Part Two of my answer: Jews are white, Asians are not, and while any overclass is resented, a racially distinctive overclass is resented more than one that barely looks any different from the resenters.

Anti-Semites know this; that's why they put out drawings of the hunch-backed, hook-nosed cartoon Jew when they want to inflame anti-Jewish feeling. It makes the Jew plainly a different race.

Part Three of my answer: even under the current covert quotas, Asian Americans are enrolled at elite colleges in numbers far above their five percent share of the U.S. population.

Yes, they're being held down: on a strictly meritocratic basis their numbers would be much higher yet, because of the arithmetic of those distribution tails. Still, strictly measured by demographic proportionality, they're high.
So yes, we were importing an overclass a hundred years ago. Elite universities dealt with the issue by fudging and chicanery—just as they are dealing with this repeat performance.

There are some key differences, though. Jews are white, which makes things easier to fudge.

Also, the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is more verbal than visuo-spatial, leading to that dominance in the shaping of opinion.
Asian Americans, by contrast, are much more visible as a group. And their high IQ is more visuo-spatial than verbal, giving us more engineers and scientists, fewer writers, lawyers, comedians, movie and newspaper moguls.

But in both cases, non-Asian gentiles get squeezed. We un-squeeze blacks and Hispanics with Affirmative Action, but that just squeezes white gentiles even more.
Under our current state ideology, the orthodox approach to that hovers somewhere between "Who cares?" and "Serve them right!"

Whether that ideology can be sustained going forward through the 21st century, is an interesting question.

Second point main point raised by readers: any merit-based immigration system imports an overclass.

I agree. Consider for example India. The mean IQ of that country is 82. The mean IQ of Indians in the U.S.A., on the other hand, is 106—higher than the mean for white gentile Americans.

So there's an overclass we've imported — from a low-IQ population.

The same applies to Africa. The mean IQ in black Africa is 70, which is very low. Assuming a normal distribution with mean 70 and standard deviation 15, Microsoft Excel tells me that only 0.0032 percent of the population is higher than 130 IQ.

That's a teeny-tiny percent; but there are an awful lot of black Africans: 1.2 billion is the latest number I've seen. Point zero zero three two percent of 1.2 billion is 38,000. Every one of those 38,000 very-smart Africans is applying for a U.S. student visa.
Caribbean blacks are, for complicated reasons, somewhat smarter than black Africans. Add them into the mix and we're importing a small black overclass.
Is this something we should be bothered about? We-e-ell — there are contrary factors to consider.

Under the present regime of chain migration, for example, all those smart Indians and Africans can bring in their way-less-smart siblings, brides, parents, and even cousins. You could argue that long-term that evens out the mix.

There's also regression to the mean. The offspring of these high-IQ immigrants will regress towards their population mean — although not all the way to it, or else Natural Selection wouldn't work. Given the likelihood of assortative mating, in fact — smart immigrants marrying other smart people — regression all the way back to the population mean is highly improbable, even after many generations.

So, no, this is not a great issue. It is an issue, though — an issue that lurks behind all the happy talk about a merit-based system of immigration.

The first time America imported an overclass, we did so accidentally. When that Great Wave of Ashkenazi Jews came in after 1881, we had only the vaguest ideas about population differentials in intelligence and personality. Psychometry as a quantitative science was just getting started.

Now we understand much more, and can make better decisions. If we import a new overclass today, we'll be doing it deliberately. We know enough to not do it.

And any overclass we import now will be nonwhite. That follows just from the balance of races in the world being much different than it was 100 years ago.

If you're a nonwhite who doesn't like white people, you are fine with that. If you're a white person living in one of the globalist-bubble districts — big coastal cities, college towns — you may think it's no big deal, we can all get along.

The rest of us are shaking our heads.