Financial Times - September 20, 2003
Out of the Melting Pot and into the New Sunbelt By Christopher Caldwell
The special election for governor of California was put on hold by a federal court this week, but not before American commentators had a chance to use it as an advertisement for the American way of assimilation.
Like him or not, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the race's star candidate, is an immigrant who struck it rich even before he "made it in pictures". California's Hispanic voters are giving him a warmer welcome than they usually accord Republicans. What's more, Mr Schwarzenegger has - despite scepticism from some quarters - been making tolerance a watchword of his campaign, welcoming gays, single mothers and other groups often kept at the periphery of public life.
So a mixed message emerged: California's politics, its budget and its mood may be a shambles - but its melting pot had never worked better.
But demographers sifting the results of the 2000 decennial census are increasingly challenging this complacency. It is true that by many statistical measures - the dramatic rise in mixed-race marriages, for example - the US is enjoying a golden age of inter-ethnic harmony. But the new America of globalisation, high immigration, sexual licence and multiculturalism is not to everyone's liking. In the past decade a net 843,000 white people left metropolitan Los Angeles for other states, and roughly a quarter of a million left San Francisco.
California's cities were not the only places in the country to see such an exodus in the 1990s (metropolitan New York lost 680,000 white people) but they were the hardest hit. For the first time since California was settled in the 19th century, more native-born Americans left the state than arrived there. Massive emigration from the US's premier multi-ethnic state raises the question of whether the country is really comfortable with its melting pot or whether its more multi-ethnic areas owe their stability to the tendency of the native-born to flee them in droves.
The social scientist who has studied these migrations most closely is probably William Frey, of the Population Studies Centre at the University of Michigan. In a number of influential articles, Professor Frey has argued that America is more accurately described as having melting pots than as being one. Immigration, of the massive, society-transforming kind, affects only a handful of states. Roughly two-thirds of the increase in America's Hispanic and Asian populations over the 1990s came in California, New York, Texas and
Florida, with Illinois and New Jersey accounting for much of the remainder. Prof Frey counts these states among America's "multiple melting pots".
In contrast to previous decades, native-born Americans are making different assessments from foreigners about where the new Land of Opportunity is to be found. They are migrating not to high-immigration states but to a cluster of low-immigration ones in the south and west, prominent among them Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, that Prof Frey calls the New Sunbelt.
While the relocation of suburbanites from the Melting Pot states to the New Sunbelt ones bears some superficial resemblance to the "white flight" from city to suburb in the 1950s and 1960s, it cannot be dismissed as merely race-based or reactionary.
We know this because native-born black people and immigrants long-established in the US are making precisely the same migration. After about a century in which black people moved out of the south to other regions, the trend has been reversed. In the 1990s, every region in the country suffered a net loss of black people to the south, particularly to the magnet city of Atlanta.
Once one looks at American migrations this way, a lot of present day US politics comes into a funny kind of focus. For all Americans' crowing about how the country's peoples are coming together, we can just as easily point to ways in which its regions are being prised apart. Prof Frey warns against any too-simple partisan identification but the New Sunbelt bears a strong resemblance to "Red America". Republicans are its party, just as Democrats are the party of the Melting Pot states. They battle with increasing stridency over a third America that Prof Frey calls "the Heartland" - the slow-growth belt of mostly white or traditionally bi-racial states that has been bypassed by the migratory tumult of recent decades.
There are limits, however, to how fully the New Sunbelt will be able to secede from the Melting Pot. When middle-class families move to these more demographically traditional places, they do not necessarily leave their lifestyle expectations behind. They immediately feel the need for busboys, janitors, hedge-trimmers and all sorts of employees that they do not want their own children to become.
As Victor Davis Hanson puts it in Mexifornia, his new book on immigration*: "There is something deeply ingrained now in the American character saying that Josh should not spend June and July in a chicken- packing plant" (to save up for his college education).
In fact, there are already signs that the New Sunbelt is merely going through the California migration schedule a few decades late. Las Vegas, the archetypal New Sunbelt metropolis, was flooded with upper-middle-class American-born college graduates in the 1990s. Its college-educated population more than doubled in the course of the decade. But at the same time, the number of its residents living in poverty nearly doubled too, an indication that its quest for low-wage labour will be unable to avoid the class polarisation that marks Melting Pot states.
Whereas suburban migrants of yore sought a "new life", today's settlers in the New Sunbelt seek to protect an old one - a world of stable, familial, picket-fenced "face-to-face" communities. This world has proved incompatible with the social dislocation and governmental tinkering by which a churning, low-wage labour pool is accommodated. In this sense, America's New Sunbelt residents are seeking protection against globalist modernity as surely as Camembert makers in France or foxhunters in England. The difference is that, whereas Europeans protest, Americans simply move away.
That, after all, is how we got here in the first place.
* Encounter Books, 2003
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard