DEI is Worse Than You Think - Marc Andreessen

Nobody wants to talk about, but I've started to talk about it, it's the intersection of DEI and immigration that has really warped our perceptions on high-skilled immigration over the last 50 years. And you see this by looking at the foreign enrollment rates of the top universities, which went from two or three or four percent 50 years ago to whatever 27 or 30 percent.

Seventy percent or whatever it is. There's been this massive transformation in who gets educated, and then there's been this massive transformation of who gets admitted through affirmative action and DEI. This goes straight to the political divide in the country. If you're a family where I grew up, and you've got a smart kid, and you think you're going to get them into a top university, you are fooling yourself. There's no chance. The top universities have an admissions program that is DEI for white people, which is the donors and all the fake sports.

Then you've got DEI for the other groups, and you've got this immigration influx. As a consequence, it is nearly impossible for somebody from a Midwestern, rural, or southern background to get into the US system. This doesn't just affect white people; it also affects Jewish people. It actually affects African-Americans in a very interesting way. Universities and corporate employers literally import Africans so they don't have to hire African-Americans, because they still count as black. There was a story in the New York Times 20 years ago about Harvard, quoting Henry Louis Gates and Lonnie Guinier at Harvard Law School, observing that African-Americans were not benefiting from affirmative action because Harvard had figured out they could import Nigerians. Nigerians are great, very smart, very productive. All other things being equal, you'd want as many of them in your country, but is that really why we're doing these set-aside programs? There's this fundamental question of what level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have cut out of the loop for the last 50 years. How long can we tell everybody in the Midwest and the South, sorry, because of historical oppression, your kids are so...

This is what I've come to appreciate from growing up in one place and now being in the other. If you're in the center of the country, you're just like, 'Wow, these people really hate me. They really hate my kids. They're really out to get me.' That's a very toxic dynamic, and it's a very bad thing for that to continue.