 I'll begin my discussion of affirmative action by defining it. Affirmative action is that form of discrimination that discriminates against people because there are members of a more successful racial or ethnic group. Since the end of white rule in South Africa 15 years ago, affirmative action has been the only form of institutionalized discrimination in the world and is pervasive. I wrote a monograph in which I analyzed affirmative action on four continents, ending with a holocaust which was the most ruthless and systematic implementation of affirmative action ever undertaken. But it was because of my study of affirmative action in the United States, in my book The Affirmative Action hopes that Professor Hoppe ordered me with an invitation to address this distinguished society and that will be the subject of my talk today. The information on my book and monograph have been distributed. Before I start, I'll explain that I use the term Hispanic to describe Latin American origin. I will begin with universities since that is the context in which affirmative action has been the most debated. The first and foremost fact that must be understood about affirmative action is that neither in the United States nor anywhere else is in compensation for a disadvantaged economic or social background. In fact, American universities give preference and admission to blacks in the highest 10% of socioeconomic status over whites in the lowest 10%. They must do that because the children of black doctors, lawyers and corporate executives do worse in school and on academic tests than the children of white and oriental manual workers. I will provide here one example out of many of my book. It is from a study done by the Law School Admission Council which is a fanatical supporter of affirmative action. The study analyzed the records of 70% of all students enrolled in American law schools. They were divided into four socioeconomic categories. In the highest category, and I quote, both mothers and fathers of students in this group had graduate or professional training and held professional jobs. In the lowest category, I quote again, those mothers and fathers of students in this group tend to be blue collar workers, many of us in our high school education and family income is below average. On the Law School Admission Test, the average score of whites in the lowest socioeconomic category, that is the children of manual workers, many of whose parents did not graduate from high school, was more than one full standard deviation higher than the average score of blacks in the highest socioeconomic category, that is blacks both of whose parents had degrees beyond a bachelor's degree. The average score of Hispanics in the highest socioeconomic category was also considerably lower than the average score of whites in the lowest socioeconomic category, and that is after four years of college. The undergraduate grade average of blacks and Hispanics in the highest socioeconomic category was also much lower than the average undergraduate grade average of whites in the lowest socioeconomic category. Even Asian American law students in the highest socioeconomic category had average undergraduate grade point average of lower than whites in the lowest socioeconomic category. I will add that study after study has found that black and Hispanic parents value academic achievement more highly than white parents do and give their children more help in school than white parents do. Black students who do well in school are more popular with their peers than white students who do well. Black students do more homework than white students, have a higher regard for their academic ability than white students, and have higher expectations of future academic success. Affirmative action and admission to college's graduate and professional schools has been widely discussed, although few people realize how egregious it is. Much less widely known is the much more pernicious practice of affirmative graduation. My book I present a great deal of evidence for this practice. For example, the Young Adult Literacy Survey consists in a series of tests given by the United States government to a broad range of Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 on frozen literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy. Standard among black college graduates, only 18 percent are able to summarize the content of a newspaper article. Only 11 percent of black college graduates are able to understand a bus schedule. And only 14 percent of black college graduates are able to calculate the cost, change new, and a 10 percent tip on a simple lunch. Affirmative graduation is also illustrated by state qualifying tests for teachers. The passing requirements on these tests are set at a ludicrously low level. The most that is required is a 10th grade and often only an 8th grade ability at reading and mathematics, even though some of these teachers are teaching the 11th and 12th grades. In my book I give many examples of the reasonably easy questions on these tests. Albert Shanker, who for many years was the president of the American Federation of Teachers, described the passing requirements as ridiculously low, serving only to screen out illiterates. Yet in every state in which these tests have been given, the large majority of black and Hispanic teachers fail, even though all have bachelor's degrees and many have master's degrees. Consequently, fudging devices are necessary. For example, Texas Institute of requirement that in order to retain their positions, all public school teachers had to pass a test on which a typical problem was picking from five choices the answer to the question. If it takes 10 hours to go from point A to B at 50 miles per hour, how long would it take at 40 miles per hour? The teacher had to pick the answer from five choices that were all there, but only 23% of black teachers and 34% of Hispanic teachers, all of whom had bachelor's degrees and many of whom had master's degrees passed. So Texas adopted an even easier test, which had a pass rate of 97% for all test takers, although 8,000 teachers did not show up to take even the easier test, presumably because they knew they couldn't pass. I will point out that in these tests, a much higher proportion of white than Asian teachers pass. It's one of the main points in my book that I can only touch on here. Opponents of affirmative action constantly focus on Asians as its victims. In fact, in most respects Asians are beneficiaries of affirmative action. Its only victims are whites. In the 1996 referendum in California to end affirmative action, 61% of Asians voted against standing affirmative action. The fact that for decades, most blacks and Hispanics who have received bachelor's and master's degrees have been functionally irriterate illustrates another crucially important fact. That is, there is no catch-up. Qualifications for admission and employment accurately predict subsequent performance in universities and in the workforce. A striking example is performance in medical school where the granting of degrees to unqualified students should be regarded as criminal. Since the 1960s, the national average undergraduate record and scores on the medical college admission test of blacks and Hispanics who have been accepted by medical school has been much, much lower than the average score of whites who have been rejected. This admission policy has had a catastrophic effect on the quality of American medical education and no American medical school is immune from this disaster. Harvard Medical School is universally regarded as being by far the best American medical school. It admits less than five percent of its applicants, and most of its applicants are extremely good. In the 1960s, shortly after Harvard Medical School began admitting large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, it stopped giving letter grades in its courses. Instead, it began giving only two grades, pass and incompletes. A student who got an incomplete could take reexaminations in that course until he passed, and the dean made sure those reexaminations became easier and easier. When a student finally passed a reexamination, the incomplete was erased from his record and a pass entered. Thus, every student who enters Harvard Medical School is guaranteed to graduate with the same record. Also, shortly after Harvard Medical School began full-scale affirmative action admissions, the dean stopped reporting to the faculty the scores of their students on the national qualifying test for doctors. A student is about to retake these tests five times if he fails, and Harvard Medical School has given medical degrees to students who have failed the national qualifying test for doctors on all five retakes. Many of you are now thinking, well, since medical school graduates must take a national qualified test in order to practice medicine, at least those tests protect us against incompetence becoming doctors. But even that isn't true. In order for most blacks and Hispanics to pass the national qualifying test for doctors, the passing mark has been made so long that 99.7 percent of whites who take it pass. And there are people out there with medical degrees from Harvard Medical School who have failed on all five retakes, a test of basic medical knowledge that 99.7 percent of whites pass. While we're discussing Harvard professional schools, I'll give just one example from Harvard Law School at a time when the Law School admission test was graded on a 200 to 800 scale. Harvard Law School rejected Kenneth Crowe, who had a perfect 800 on the Law School admission test, had graduated from MIT with honors, had a PhD in mathematics from Harvard, and was the co-author of the Crowe Roads Theorem, which is a mainstay of modern algebraic theory and computer science. In the same year as Harvard Law School rejected Kenneth Crowe, it admitted several blacks and Hispanics with scores on the Law School admission test in the 400s that is on a 200 to 800 scale. Law School graduates, like medical school graduates, must pass an examination, a bar examination, in order to practice law. And as with national medical qualifying tests, in order for most blacks and Hispanics to pass the bar exam, the passing mark has been said so low that in many states nearly every white who takes it passes. The facts I presented illustrate another basic point. Supporters of affirmative action constantly insist that they're opposed to quotas. But if racial and ethnic discrimination is going to be practiced by far the fairest and most efficient way is through explicit quotas. Their explicit quotas were used then when a state set qualifying tests for its teachers. It could announce beforehand that, for instance, 15% of those who pass must be black, 15% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 65% white. It could then ask reasonably difficult questions and set the passing mark for each group so that the desired proportion pass. That would ensure that at least the white teachers who pass it are qualified. Similarly, every year the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association should announce beforehand how many of each group are going to pass the national qualifying test for doctors and lawyers and set the passing mark accordingly for each group. Then the public would at least know that those whites who pass these tests are competent to practice medicine and law. This leads to another important point. The citizens of several states have voted in referenda to ban affirmative action. I show in my book that these bans have had a calamitous effect on the public universities in those states. Previously, these universities used a quota system, although they always denied it and hid it. They used scores on standardized tests, SAT and ACT and high school grades, and they set different cutoffs for each group. That ensured that at least their white and Asian students were qualified. For example, the University of Michigan in Annabelle used a point system to determine undergraduate admission. It assigned a certain number of points for each criteria to be used. I must explain why the people here are non-American. The SATs, Galactic Aftertests, used to consist of two tests, one of verbal reasoning, one of mathematical reasoning, marked on a 200-800 scale. They were extremely accurate predictors of performance in universities and subsequently an important. The University of Michigan undergraduate gave 12 points for a perfect SAT score, that is 800 a math, 800 in verbal, and 20 points for being black, Hispanic, or American Indian, which meant having a black Latin American, Latin American ancestor could have blonde hair and blue eyes in the local slaves. You still got 20 points for having a Latin American ancestor or American Indian ancestor. No consideration was given to socioeconomic background. The child of a white single mother who worked as a waitress or the child of non-English speaking Bulgarian immigrants got 12 points for a perfect SAT score. A multi-millionaire got 20 points for having a black Latin American or American Indian ancestor. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that this open, honest means of practicing racial discrimination violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The University of Michigan then announced it would attain the same racial and ethnic proportions by other means. I'll give one example of these means. It's from California, where a referendum prohibited the state institutions were considering race. The nursing programs at California's public community colleges provide 70% of California's practical nurses. Since these colleges can no longer practice open racial discrimination and mission, they have made everyone who graduates from high school with a C average, and let me tell you, you can graduate from a high school in the United States with a C average and be totally illiterate. They've made everyone who graduates from high school with a C average eligible. They then pick among eligible students by a lottery or by who applied first. The result is that many of the students in the nursing programs at California's public community colleges can no longer be taught how to solve a single variable algebraic problem. By that I mean if x equals 100 cubic centimeters of a medication, how many cubic centimeters does 2x equal? Many of the students in the nursing program at California's public community colleges are no longer capable of being taught how to solve that problem. So if you live in a state in which you can vote on a referendum to bear the affirmative action, I urge you to vote against it because what will be substituted will be worse. So far I've concentrated on academic affirmative action, but in my book I discussed the disastrous consequences that affirmative action has had on all areas of American life. One example is provided by a systematic study that was done by John Lott of the effective affirmative action hiring and promotion on police departments. Lott used comprehensive surveys that the United States Department of Justice conducted on all American law enforcement agencies with a hundred or more officers. And using these surveys on control for each city's population, demographic makeup, average wage and unemployment, he found that every 1% increase in the proportion of a police force that is black increases the rate of property crime by 4% and the rate of violent crime by 5%. I will repeat that. Every 1% increase in the proportion of a police force that is black increases the rate of property crime by 4% and a violent crime by 5%. To be more specific, in the 189 cities and towns for which the numbers that Lott used were available, a decrease in the number of white male police officers by 6% increased the number of murders by 1,145 and an increase in the number of black male officers by 5% increased the number of rapes by 300. Lott also found that the increase in crime from hiring black police officers is greatest in those communities with the most blacks. Hiring additional Hispanics and American Indians also increases crime rates, but not by as much as hiring additional blacks. The huge negative effect of hiring more minorities, especially black policemen, comes not only from the incompetence of the additional policemen, but also because in order to enroll more minority policemen, intelligence requirements are lowered for all policemen. For example, in order to pass significant numbers of blacks and Hispanics, Ronald Reagan's Justice Department ordered Nassau County in New York State to remove all cognitive tests from its police examinations, except for a reading comprehension test which required that applicants had to score only as well as the bottom 1% of current officers. That makes it impossible to screen out incompetence in general, including white incompetence. Again, as always, by far the best way to practice racial discrimination is through explicit quotas. In words, the number of each racial group that's inside is stated at the beginning of the hiring process. Then legitimate qualifications could be used in different cutoffs set for each group. The same is true of criteria for promotion. White police officers perform much better than non-white police officers. On all sensible criteria, tests of reasoning ability, arrest and conviction rates, etc. Consequently, these factors are being abandoned. For example, Chicago spent over $5 million to have consultants devise unbiased tests for promotion. But since minorities had pulled yet all of them, Chicago made seniority the main factor for promoting police officers. Obviously, such a criterion removes all incentives from lower-ranking officers. But what about diversity? In 1978, the Supreme Court established diversity as the only legitimate excuse for racial discrimination because, and I quote, the attainment of a diverse student body creates an atmosphere of speculation, experiment and creation so essential to the quality of higher education. However, shortly afterwards, the diversity argument was mind-wrisky, applied to all occupations, even though for most accountants, tax lawyers, anesthesiologists, welders, carpenters, firemen, not even the most ingenious diversity advocate who come up with any diversity, any benefits the diversity of opinion conferred. Moreover, all evidence is that increasing the number of blacks and Hispanics is not had in the slightest the diversity of artwork at universities. And in fact, the argument of racial discrimination in university admissions is necessary because diversity of opinion is essential to the quality of higher education is terribly ironic, since American universities have less diversity of opinion than any other institution in American life. I'd present a lot of evidence for this, the total lack of conservatives, libertarians, Republicans of any sort in the faculties of American universities, and I don't have to tell the people here that anyway. The final question is who are the beneficiaries of these blatantly absurd and pernicious practices? By the early 1960s outside of the South, blacks had been receiving preference in university admissions and civil service hiring and promotion for a long time. In the early year 1960s, universities began to recruit Hispanics and federal agencies and private businesses that interacted with the government, the US government, had to demonstrate non-discrimination by reporting the number of Hispanics as well as blacks they employed. Affirmative action was still being justified completely as compensation for slavery and past discrimination by against blacks. But by 1965, white Latin American multimillionaires, whose ancestors owned slaves, were receiving massive preferences in universities, public and private business. I knew some even then. In 1900, the Hispanic population of the United States was only 125,000. That is one sixth of 1% of the population. In 1900, there were more people in the United States of Swiss average origin than Latin American origin. The 1924 immigration law favored Latin Americans over Europeans by exempting them from national origin quotas. As a result, the Hispanic population of the United States increased to 6 million in 1960. With the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965, the number of non-blacks eligible for affirmative action exploded. Between 1965, when the American black population was less than 20 million, and 2000, 35 million immigrants entered the United States. Of 26 million, along with their descendants, seemingly for all time, are eligible for affirmative action. That was up to 2000. Since then, the number of immigrants who were eligible for affirmative action has increased exponentially. That does not include the descendants of Latin Americans who entered the United States preferentially over Europeans before 1965, where the huge numbers of Latin Americans who consented the United States illegally in their descendants are eligible for affirmative action. By 1990, less than half of Americans eligible for affirmative action were black, and the black proportion keeps deciding, declining precipitously. This decline in the proportion of blacks among those who are eligible for affirmative action has occurred despite heavy black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa. As I point out in my book, most of the blacks who benefit from affirmative action are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who arrived there after 1965. For decades, nearly all recipients of affirmative action belong to the only groups of people in American history who have received massive preferences from the time of their arrival.