Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in the Solicitor General’s office in the late eighties and early nineties, has become known in recent years for her belief in the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” In 2017, Wax said, in an interview, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half.” The dean of Penn Law School, Theodore Ruger, said that Wax had spoken “disparagingly and inaccurately” and had been barred from teaching core-curriculum classes.

Last month, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in Washington, D.C., Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She went on, “Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” In response to her remarks, Ruger issued a statement, saying that Wax’s views “are repugnant to the core values and institutional practices” of both the law school and the university.

After the National Conservatism Conference, I wrote to Wax to request an interview. I wanted to understand the basis of her thinking and find out how she views President Trump’s leadership. When we first spoke, on the phone, Wax explained that she was wary of the media, which she claimed has sometimes misquoted her and has frequently taken her comments out of context. Therefore, she was going to record the formal interview. She also said that she planned to occasionally adopt the role of interrogator and ask me questions, such as why some countries were “shithole countries.”

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Wax expounded on her beliefs that people of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men. She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color.

Wax, a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious American universities, is not a fringe actor. Her arguments about “cultural-distance nationalism” have been published by the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy. At the National Conservatism Conference, she spoke alongside Tucker Carlson, Senator Josh Hawley, and President Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton. In some respects, her proposed immigration policies are not as extreme as those of the Trump Administration. This week, President Trump proposed a new regulation that would allow the government to indefinitely hold immigrant families, and threatened to revoke birthright citizenship, a fundamental American right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

At the conference, it seemed like you were embracing what you define as “cultural-distance nationalism.” Are you?

Well, I think that there is something to be said for it, and I think that we should at least be talking about it. And, if you read the rest of my talk, from start to finish, and you read it carefully, then you will see me saying that. I am saying this is a neglected dimension that gets no attention, no discussion. We just assume in a very, I think, unexamined and optimistic way that it doesn’t matter at all. And I think it might matter. I was basically speaking to my fellow-conservatives. I was speaking bluntly, and with elision. I was saying, “Well, if you do discuss it or you even advocate for it, people are going to say, ‘Oh, you are saying we are better off with more whites than non-whites. That is the equivalent of the position you are taking, and that is going to spook conservatives.’ ” Not knowing that there would be this limousine-liberal meltdown, I probably should have spelled out in more explicit terms that the media and people on the left are going to interpret your neutral criterion as a racial one, or at least they will be upset that it has racial effects, and you will be tarred with that. That is essentially the gist of what I was saying to them, and, at the time, everybody understood that I was saying, “Here is why you guys are not going to go down that path.” I think it is going to be very hard for you to go down that path.

So you are saying that conservatives can’t pursue immigration policies with racial aspects to them in 2019?

No, racial effects, not racial aspects. Or potential racial effects. Actually, it could play out with no racial effects, because if people from Europe have no interest in coming, it’s not like we would exclude people from the rest of the world. We would just very much limit the numbers who come. We’d take it low and slow. And we would have a much better chance to incorporate and assimilate those people to whatever system we have left.

Actually, many people wrote me to say we should have a moratorium like we had from 1924 to 1964, because that would do an even better job. [The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, set extremely low quotas for immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and blocked immigration from Asia.] Well, I haven’t advocated for that. But, frankly, the racial impacts of taking a more cultural-similarity-factor view—that is up for grabs in a way. You can see that by looking at Australia and Canada. If you think the Australia and Canada points system and restrictions don’t have a differential racial impact, you are kidding yourself. They do. But nobody calls them white supremacist. Well, a few people do. [Laughs.]

You followed up by saying, “And as long as these taboos exist, and respectable mainstream conservatives defer to them, it will be hard—maybe impossible—to change course. Our country’s future trajectory, however, will not be determined by political correctness but by reality and facts on whether cultural differences really matter, whether they are stubborn, and whether they have consequences. And, by the time that that becomes clear and the dynamic plays out, it may be too late to turn the ship. And it may well be too late already: our legacy population is demoralized, beleaguered, and disorganized.” My reading of this was that you are not only embracing cultural-distance nationalism but saying it may, in fact, be necessary to save the country. Is that correct?

Well that’s a little bit of an overheated way of saying it. It might be one tool in the toolbox for preserving a lot of what I think is desirable and what I think is responsible for our signal success. You have to understand that I come to this whole question of immigration with an unanswered question in my mind, something I got interested in years ago, and I have tried to get people to answer it. And the question is: Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? We also have Japan, which is a wonder, I think, in many ways, a very admirable country. Perhaps Taiwan. And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world? And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.