Justin Gest: America is Hopelessly Diverse—In the Best Way Possible
Episode Summary
In 2015, the US Census Bureau released a report projecting that the US would become a majority minority nation by 2044. Justin Gest asserts that the US reached this milestone a long time ago. Gest discusses America’s immense diversity and immigrant roots, which can be sources of unity, rather than division. He interrogates the use of categories and labels that ultimately divide us, calling for a more civic and inclusive understanding of the nation. Justin Gest is a professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
A scholar of the politics of immigration and demographic change, he has written six books, the most recent entitled Majority Minority (2022). His research is published in many peer-reviewed academic journals, and he provides commentary for major media outlets. You can keep up with his work on his website, justingest.com.
54:01
Alex Lovit
Justin Gest
Justin Gest: Immigration is the human face of contemporary globalization. It is a proxy vote for closure instead of openness. What we are experiencing right now is a backlash to globalization. And with globalization, we have witnessed the way that globalization dissolves borders as it relates to the movement of ideas, of goods and services, of currency. But immigration is something that sovereign states like the United States, but also down to a small country like Belgium, can control one person at a time.
Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Justin Gest.
Gest is a professor of policy and government at George Mason University and an expert on demographic change. He’s a prolific guy. He’s written six books in addition to many academic articles and has appeared in print and on screen in a variety of journalistic outlets including ABC, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others. You can keep up with his work on his website, justingest.com. His latest book is titled “Majority Minority,” which is about nationalism and demographic change.
Immigration has been in the news a lot lately, and it will be a major topic in this year’s election. Donald Trump successfully ran for the presidency in 2016, pledging to crack down on illegal immigration. Joe Biden successfully ran for the presidency in 2020 on a promise for more humane border policies. Now these two men are competing for the same office. And as Gest and I discussed during this interview, more Americans name immigration as the top problem facing the country than any other issue.
Border crossings have been on the rise recently. For each of the last three years, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has reported apprehending more than two million people illegally crossing the southwestern border, compared to an annual average of less than half a million for the pre-COVID decade of 2010 to 2019.
But the anxiety many Americans feel over immigration isn’t a simple reflection of growing pressure at the border. After all, 2016, when Trump rode the slogan “build the wall” all the way to the White House, was not a period of especially high immigration. So, maybe Americans’ attention to the topic has less to do with how many people are arriving in the U.S. any given year, and more to do with the demographic change our country is experiencing, including the projection that within the next two decades we will become a majority-minority country.
You’re going to hear this phrase, “majority minority” a few times in this conversation, and it’s really central to Gest’s work. So, let’s talk about what it means.
The basic definition is simply a population where no single racial, ethnic, or religious group constitutes a majority. But since these categories—race, ethnicity, and religion—are culturally constructed and constantly evolving, majorities are in the eye of the beholder. Depending on how you define race, the U.S. is about to become majority minority in the 2040s. Or maybe it already did back in the 1920s.
Race is real in the sense that observable characteristics, like skin color or hair texture, are genetically inherited. But mostly what makes race real is what’s in our heads. Most of North America’s early white settlers were Protestants from Northwestern Europe. When Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Ireland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe started arriving in larger numbers in the U.S. in the late 1800s, that seemed like a distinction worth noting.
The new immigrants could be distinguished by their language and accents, their foods, their culture; but also through subtle gradations with skin and hair. It seemed like such a notable difference, in fact, that the country kind of freaked out.
As a settler nation, the U.S. had generally welcomed immigration. It was a big continent full of resources and in need of labor. Enslaved people from Africa had been an early solution to the labor problem. By the turn of the 20th century, slavery was over, and most black Americans lived under segregation without access to full citizenship rights.
The economic boom of the California Gold Rush was largely fueled by the labor of Chinese immigrants. But that door was slammed shut with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In the 1920s, when the U.S. freaked out about the new arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, it didn’t completely close the door, but America did pass new quotas on countries which had only recently become sources of immigration.
Over the next 50 years, the percentage of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. fell by 30 percent, and as a percentage of the population, was cut in more than half.
But the other thing that happened is that some of those distinctions that seemed so important a century ago started to seem like less of a big deal. Some of that was assimilation in every direction. The new arrivals tended to learn English. Everyone learned that pizza is delicious. And white Americans redefined their idea of who shared their racial identity.
Physical distinctions of skin color, facial structure, and hair and eye color that your grandparents might have noticed now don’t attract your attention. And in 1965, the U.S. replaced the old quota system and propped the door open a little further. This began a new chapter of increased immigration—and increased anxiety about immigration—in the U.S., ushering in our current era of divided politics and policy stasis.
But Justin Gest can tell that story better than I can, and he does so in this interview, alongside other insights into the causes of human migration, how the U.S. census divides us, and how we can build a more inclusive civic identity of what it means to be an American.
Justin Gest, welcome to The Context.
Justin Gest: Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Alex Lovit: So, your research focuses on multiracial societies and how they succeed or fail to build harmonious, peaceful communities. That’s a pretty important question for the United States and a number of other diverse and diversifying nations around the world. How did you first get interested in that topic?
Justin Gest: Oo. Gosh. I think it goes back to my childhood. I grew up in Los Angele, California. And I went to public schools all through elementary and up to high school. These were formative years for me, and it was a majority-minority high school. There was no single ethnic or racial or religious majority. And in many ways, it was a signal of what was to come for our country—you know, [when] one of our country’s most diverse cities, a very diverse school, that presaged the demographic change that was before us.
And I think that it’s also sort of piqued my interest how societies adapt to these changes, because it was something that I grew up with very much and kind of remained intrigued.
The other thing, too, is I grew up the son of a refugee. My dad was a refugee. So, I’ve always been sensitized to the immigrant origins not only of my own family but of American society. And so, I think that the demographic change that the United States is experiencing right now is very much consistent with the evolution of the country over the years. And all these were personally very important to me and influenced, you know, my interests as a scholar.
Alex Lovit: So, I would say that race is both culturally and biologically constructed in the sense that physical characteristics such as melanin content of skin is an inherited characteristic.
But any attempts to draw a line on a map or across the spectrum of human skin tones and say that people on one side of that line are one race, and people on the other side of that line are another race, that’s inherently arbitrary. In a lot of cases, when people are talking about racial categories or divisions, what they’re actually talking about is cultural practices or religious belief.
How do you define what you’re studying, and is there a vocabulary or a set of basic concepts that can help us to talk about it?
Justin Gest: Yeah. I try to work within conventional understandings of these concepts just so that I’m not trying to rewrite the way my readers and my listeners think about these issues. I really want to meet people where they are and not create lots of new jargon for them to interpret. And I also would like people to be comfortable talking about a really sensitive subject like race and ethnicity and identity.
And I think the more that I start policing these terms and how people talk, it makes them less comfortable talking about things that they’re already pretty uncomfortable talking about. So, I try to meet them where they are with the terms that they use and the way that they use them.
That said, I think that the most important concept or term that I do introduce and talk a lot about is the idea of a majority-minority country, or a majority-minority society more broadly. And that really refers to a milestone, a demographic milestone where one group of people that previously made up a majority ceases to do so because of the arrival and differential fertility rates of a group of immigrant origin. So, a foreign group that arrives.
That’s the most important term that I use, you know, as it relates to race. And I think your definition is really spot on. But as it relates to race, ethnicity, identity, and religion, I really do try to use the conventional understandings of them.
Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how it came about that we’ve got people from different groups in contact. That is, in some ways, a fairly recent phenomenon in world history. We’re talking about the last few centuries. You know, you’ve studied ethnically and racially diverse societies in a variety of places, everywhere from Singapore to Bahrain to Youngstown, Ohio. You know, these are very different places with their own particular unique histories.
But it strikes me that the motivations for migration in all of these cases are often economic. Is it possible to paint kind of a broad-brush picture of colonialism, industrialization, globalization; what’s been going on in the last few centuries that’s been bringing people into increased contact?
Justin Gest: Yeah. This is a long story short, right? You know, with colonialization, when colonial empires took over mass amounts of territory, primarily for the purposes of extraction, they encountered huge appetites, veracious appetites, for foreign goods. And it coincided with a period of industrialization where they were able to manufacture and process those goods—whether it’s cotton, sugar, or coconuts—to provide them to lots of different markets.
And that both created the need for those products but also lots of labor in order to produce those different products. And that led those empires—Spain, Britain, and France; but particularly Britain, for the purposes of my book, “Majority Minority”—to import labor from lots of other places inside of their dominions.
And so, that kind of stimulated this process where demographic change began to take place drastically in some places. And particularly in smaller islands or smaller colonies, the mass importation of labor completely transformed the complexion of those societies. And yeah, it was absolutely driven by economics—initially by slavery, and then thereafter by indentured servitude; because the producers didn’t want to pay for labor, and slavery was a convenient way to avoid that.
And the concoction of racial forms of supremacy justified it, until it was abolished. And at that point, slave-owners and slave markets began to shift to indentured servitude as another source of effectively free labor, albeit with the promise of some airable land at the end of the indenture, or a return passage home.
So, that forever changed the societies where those immigrants, forced or voluntary, arrived. And it really set into motion the beginnings of demographic change that forever altered the fragile demographies of their nations.
Alex Lovit: Okay, so that’s like three centuries of world history in a paragraph.
Justin Gest: Yes.
Alex Lovit: I appreciate that. How about today? Can you discern any kind of overall patterns of where people are coming from today, where they’re going, and what is driving that migration?
Justin Gest: Well, increasingly today with the advances in both transportation and communication technology, migrants come from everywhere, and they increasingly go everywhere. For a long part of 20th century history, migration was primarily a sort of global south to global north phenomenon. But what we now know is about half of the world’s migration is moving from one low-income country in the developing world to another low-income country.
And that is really fascinating and certainly game-changing because it’s leading to demographic change effectively all over the world, driven by migration, except for those countries that are completely closed to migration, which are very rare at this point.
What that means is that the different countries that are being affected are receiving immigrants for lots of different reasons from lots of different places. So, we have everything from student migration to economic migration, to refugee and forced humanitarian migration, to family migration where people are reunifying with family or forming families across borders.
And just focusing on economic migration, which is the most primary justification for people’s mobility these days, we have immense diversity there too, because we have some people just taking up intercompany transfers or doing a brief apprenticeship, to people who are moving to take up a job that they were already offered and sponsored by an employer, or maybe they’re being admitted because of the skills that they possess and the demand for those skills in the local labor market in the destination country.
And so, that amount of diversity—overlaid upon that also entrepreneurs and people with extraordinary talent—you have a world in motion, and for lots of different reasons among lots of different people from lots of different places.
Alex Lovit: Well, so let’s talk about the U.S. You’ve studied immigration in multiethnic societies all over the world, as we’ve just discussed. But for the rest of this conversation I’d like to focus on one nation in particular where ethnic divisions and contested ideas of identity present a threat to democracy, which is the United States. So, first of all, how does immigration in the United States compare to other wealthy democracies? Do we have more immigration or less? How do our immigration laws compare to other peer nations?
Justin Gest: We’re weird. The United States is strange. It’s an outlier. It’s an exception. And not necessarily in a good way. It depends on your preference sand your politics.
How are we weird? First off, we call ourselves a country of migration, which we very much are. And yet, actually, the number of immigrants that come to the United States as a share of our national population is rather middling. So, despite being the sort of beacon of immigrant history in the world, we actually have a pretty average number of immigrants who come in as a share of our national population.
And so, we are not so much an outlier in terms of how many immigrants are arriving; we vastly overestimate how many immigrants are coming, though. Among developed countries in the world, only Italy is less numerate when it comes to evaluating the number of immigrants in their country. I think the average American perceives double the amount of immigrants that are actually here, which is striking.
The second thing that’s really interesting about the United States is that our immigration policies for admission are designed to really maximize the number of family migrants that come into the country. And that is truly unique in the world.
What you should think about—this really comes down to your preferences and your politics. And I’m not here to tell anyone what to think. On the one hand, you might think that is incredibly humane, because we are reunifying families and we’re relying on what you could effectively call chain migration, migration driven by social networks and family relationships, to bring people over, help them integrate into the country, help them find work, help them learn the customs and norms of the United States. It’s a wonderfully humane approach that has permitted the consistent arrival of immigrants over time.
On the other hand, another perspective, an alternative perspective, would say this is completely foolish and unstrategic because you’re bringing in immigrants who have family connections and families ties but doesn’t necessarily meet the economic needs of the country. And the immigrants that are coming in could otherwise also be humanitarian migrants who are desperate for help and are often fleeing war zones that the United States had a hand in.
So, there are a lot of different perspectives about what should be the principal justification for allowing people into the country. Most of the world focuses heavily on economic immigrants. They focus on skill targeting, or employer sponsorship, or employer wish lists of the kinds of immigrants they need to fill critical vacancies; or they target highly skilled immigrants with lots of talent in growing industry areas, industrial sectors.
The United States doesn’t really do that much. That’s a fraction of our annual admits. In fact, it’s actually quite difficult to bring in economic immigrants into the country.
Meanwhile, about two out of every three permanent immigrants coming into the United States are coming on family visas. And that is about double the closest country in the world when it comes to family migration. Only France and Ireland are anywhere close to us, and they’re not that close. The United States is nearly double both those countries in terms of the share of its visa mix that are coming from family migrants.
Alex Lovit: Well, let me try to follow up on a couple things you said there. So, one is you’re saying that we have a kind of unusual immigration policy in the world right now. When did that policy start? What’s the history of that policy?
Justin Gest: It really goes back to 1965. So, the United States had effectively a closed-door policy of very racialized admissions terms. We basically banned anyone from coming to the United States unless they were of European origin or already inside of U.S. territories, up until the 1960s. As part of the Civil Rights movement and the Race Relations Act, the United States government passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act. And that hinged immigration on family migration.
And at the time, government was not suddenly doing something really progressive. They thought that by permitting greater family migration, it would simply be utilized by pre-existing European-origin Americans to bring in other Europeans into the country. But what that did was open the door for future generations of Latinos and Asians, by far the fastest-growing arrival group in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, to sponsor family members and completely transform the ethnic and racial and religious demography of the United States forever thereafter. And so, the great opening of the 1960s was actually remarkably unintentional.
Alex Lovit: So, that policy has been more or less unchanged for the last 60 years now.
Justin Gest: Think of it as policy formaldehyde.
Alex Lovit: Well, and that’s what I want to ask about. So, immigration is famously an issue that our national politics struggles to make progress on, to make changes on—whether it’s progress or not. And we’ve seen [that]—repeated attempts to pass immigration policy reform that have failed. We recently saw that with a bipartisan bill that had support in the Senate. Biden said he’d sign it, but it has not come for a vote in the House.
Why do you think it is so difficult for the American political system to reconsider immigration policy?
Justin Gest: Well, we’ve had little updates along the way since the 1960s. In 1986, there was a major act called EIRCA. Thereafter, there was another update in 1990, another one in 1996 that was dealing largely with undocumented and the criminalization of people’s unauthorized arrival or stay in the United States. But basically, it’s been unchanged since then.
And the reason why is that immigration was historically a sort of tertiary issue, a really minor technical issue on the American political landscape. But since around the 2000, it has become a litmus test for partisanship. It has become one of the most sensational and inflammatory issues in U.S. politics.
In many ways, you can use it as a predictor of people’s partisan leanings just to understand their views on immigration, on whether we should have more or fewer immigrants in the country, on whether we should be facilitating their citizenship and settlement in the country, on whether they contribute as net contributors to the United States or whether they’re net detractors.
These kinds of questions often predict our politics, because our politics have evolved into something that’s more than just left or right, but really more about open versus closed.
And so, this little issue, this technical tertiary matter from 30, 40 years ago has become one of the most divisive matters in American politics today. And that is why we have this stalemate, because both sides are completely uncompromising in their views to the detriment of any reform.
Alex Lovit: That segues into the other question I wanted to ask, which was, as you mentioned, the U.S. current levels of immigration are historically high for the United States, if I have this right. The percentage of people in the U.S. right now who were born out of the U.S. is not as high as it’s ever been, but it’s higher than it’s been in a century, more or less.
Justin Gest: We’re approaching about 14 percent, Alex. And the highest we’ve ever been is around 14.5 or something like that. Maybe max out at 15 percent. That was around the turn of the century, like—or before the turn of the century, I think, in the late 1800s.
Yes, we are approaching our high. Just to contextualize this, though, what I was saying earlier about other countries, a country like Switzerland or Australia or Canada is around 30 percent, double the share that we have. A country like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates is around 90 percent foreign-born. And so, 14 percent is relatively high in historical terms to the United States, but contextualizing the rest of the world, it’s middling.
Alex Lovit: Yeah. So, in a historical perspective, it might be relatively high. But in an international comparative perspective, it’s—yeah, as you said, not that high. Yet, as you’ve said, it’s become a flashpoint for our politics, and in fact just recently has seen a large increase of attention. According to Gallup, in September 2023, 13 percent of Americans named immigration as the most important problem facing the country today. That number more than doubled by February and March 2024, with 28 percent of Americans now naming immigration as the most important problem. More Americans now name immigration at the top of that list of the most important problems than any other single issue.
What do you think is going on here? How do we explain this surge of concern about immigration?
Justin Gest: Well, despite divisive disagreements about what we should do about immigration, one thing everyone can agree upon is that the system is broken. Both sides will tell you that. They just think it’s broken in different ways. And so, it is certainly an issue at the top of many people’s minds.
However, what’s interesting is that there is a partisan dynamic to people’s interest in immigration. The vast majority of that 20 percent of the public for whom immigration is the priority are republican, are conservatives. And this reveals what I’ve referred to as an “intensity gap” between democrats and republicans on their views of immigration.
For democrats, and many moderates as well—many people who are independents—they have views on immigration, and they believe in them strongly, but they are superseded by their concerns with, you know, reproductive rights, climate change, inequality and inflation, human rights and foreign wars. There’s a lot of other things that are on people’s minds on the left and in the center of American politics. But on the right of American politics, immigration is, for almost everyone, a top-three issue; and for many, about a third of people on the right, the number one issue, the single most important issue on their minds come election day.
And that is the dynamics that we’re working with, which is why we have a situation where about 70 percent of the United States, people believe that immigrants are net contributors, and a similar amount—about two-thirds of the country—want to see immigration increased or kept about the same. And that’s been true for many years now, more or less. It’s wavered back and forth, but it’s generally around those numbers.
But for the people who are in the final third that want to see immigration decreased and don’t believe that immigrants are net contributors, that they’re net takers from the United States, for that 30 percent of the country, immigration is paramount. And that is what has led to a lack of compromise, because in particular republicans are incentivized to dig their heels in, because they know that this is the principal issue on their constituents’ minds.
Alex Lovit: And how do you explain what’s going on there, you know, what is motivating this kind of anti-immigration movement in the republication party? Is this a case of polarized media—you know, Fox News is telling a narrative? Or is this a case where, you know, Fox News is telling people what they want to hear?
Justin Gest: No, it’s more than that. Immigration is the human face of contemporary globalization. It is a proxy vote for closure instead of openness. What we are experiencing right now is a backlash to globalization. And with globalization, we have witnessed the way that globalization dissolves borders as it relates to the movement of ideas, of goods and services, of currency.
But immigration is something that sovereign states like the United States, but also down to a small country like Belgium, can control one person at a time. We can control who enters our borders. Belgium is actually kind of an unfortunate example because it’s part of the Schengen zone inside of the free-mobility European Union. But almost every country outside of a free-mobility zone controls its borders. And that is a way that countries can assert their sovereignty, reassert their borders in an increasingly borderless world.
And as the human face of globalization, it’s where people are putting their foot down to register their discontent with the excesses of globalization. Many people believe that they are poor. They believe that their culture has been dissolved or diluted by globalization. And immigration brings all those issues together because, as the human face of it, people are faced with all the panoply of political issues that relate to immigrants. And that means crime, access to healthcare, jobs, inequality and wage differentials.
All of this relates to so many different issues in each country—I could go on; education, foreign policy. It all relates to immigration in some kind of way. And so, it encompasses a lot of our political disputes all in one issue.
Alex Lovit: So this is a podcast about democracy, so I’d like to talk about the challenge of building and maintaining democracies with diverse populations. But before we get there, from reading your work, it seems like there’s a lot of historical and present-day examples of non-democratic regimes purposely exploiting racial and cultural divisions in kind of a divide-and-conquer strategy, to prevent unified resistance. Do I have that right? And if so, what are some examples of that?
Justin Gest: You definitely have that right. And I study it in a number of non-democratic settings. But I want to emphasize that we see the same tactics happening in democratic spaces. Ultimately, democracies are majoritarian structures. And if you can leverage ties built on race, ethnicity, religion, innate characteristics—phenotypical appearance—to mobilize support for one party over another, you do.
And we’ve seen that throughout the course of American history and the history of many other democracies, into the present day when lots of fear-mongering politicians are leveraging pseudo-racial, racial innuendo, or sometimes overt race-based solidarities in order to mobilize support for their candidacy.
Alex Lovit: So let’s talk about democracy. In your book, “Majority Minority,” you write about Mauritius, and Trinidad and Tobago. These two nations are 8,000 miles apart, but both of them are former British colonies and subject to the colonial history that you talked about earlier. In each of them, the largest two ethnic groups are Creole descendants of enslaved Africans, and descendants of indentured laborers from India. Both of these nations are now democracies, but they have ongoing political and cultural conflict between these large ethnic groups. What can we learn from these examples about the challenges of building multiracial democracy?
Justin Gest: Well, I think they presage the problems that are already starting to happen in the United States and also elsewhere in a number of other multiethnic, multiracial democracies.
Effectively, what we see—again, this is going to be a long story short—in places like Mauritius, and Trinidad and Tobago, is the racialization of their political parties. In Mauritius you have parties that are drawn along overtly ethnic and religious lines. There is a Indian-origin Hindu party, an Indian-origin Muslim party, and then there’s this sort of Creole French Catholic party there. And they’re quite overt about that.
Similarly, in Trinidad and Tobago, you have the UNC, which is a pretty overtly Indian-origin party, and the PNM, which was the historical party of people of Afro-Creole backgrounds, Afro-Trinidadian backgrounds.
And that is about the worst-case scenario for a country like the United States or Canada, or Australia, or the United Kingdom, because suddenly our partisan and political disputes, which ought to be on matters of attitudes and policy preferences, become linked into these political mega identities that are connected to identity that is phenotypical in nature, and unchangeable.
And it allows our politics to devolve down to disputes that are ultimately irresolvable because they’re based on racial, ethnic, and religious rivalries. And that is going to impeded our ability to self-govern. We’re not going to be able to find compromises because the cycles of argumentation continue eternally thereafter. And we’re already at risk of seeing this happen in the United States.
And I’ve written a lot about the appeal of Donald Trump and the republican party of late among Latinos in the United States, which on the bright side could stave off these worries about the racialization of American politics. In fact, actually, I was quite excited to see that some Latinos were interested in the republican party because it suggested prima facie that we weren’t racializing our partisanship.
However, a deeper dive look under the hood of this phenomenon, we already can see that predominantly the Latinos who find the republican party appealing, particularly under Donald Trump’s leadership, often self-identify as white themselves. And how this is happening is because you can be both a white person and someone who identifies as a Hispanic, because in the United States we think of being Hispanic as an ethnicity and white as a race.
So, that’s actually kind of depressing compared to the possibility that Latinos of different racial backgrounds could be finding the republican party of interest. So, it’s very much a “watch this space.” But I think that Trinidad and Tobago, and Mauritius, are cautionary tales for a multiethnic democracy like the United States and others.
Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about America’s history of being an immigrant society, as you talked about. In your book “Majority Minority,” you write about six different island communities where no single ethnic group constitutes a majority of the population. In a lot of these places, as we’ve already discussed, ethnic divisions have become major dividing lines.
And the two places in the book where you say populations have redefined themselves under more inclusive identities—in Manhattan and Hawaii—are both American. That’s not to say that there’s, you know, no conflict whatsoever and they’ve completed transcended ethnic tensions. But, you know, there’s maybe some reason for hope there and some reason to think that there’s an American tradition of building broader identities.
When you say that New Yorkers and Hawaiians have constructed more inclusive identities, what do you mean by that?
Justin Gest: Yeah. Well, first off, it’s important to emphasize that these are reconstituted identities relative to the disputes that those two venues were having in the late 19th century. The story of New York and immigration begins really with the Irish potato famine between 1845 and 1854. And if one looks at the status of Irish people in the United States today—similarly with Italians, Greeks, Jews, Slavs, Germans, et cetera—we have seen their integration into America as a major success story. So, that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t have divisions today otherwise. It just doesn’t have to do with Irish people very much.
Similarly, in Hawaii, Hawaii was its own sovereign kingdom up until a forced coup d’etat led by the United States in 1893, in which it displaced the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani in the 1890s, and placed her under house arrest and then tried her with treason. And at that time in Hawaiian history, Hawaii was coping with the arrival and settlement and integration of a variety of foreigners, primarily from East Asia—Japan, China, the Philippines, et cetera—that were admitted by the monarchy itself before the Americans even got involved.
And when we take a look at the place of those Asian minority group in Hawaiian society thereafter, it’s also a huge success story. What we’ve seen is similarly with the Irish; we’ve seen intermarriage, we’ve seen the amalgamation of a Hawaiian and a New York identity that ignores previously important racial lines, lines that were once salient, like Catholicism or Irishness, or being Japanese or Chinese. Those have largely dissolved.
And that’s because we have seen the reconstitution of what it means to be a Hawaiian and what it means to be a New Yorker—and an American, in a broader sense. And so, those two places have come a long way as it relates to those groups.
But we still have a lot of work to do in the United States because many other minority groups, immigrant-origin groups, have come to the United States since, in just the last half-century. And we’re still figuring out ways to reconstitute ourselves and re-understand what it means to be an American in a way that is both inclusive of both these immigrant-origin minorities, of African-American minorities, of indigenous groups like Hawaiians; all at the same time while maintaining a sense of exclusivity, something that makes America different and distinct from other parts of the world.
So, the real challenge before us, as the United State, as it’s kind of unfurled from [Hawaiian] and New York today, is really to be both inclusive and simultaneously exclusive.
Alex Lovit: You know, I want to ask about how the idea of an inclusive identity relates to pluralism. You know, so the act that New Yorker identity or Hawaiian identity didn’t become sort of racially polarized doesn’t mean that, you know, the Hawaiians still dance the hula, New Yorkers still celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. How do you define what is a healthy acceptance of cultural pluralism versus what’s kind of an unhealthy, exclusive identity that prevents different groups from kind of having united identity?
Justin Gest: Well, pluralism comes down to the recognition and acceptance of different viewpoints and different backgrounds, and ultimately ends in cooperation, in mutual flourishing of different groups from different backgrounds. So, I think that’s ultimately what we’re looking for.
And you know, as it relates to the identity politics, what we’re also ultimately seeking out is the dissolution of those boundaries as it relates to membership. There’s certainly nothing wrong with sustaining a sense of culture and heritage in these times and in diverse societies, but what becomes worrisome is when we begin to patrol the lines, the boundaries, of national identity in a way that invokes those cultural differences.
And what we’ve seen in Hawaii, and in New York ultimately, is that something like St. Patrick’s Day, to your example, has become something that everyone celebrates. It has become something far more than just Irish. It’s become something American. I mean, certainly we celebrate it a lot more than the Irish do, back in Ireland.
And you know, hula, one of the most important rituals in Hawaiian heritage, has become something that’s been adopted by people of mixed—what Hawaiians call “hapa” backgrounds, even those who don’t necessarily even have Native Hawaiian roots. Hula has transcended the boundaries of Kanaka Hawaiian identity.
Alex Lovit: So you’re talking about how New York and Hawaii dealt with increasing diversity by redefining a more inclusive identity. And overall, one way the U.S. has historically managed anxiety about diversity was to redefine whiteness such that it embraced a wider range of people and allowed Americans to basically ignore this majority-minority milestone. We just redefined the majority in a way that allowed the country to not even perceive it.
As a strategy that’s limited because not everyone can be redefined as white, and we need a broader conception of identity that is not just limited to white Americans.
Justin Gest: But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, you know? We’re already witnessing the expansiveness of whiteness to include Latinos. We already talked about this as it relates to those who favor the republican party. But also to expand whiteness to include people who are half-white. We have a lot more mixed marriages and mixed children being born in the United States.
So, it hasn’t stopped people from trying to expand whiteness yet again, but yes, that is the tendency.
Alex Lovit: Well, I guess the question I’m trying to ask is, it seems like that can only take you so far. That’s not ultimately going to build an American identity that embraces black folks and Asian folks—you know, people form all over the world. Do you have any fear that, you know, we’re going to solve this problem the way we’ve solved it in the past, by sort of expanding white identity and doubling down on white identity?
Justin Gest: In many ways I think we are already precisely in the ways that I just described. You know, the other thing that we have done in the past, beyond broadening the boundaries of whiteness, was to also shut down our borders. When we reached that majority-minority milestone, that was also a period of closure in American politics where we ethnicized and racialized our immigration admissions rules and otherwise basically cut back how many people we were welcoming into the country, for any reason.
So, yeah, I think we’re already there. We’re repeating a lot of the same errors that we made 100 years ago or so. And you know, in the end, what we ultimately need to be doing is not thinking about how we can expand whiteness; we need to think about how we can broaden our understanding of America. And I think that calls for less ethno-religious understandings of who we are, and more civic understandings of the nation. Civic understandings that rely on an American creed that links everyone together. And I think that we have those resources in American society. There are certain things about the United States that we can all connect to that transcend the boundaries of race and ethnicity and religion.
Alex Lovit: Let’s talk a little bit about the census. In the U.S. we’ve been gathering data on the racial make-up of our population since way back in the first census of 1790. What’s the point of the government doing this? Why should we collect data on race and ethnicity?
Justin Gest: I think that we absolutely should be collecting data on race and ethnicity, and I think that we should be doing it in a much better way. The U.S. census is one of the greatest impediments to formulating a more consolidated identity among Americans today. It has replicated the lies inherent in the construction of racial identities in the United States.
It has perpetuated the myth that whiteness today is anything like whiteness was when it was innovated as a trope, as a justification for the subjugation of people. And it really is fundamentally unhelpful to the mission of social cohesion in the United States, because it makes people think that we can be split up into these monolithic labels that completely ignore the staggering diversity of the United States.
The only way you have the racialization of political parties, like we see in Trinidad and Tobago, in Mauritius, in the United States today, is when you have institutions perpetuating the myth that the different groups are somehow solidaristic, are somehow similar; when in fact, they are incredibly, remarkably diverse.
The idea that a white person who, you know, has roots in Lebanon, has really that much in common with a quote-unquote “white” person with roots in Scotland, is kind of laughable. And the idea that Asians, you know, from a place like Afghanistan or Sri Lanka should be grouped with Asians from Japan or Korea, these are all just broad categories that do not reflect real solidarities and the real diversity of the country.
And it altogether ignores the fact that the vast—not just the vast majority—pretty much every American has some immigrant roots today. And that one fact is so much more unifying than anything else out there. And we ignore it by basically perpetuating the myth that we are subject to these completely constructed labels.
And so, the census is a massive impediment to us as a society recognizing and reaching this epiphany that there’s so much that unifies us, but also that we are hopelessly diverse in the best possible way, and that the labels that we use to categorize each other are effectively bankrupt.
But if you read the U.S. Census reports, they ignore that diversity in so many different ways, by insufficiently reflecting it. And the problem with that, of course, is that what the census does sets the tone for data collection and box-checking to the level of employers and customer satisfaction surveys, and university admissions, et cetera, such that we all end up parroting exactly what the census has otherwise institutionalized.
Alex Lovit: Maybe this is an example of the census promoting division. In 2015, the Census Bureau put out a report that projected that the United States would become a majority-minority nation in 2044. A wave of media coverage followed that report. And several studies, as you’ve written about, have found that informing white Americans about this demographic trend, that this majority-minority milestone approaches, tends to make them identify less with the nation and more with their race. They express increased fear and anger towards people of color.
You’re obviously not scared of the phrase “majority minority.” You’ve titled the book that. And as you pointed out, white Americans—using older categories of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants—we passed the majority-minority milestone many years ago. Do you have any concern that talking about demographic change can exaggerate negative responses to it?
Justin Gest: I think that talking about it in a way that’s inaccurate can definitely exacerbate things. But I think that we must. And actually, my research shows that when we do talk about it with accuracy, people change their minds about immigration. When we expose them to information that reveals our diversity but also reveals the fact that we are aging as a society and that we need more immigrants in order to sustain the nation and its population and our market power, people change their minds.
So, I actually think that we should be having frank conversations about demographic change. I think the problem is that we’ve allowed fear-mongers to exploit people’s prejudices and exploit people’s hunches, rather than actually illuminating the real truth behind the social trends that we’re experiencing.
And the most fundamental truth I think that we should be spreading as far and wide as we can is exactly what you said, which comes from “Majority Minority”: We have reached this majority-minority milestone a long time ago. The United States is already a majority-minority country by the standards of the 19th century.
If whiteness is limited to Anglo or Northern European Protestants even, those white people have become a minority in the United States probably around the 1920s, about 100 years ago. And so, why are we flipping out about this next majority-minority milestone? Well, it’s because we’ve completely redefined what whiteness is, to the detriment of our society. It has only led to the subjugation of other groups who are deemed “not white enough.” And worse, it’s created a sense that our country cannot survive its continued diversification when, in fact, over the last 100 years since the original majority-minority milestone, we’ve done just fine.
Alex Lovit: So very recently, at the end of March, the Office of Management and Budget announced the first update to the federal government’s racial categorizations in 27 years. They’re adding a new Middle Eastern and North African category to federal forums, and also allowing Americans to select multiple identities for the first time.
I believe you’re in favor of these changes. Can you explain why this is an improvement?
Justin Gest: This is the most marginal of improvements one can imagine. So, as I wrote in an essay for the Atlantic last year, in spring of 2023, the U.S. Census absolutely ought to create a Middle Eastern and North African category. But they should go so much more beyond that. I mean, that is the start of something they should continue, which is to simply let people select their national origins.
Why aren’t we just giving people a gigantic checklist of countries that they originate from and select all that apply? Why do we insist on creating these categories that ultimately divide us? This is yet another label, and it’s linking people from as diverse a place as Oman and Morocco an Iran up to Turkey, you know? These are very different places. And it is remarkable to me that the Census Bureau just fears change that much.
And maybe it’s a little bit out of the preciousness of statisticians: “Oh God, if we change our labels, then we can’t have, like, you know, longitudinal trends over time. We can’t look back into historical change in trends.” But that’s just not true. You know, if we were to allow people to just pick as many national origins that apply, not only will it reveal the immense diversity of the country and the fact that there is no majority, and there never really has been—at least for the last 100 years, in terms of origins; it will also allow us to continue to categorize people when convenient.
Because certain countries are going to be inside of those regions. And if you really want to know who has Asian origins in that gigantic region that we call Asia, you can still do that. There’s nothing stopping you from reinforcing those labels.
But why? Why are we creating labels that only serve to divide us and that falsely create socially constructed distinctions that really have no social bearing? I think that the Census should get inspired by the creation of this new Middle Eastern identity and just throw the whole thing out and start over, which would be the best thing they could possibly do.
Alex Lovit: So, you’re saying this is a fairly minimal change, but it is a real change that will affect the federal government’s demographic statistics going forward.
Do you think that will impact the results of future census or other federal research into the U.S. population? Should Americans expect to see shifts in the results of the 2030 census?
Justin Gest: Well, absolutely. So, if you consider people who are Middle Eastern or North African non-white, you know, we will reach the majority-minority milestone faster because majority-minority leans on the silly distinction of whiteness and non-whiteness. It divides American into this simplicity binary of whiteness.
And so, creating a Middle Eastern or North African category will shave off several percentage points from the people who otherwise normally self-identify as white. And that means anyone from the Middle East, Jews, people from North Africa—you know, this is not a huge share of the U.S. population, but it will dwindle the share of people who self-identify as simply white, with no ethnicity, into something smaller.
Now, because the U.S. Census separates race from ethnicity, you will basically see anyone who selects Middle Eastern and North African as their ethnic group; they will still self-identify, on the separate questionnaire of race, as white. But that is precisely what Latinos do. But when the Census created this upcoming demographic milestone of a majority-minority country, they factored in people who ethnically identify as Hispanics, independently of their white race, into the share of people who are non-white. And so, if they continue to do that, then the non-white share will only grow faster because people who select Middle Eastern ethnicity will be non-white too, under the same logic.
Alex Lovit: So, how do you expect the Census Bureau or just the media in general to report these results? I mean, what should people have in mind as they’re seeing results from forthcoming censuses?
Justin Gest: That these boundaries are something that demographers and economists have created in a really non-descript office in Suitland, Maryland. That’s where these things come from. And so, we can choose to abide by these outdated labels, or we can redefine them and redefine our country in the process. And we can recognize that we are so much more than labels and that we cannot be divided into simplistic binaries and ethnic categories.
Alex Lovit: So, if the increasingly diverse United States is going to build a long-term foundation of inclusive democracy, it’s going to be necessary for our citizens to build an inclusive identity with respect for cultural and religious pluralism, as we’ve just discussed.
You’ve looked at the research about different practices of promoting pluralism and acceptance, including perspective-taking and other methods of decreasing psychological bias, contact theory, and various methods of promoting intercultural exchange and understanding, and strengthening institutions that bring people together for shared purposes.
What does the research tell us about what works to promote pluralistic prodemocracy attitudes?
Justin Gest: Well, they all seem to work. You know, my review of a lot of other really brilliant social science out there says that we can change minds in a variety of different ways. We can change minds by changing incentives. We can change minds by changing perspectives—institutional incentives and personal perspectives. Or we can change minds by introducing people to each other. And they all seem to work.
Institutional changes are hard. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth pursuing, but it’s challenging to change political institution. So, it’s a long-shot bet with a huge upside.
Perspective-taking has shown a lot of promise, and perspective-sharing shows a lot of promise, but it’s very resource-intensive to facilitate lots of conversations out there.
I put a lot of my chips in the contact bucket. If we can facilitate greater amounts of contact between Americans of different backgrounds, both ethnic or racial or religious backgrounds, but also people of different partisan backgrounds and ideological backgrounds, I think we begin to humanize the other in a way that facilitates compromise in the future. Because it builds relationships across those boundaries, those vexing social boundaries. And it reveals, I think, new forms of solidarity and commonality.
And also, the wonderful thing about contact is that it doesn’t require a Constitutional amendment to facilitate. It doesn’t require an act of Congress to facilitate. It’s something that we can all do at the level of our local families and organizations, and churches, and workplaces. We can create policies and processes and procedures that facilitate the introduction of each other to others, who they may otherwise not know.
By mixing teams and creating opportunities to break bread, share a meal with each other, to work with a diverse group of colleagues, all these are ways that we can facilitate the changes that we want to see.
Alex Lovit: Well, I think that’s a hopeful note to end on and a call for institutions and organizations of all types to engage in this work and to try to increase contact across what otherwise might be the divisions in our society. Justin Gest, thank you for joining me on The Context.
Justin Gest: My pleasure.
Alex Lovit: The context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the foundation.
Other people who worked to bring this show to you include our research assistant, Isabel Pergande; our episode producer George [Greg], Junior; and our director of communications, Melinda Gilmore. If you have questions or thoughts about this show, reach out at thecontext@kettering.org. Visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to subscribe to our newsletter.
If you like the show, it really does help us reach new ears if you’d be willing to leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcast or whatever platform you get your podcasts from. Or cut out the algorithm middleman and just tell a friend who you think might be interested. Thanks, and we’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.
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