Opinion by Farah Stockman on January 4, 2025.

It matters that U.S. sanction policies were overseen by a man who grew up watching his parents send money through Western Union to relatives in Nigeria.

That man, the deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, was born in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. He understood how catastrophic it could be when a community gets cut off from its financial lifeline in the United States. He brought that knowledge to the table when he recommended measures that would mitigate the unintended consequences of sanctions on innocent people abroad.

That’s worth remembering today as Americans bid farewell to the most diverse administration in U.S. history — and as we watch a new administration that pledges to dismantle diversity initiatives take power.

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Biden Promised and Delivered

Joe Biden took office promising to create an administration that looked like America, and he delivered. Half of his Cabinet appointments are people of color, according to Inclusive America, a nonprofit organization that publishes a government diversity scorecard. His Cabinet included the first Black defense secretary (Lloyd Austin), the first female Treasury secretary (Janet Yellen), the first Native American Cabinet member (Deb Haaland, interior secretary) and the first Senate-confirmed openly gay Cabinet member (Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary).

Even more striking is the number of senior officials who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy? Arati Prabhakar, who was born in India. The acting labor secretary, Julie Su, is the child of a woman who arrived in the United States on a cargo ship from China because she couldn’t afford a passenger ticket. At a time of rising ethnonationalism around the world, the Biden administration modeled just the opposite.

Too often, critics have labeled this commitment to diversity as politically correct window dressing or a source of government bloat. But when diversity is done right, it can be a crucial strategy for bolstering American power. The United States attracts the world’s best and brightest because they can rise here and eventually help run the place. Newcomers to China, Russia and Iran can’t expect the same thing. That makes diversity in the ranks of the federal government a big comparative advantage.

Trump Taps Foreign-Born for Key Roles

Donald Trump seems to understand this. Despite his mantra of “America First,” he has tapped a host of foreign-born associates to play key roles, including the South African-born Elon Musk, who has been asked to suggest cuts to the federal budget, and the Indian-born Sriram Krishnan, who will become an adviser on artificial intelligence. Both favor expanding the H-1B visa program, which they say helps attract talented people from around the world. But their views have sparked a backlash from hard-liners who don’t want to see poorly paid new arrivals taking American jobs, let alone running the place.

“Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India,” Laura Loomer, a Trump acolyte, wrote in a series of social media posts that broke open a contentious debate in Trumpland over whether the tech moguls Trump has gotten in bed with are betraying his base.

Biden, who was elected on the heels of huge racial justice protests, bet big on diversity, equity and inclusion. From his very first day in office, he issued a series of executive orders that led to changes in how the federal government hires staff members, procures supplies and awards grants. It was a grand experiment that directed federal agencies to search for disparities and address them. But progressives were never satisfied. Despite his diverse Cabinet, they complained that Biden’s inner circle was still white.

At the same time, some Republicans pushed back fiercely against DEI. To them, the only thing worse than big government is big woke government. As a senator, JD Vance cosponsored a bill that would stop federal money from flowing to companies and universities that practice DEI. Trump has suggested that white people should be compensated for “discrimination” suffered under Biden. As allegations of reverse discrimination, junk science and grift piled up, Democrats fell silent. By 2024, neither Biden nor Kamala Harris campaigned on DEI. It was Trump who brought it up — when he pledged to eliminate it.

But before we throw the baby out with that bathwater, let’s remind ourselves why diversity matters in government.

There are plenty of examples like Adeyemo, the Treasury official. Sameera Fazili, a former deputy director of the National Economic Council, had relatives in Indian-held Kashmir. She understood how dependent developing nations were on Ukrainian grain and how people would blame the United States and not Russia if they started going hungry. That’s why she volunteered to lead the administration’s global food security response for the first few months of the war, she said.

It’s no accident that, as interior secretary, Haaland found a way to auction off leases of public land for conservation and restoration, not just for drilling. As a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe in New Mexico, she was raised in her grandfather’s cornfields and learned a deep respect for the land.

And Biden’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shalanda Young — the first Black woman to hold the job — is credited with staving off government shutdowns by leaning on relationships she forged with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Her upbringing in rural Louisiana gave her an understanding of how to develop a rapport with Southern conservatives.

Biden’s Picks Have Well Served America

The Biden administration’s decision to draw on talent from different walks of life, rather than the well-connected few, has served America well.

The incoming Trump administration is taking shape, stocked with combatants in the bitter offensive against DEI — championing choices whose main qualifications for running a major government agency or representing America abroad seem to be willingness to lie about an election, Trump family ties and looking good on television.

At least some immigrants, along with Musk and Krishnan, will have a place in the federal government under Trump. Even the person picked to run the civil rights division at the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon — who is expected to wage war on wokeness — is a Sikh born in India.

Even MAGA needs immigrants, it seems.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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