Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm away this week, but my colleague Toby Young is filling in for me, and he's interviewed the American academic Amy Wax.

Hope you enjoy it.

Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is no stranger to controversy.

Two years ago, she co-authored an op-ed piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which blamed a lot of America's social

problems on the decline of bourgeois values. It praised America's traditional Anglo-Protestant culture

and contained the line, all cultures are not equal. That led to her being denounced in an open

letter signed by 33 of her colleagues at Penn Law,

and partly as a result, she was relieved of some of her teaching duties.

Last month, at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in Washington,

Wax made some remarks during a panel discussion about immigration

that led to her being described as

quote, an outright advocate for white supremacy by a reporter for Vox. As a result of her remarks,

or the way they've been reported at least, a petition calling for her to be fired from pen law

has gathered over 50,000 signatures. In addition, the law school's dean,

Ted Ruger, has sent an email to students and faculty condemning her comments. At best, the reported

remarks espoused a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy, he wrote. At worst,

they are racist.

I spoke to Professor Wax to find out more about the argument she was making about American

immigration policy, whether it's fair to characterize it as racist, and why, if she didn't

want her argument to be characterized in that way, she used some of the inflammatory

language she did.

...