Will raises some thoughtful objections to Ross’s column on the case for an enforcement first approach to immigration reform.

I’m not sure if I buy Ross’s argument that (much more modest) liberalizing reform becomes more realistic if enforcement under current law is improved. To me this sounds like an argument that if the state is able to make its coercion more effective, and the side-effects of its injustice less visible, Americans will feel more comfortable about opening things up a bit. Maybe it works like that, but I’m skeptical. Would a better executed Jim Crow have sped the way toward racial equality?

I should know better than to wade into counterfactual waters, but let’s pursue this thought experiment a bit further. Derrick Bell, best known as one of the leading figures in critical race theory, has argued that Brown v. Board might have represented a serious misstep. The following is drawn from a 2004 report by Lisa Trei of Stanford University’s news service:

“From the standpoint of education, we would have been better served had the court in Brown rejected the petitioners’ arguments to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson,” Bell said, referring to the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that enforced a “separate but equal” standard for blacks and whites. While acknowledging the deep injustices done to black children in segregated schools, Bell argued the court should have determined to enforce the generally ignored “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine.

That is, Bell is suggesting that a better executed Jim Crow, or rather a better executed law that accepts the principle of a racial segregation that is compatible with equality, might have sped the way toward racial equality. His basic argument is that the highest priority should have been a high standard of education rather than the end of formal racial segregation. But the end of formal racial segregation served an urgent strategic purpose for the United States in the context of the cold war; the end of deep inequalities in the provision of high-quality public education did not, at least in the judgment of the U.S. leadership of the time.

In 1976, Bell said he came to the same conclusion in an article titled Serving Two Masters, which stated, “Our clients’ aims for better schooling for their children no longer meshed with integrationist ideals. Civil rights lawyers were misguided in requiring racial balance of each school’s student population as the measure of compliance and the guarantee of effective schooling. In short, while the rhetoric of integration promised much, court orders to ensure that black youngsters received the education they needed to progress would have achieved much more.”

Bell is a staunch left-wing egalitarian, yet his characterization of the politics surrounding Brown v. Board strikes me as fairly sound.

In White Flight, Princeton historian Kevin Kruze argues that the modern American right can’t be understood outside of the context of the movement to preserve racial segregation in the postwar South. He notes that segregationists, many of them working and lower middle class whites who had experienced rapid gains in income and status thanks to New Deal programs that made many of them property-owners for the first time, embraced sweeping school choice programs as an alternative to racial integration of the public schools. This is one reason why many on the left continue to distrust the voucher movement.

One wonders, however, if voucherizing public education might have actually proved a more effective way to achieve racial integration over the long term. Consider that the actual consequence of desegregation efforts was, per Kruze’s title, white flight from municipalities like Atlanta to outlying suburbs, which made integration efforts difficult if not impossible due to physical distance and the creation of new municipal boundaries that restricted the flow of tax dollars from one region to another. Universal statewide school choice programs would have facilitated redistribution, and they’d also allow many different types of school to flourish, including progressive integrated schools that could, over time, prove themselves in the marketplace.

Of course, this could be entirely wrong. But it does seem as though the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s devised a “solution” that might have — inadvertently from their perspective — sharply reduced racial inequality and tension over time.

And it’s worth noting that school integration is very different from immigration. I tend to think that Ross is right to suggest that many voters are offended by the unfairness of an immigration regime that allows some people to “cut ahead of the line.” Yes, there is considerable anxiety about the raw numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, but my impression is that the perception of disorder really is the driving force.