Immigrants Don’t Just Change Voting Patterns

Of the many questions at stake in this fall’s election, one of the less obvious is this: Will the United States remain a country where someone like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris—a person of color with immigrant parents—is likely to be born? The answer depends, in part, on whether America’s universities retain their global appeal. If Donald Trump wins reelection, they may not.

Harris and Obama exist because, after World War II, American universities grew more attractive than their British counterparts to many young strivers from the decolonizing world. As the s reporter Ellen Barry explained in , the current Democratic vice-presidential nominee’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, yearned to be a scientist. But in the British-influenced educational system prevalent in newly independent India, that wasn’t easy for a woman. At New Delhi’s Lady Irwin College, established by the wife of