No court case in recent history has propelled Asian Americans into the political sphere like Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and no issue has galvanized them like affirmative action. Asian Americans have taken center stage in the latest battle over affirmative action, yet their voices have been muted in favor of narratives that paint them as victims of affirmative action who ardently oppose the policy. Bridging theory and research on immigration, stereotypes, and boundaries, I provide a holistic portrait of SFFA v. Harvard and focus on Asian Americans' role in it. Immigration has remade Asian Americans from “unassimilable to exceptional,” and wedged them between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. Presumed competent and morally deserving, Asian Americans subscribe to the stereotype, and wield it to their advantage. Competence, moral worth, and respectability politics, however, are no safeguards against racism and xenophobia. As fears of the coronavirus arrested the United States, so too has the rise in anti-Asian hate .

The “color line” has long served as a metaphor for the starkness of black/white relations in the United States. Yet post-1965 increases in U.S. immigration have brought millions whose ethnoracial status seems neither black nor white, boosting ethnoracial diversity and potentially changing the color line. After reviewing past and current conceptualizations of America's racial divide(s), we ask what recent trends in intermarriage and multiracial identification – both indicators of ethnoracial boundary dissolution – reveal about ethnoracial color lines in today's immigrant America. We note that rises in intermarriage and multiracial identification have emerged more strongly among Asians and Latinos than blacks and in more diverse metropolitan areas. Moreover, these tendencies are larger than would be expected based solely on shifts in the relative sizes of ethnoracial groups, suggesting that immigrationgenerated diversity is associated with cultural change that is dissolving ethnoracial barriers – but more so for immigrant groups than blacks.