University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax has criticized Asian immigration to the United States, warning of the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.”

“If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they’re sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now,” said Wax, who is Jewish. 

Wax also said Asians in the U.S. should be more ‘thankful’. “Why should someone who emigrated from India, has taken advantage of everything our society has to offer, who is leading the good life, who’s part of the elite — why shouldn’t that person be objectively grateful? And, you know, recognize overtly all the wonderful things about our country?” she said.

She made the comments during a December 20 interview on journalist Glenn Loury’s web show, Bloggingheads.tv. The dean of the Law School, Theodore Rugers, has criticized her comments as “thoroughly anti-intellectual and racist” for suggesting that the United States is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

“Like all racist generalizations, Wax’s recent comments inflict harm by perpetuating stereotypes and placing differential burdens on Asian students, faculty, and staff to carry the weight of this vitriol and bias,” Rugers wrote in a statement. However, he did not initiate any disciplinary action against Amy Wax.

Loury recently published an email he received from a listener who was critical of Wax’s comments. He also allowed Wax to respond to the listener. 

In her response, Wax wrote:

“In the case of Asians in the U.S., the overwhelming majority vote Democratic. In my opinion, the Democratic Party is a pernicious influence and force in our country today. It advocates for “wokeness,” demands equal outcomes despite clear individual and group differences in talent, ability, and drive, mindlessly valorizes blacks (the group most responsible for anti-Asian violence) regardless of behavior or self-inflicted wounds, sneers at traditional family forms, undermines and disparages the advantages of personal responsibility, hard work, and accountability, and attacks the meritocracy.  

I confess I find Asian support for these policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here.  Perhaps they (and especially their distaff element) are just mesmerized by the feel-good cult of “diversity.”  I don’t know the answer.  But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

Wax’s comments generated a lot of reactions on social media, with some pointing out that she has also praised the “superiority of European culture.”

In 2019, students at Penn Law called for Wax’s termination after she was caught on camera saying the United States “will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,” the Pennsylvania Capitol-Star reported.

Such racist views on Indian and other Asian immigrants are also shared by some on the other end of the American ideological spectrum. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Melinda Byerley, an advocate of ‘diversity in tech’ and likely Democrat supporter, had gone on an anti-immgrant rant on Twitter last November, calling immigrants like Vinod Khosla who succeeded in Silicon Valley as ‘parasites’ and asking them to “just take their money and go (leave the US). stop trying to turn US into the caste system/apartheid system you came from.” 

Byerley was upset that some of these rich tech immigrants were advocates of less taxes. She later ‘apologized’.