re not here necessarily because they really want to be Americans, or they want to come to America. It’s just that they didn’t want to die. So there’s this really dire situation that is going on that sort of complicates the issue of assimilation. I just wanted to point that out because we tend to lump everybody in a group and call them all immigrants, but many, many of the newcomers are actually refugees.

Amy Wax: Can I just comment on this? I would go back to this concept in my talk that numbers matter. The Hart–Celler drafters, you know, the legislative record is just full of assurances that the numbers would not be great, that the demographic profile of the United States would barely change, that the legacy groups that are here would still be demographically dominant, would still be numerically dominant, and I think you could attribute all sorts of dire motives to them saying that, but I think there is a core insight there, which is, in order to have assimilation, you need to have demographic dominance, numerical dominance of the group that forms the culture, and that to which you are going to assimilate.

Sam Huntington said as soon as you start getting these large influxes from particular places, particular societies and cultures, they will form these enclaves. They will start to associate with each other. They will not have any incentive or imperative to integrate, to make the brutal bargain, to change their ways towards a common identity that’s just, once again, a matter of the numbers. So the numbers that we have are a problem.

Mike Gonzales: The numbers matter. By the way, I think the complete quote about Podhoretz was, “The brutal, but necessary, bargain,” right? So look, Scott, it didn’t happen naturally. It was a policy. It was a policy pursued by New York, by the government at all levels. It was a policy pursued by corporate America.

The Irish were told to assimilate. The Germans, all the Ellis Islanders and the pre-Ellis Islanders, were told to assimilate. And people who were very pro-immigration, like Lincoln, believed in assimilation. It was bipartisan. We walked away for political and ideological reasons in the ’60s, but it used to be a policy that was pursued, and it’s a brutal, but necessary, bargain, as Podhoretz said.

Scott McConnell: Yes, sir. Wait for the mic, if you would.

Audience Member 6: So one of the more fun, kind of syndromes of our strange clown world that we live in is this combination of these concepts of equal protection under the law and the protected class, which seem to kind of coexist in our jurisprudence in an interesting way. And this question is for Dr. Gonzalez, which is, if you’re actually proposing going all the way to eliminating protected classes—I don’t know that you’re proposing actually going that far, that’s quite radical—and restoring equal protection under the law and having only one class of citizen you’ve got to bear in mind that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, people whose job is enforcing that regime. What happens to those people?

Mike Gonzales: I know. I know. Look, when I…I know what I’m up against. Please don’t remind me. I still think that this is a mission worth undertaking, and that we need to do it if we’re going to save America, but I understand how many people’s jobs are at stake here.

Ryan Williams: In the back here. This will be our last.

Audience Member 7: Good evening. Most of you, all of you, have been speaking of what you think should happen. I wonder if any of you would speak to what you think is likely to happen, and if that amounts to conservatives losing the immigration question, what is your plan B?

Amy Wax: I think we are going to sink back significantly into Third Worldism. We are going to go Venezuela, and you can just see it happening. I mean one of my pet peeves, one of my obsessions, is litter, and I… If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory, right? Or versus other places that are “more diverse,” you are going to see an enormous difference. I’m sorry to report. You know, generalizations are not very pleasant, but little things like that, which aren’t little, they really affect our environment, attitudes towards public space.

I think Adam Garfinkle did a piece in The American Interest, where he talks about this—about noise levels, about the public space, about people’s deportment in public spaces, about respect for other people’s privacy, about things like heckling and, you know, sexual harassment. I mean all of this stuff sounds really silly, but when you add it up, these cultural habits, you know, make a difference to our environment.

And I think the celebration of diversity means that we lose some of these norms, these mores, that you know, make our life what it is. And I’m very concerned about it. Of course, it goes a lot deeper than that. Of course, it’s not just these superficial things, but I’m just mentioning that as emblematic of the way that I think we really are going, and nobody is willing to say anything about it, let alone try and stop it. I mean I guess I am, but…

Scott McConnell: I mean, there are a lot of obvious dystopian scenarios. Amy’s is similar to George Kennan’s, like the Third Worldization of America. There’s…Reihan Salam talks about whites and Asians in increasingly gated communities, and a sort of re-segregation of the society. And obviously, there’s various civil war type versions. There’s a novel by an Egyptian-American called “The American Civil War,” which takes place in, like, 2070, and I think culminates in use of biological, genocidal biological weapons. So you know, probably Amy’s Venezuela is the best case, if nothing…

Mike Gonzales: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have a plan B. My uncle in New York, in Queens, in the ’70s told me we were given this opportunity to come here from Cuba, and there is no plan B. I’m going to try to make it work until I drop, and I’m optimistic, at least more optimistic than Amy. But I think…I don’t have a plan B.

Luma Simms: I have a suggestion. I think if we do reduce the numbers, which I am in favor of for the right reasons, I think that…and at the same time, reinvigorate the family and religion within American culture, then what you can see…what may happen is a better assimilation of those that are already here, and more cohesion, and then we would have…drop the numbers, and therefore, not continue to bring in those that don’t believe in American way of life.

Ryan Williams: Thank you all very much. Please join me in thanking the panelists.