A “transgender Indian migrant” who lacks even a “work visa” got elected to the “Scottish Parliament” and now “wants locals to pay reparations to Palestinians,” notes law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds.
“Q Manivannan was elected as a Green Party MSP to represent Edinburgh and Lothians East last week. The self-described ‘queer Tamil immigrant’ made headlines after it emerged they were in the country on a student visa, and had been fundraising for a graduate visa. The migrant, along with fellow trans Green MSP Iris Duane, endorsed a ‘manifesto’ by Art Workers for Palestine Scotland before the election. The trans Indian was allowed to run for office based on a recent rule change that lets foreigners on short-term visas run for office.”
In the United States, progressive legislators have proposed paying trillions of dollars in reparations to blacks — even black immigrants — to eliminate the racial wealth gap. But the racial wealth gap is not caused, for the most part, by discrimination or slavery, and countries that adopted race-based reparations damaged their economies without permanently eliminating racial wealth gaps:
White people’s wealth today is not based on slavery or redlining (nor is America’s wealth based on slavery), so reparations can’t be justified on that basis. Most wealth isn’t inherited. And “most of the wealth gap between blacks and whites is not due to inheritance” — indeed, the black-white wealth gap among people who had no inheritance is about three-quarters as big as it is among people who did have an inheritance. (See Thompson & Suarez, Exploring the Racial Wealth Gap Using the Survey of Consumer Finances (2015)).
Even less of it is inherited from three generations or more earlier, because people who inherit wealth tend to spend it or lose it. “According to Time Magazine, 90 percent of all rich families, from the Astors to the Ziffs, lose their fortune by the third generation,” noted Ester Bloom in The Atlantic. So white people’s wealth does not originate in slavery or the Jim Crow era.
Racism is not the reason why blacks make less money than whites. Non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia commonly earn more than whites do (although their kids often make less than whites), showing that racism is not a barrier to success. Asian Americans have the highest average net worth and highest average income, despite harsh discrimination against Chinese and Japanese Americans in the past. There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for poor Americans of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.
Past discrimination did not cause present-day racial disparities in wealth or income. Asians once were subjected to massive discrimination, yet today, they have higher incomes than whites. As the New York Post notes, “several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states [including California]. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II,” which forced many interned Japanese people to sell their businesses at fire-sale prices, ruining them. “But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.”
Reparations may not fix the racial “wealth gap” anyway. Many people just spend windfalls they receive from the government, rather than saving or investing the money. When Uganda seized the businesses of Indian immigrants without compensation and gave them to blacks as reparations for colonialism, the businesses did not last for long afterwards, and Uganda’s economy collapsed. When Uganda let Indians come back to Uganda and set up businesses again 14 years later, Indians once again ended up dominating Uganda’s economy, even though they had to start from scratch.
Conversely, minorities targeted by racist attacks often rebuild their wealth by tightening their belts and reducing consumption to bring their wealth back up to past levels. So racism doesn’t necessarily reduce the wealth of their descendants. For example, blacks rebuilt Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” after a white mob burned it down. And medieval and north African Jews often rebuilt European ghettos that were destroyed by antisemitic mobs. As a web site notes,
Thanks to recent scholarship and pop culture depictions of the massacre in Greenwood, more and more Americans are coming to know the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed Black Wall Street. But the common narrative — that the massacre destroyed the neighborhood and it never recovered — is incorrect. In fact, Greenwood’s resilient residents rebuilt their community almost immediately after the massacre — in defiance of hastily-enacted racist zoning codes — giving rise to the popular use of the neighborhood’s moniker of Black Wall Street after, not before, the massacre.
For more than 50 years, Malaysia has systematically discriminated against its large ethnic Chinese minority, and in favor of its Malay ethnic majority, giving Malays affirmative-action preferences in jobs, education, and government contracts. Yet, Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese continue to out-earn its ethnic Malays, and continue to have more wealth per capita. Why should Malays work and study as hard as the Chinese when affirmative action lets them coast?
