America’s map
shifting with migrants
By 2025, ‘assimilation’ will be key
issue, demographer says
What will America look like in 2025? A
recent analysis by a leading demographer draws this map: The
United States won’t be one single racial and ethnic
melting pot but 10. Moreover, U.S Census data suggests the
South will become more black, the Midwest will stay about
how it is now, and the Pacific Northwest will become more
white.
INSTEAD OF A SINGLE national melting pot,
Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New
Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas will represent
individual areas of strong diversity, according to Bill
Frey, senior demographer at the Center for Social and
Demographic Analysis, a think tank at State University of
New York in Albany.
Those states, he added, will provide
economic growth with a younger, more educated population as
their backbone.
In contrast, nearly 20 states — most in
the Midwest — will experience slower economic growth and a
largely white population, argued Frey, whose work includes
heading a team that prepared a five-year, federally funded
study of U.S. migration data.
And the South will experience an increase
in the domestic migration of U.S.-born blacks, while the
Pacific Northwest will see an increase in domestic migration
of U.S.-born whites.
“The 90s is really a period when black
migration is reconsolidating itself to the South,” Frey
said, citing U.S. Census data.
As for the Northwest, Frey cited a “very
strong California impact” that has seen residents there
move north. Some of those are Hispanic immigrants, he added,
but “that migration flow tends to be largely white.”
‘MULTIPLE MELTING POTS’
Frey said the significance of the data is
that it dispels what he says is the myth of a single melting
pot. “The country is moving into a new direction, what I
call multiple melting pot regions and which are going to
take on very different dynamics” than what happens in
America’s heartland, Frey predicted.
In those melting pots, he added, rising
immigrant populations will mean changes in voting patterns
and politics.
“A single melting pot doesn’t
recognize” these trends, he said. “We need to recognize
what’s happening and deal with it in each of these
areas.”
Among cities, New York is expected to
attract the most new immigrants, with Los Angeles a close
second. San Francisco is third, followed by Miami, Chicago,
Washington, D.C., Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Diego and
Boston.
Frey has also studied historical migration
patterns and even hosts a Web site www.frey-demographer.org
that allows users to plot trends over the last decade.
ASSIMILATION AS KEY
Frey and another researcher speaking last
November at a conference on the future of U.S. cities
contended that whether immigrants assimilate into American
culture will be much more important than the traditional
rural/urban divide.
“The new demographic divide will not be
between who lives in the cities and who lives in the suburbs
or who lives in the rural areas and who lives in the urban
areas,” Frey told the conference. “It will be the
numbers of people of a particular race and how they
assimilate into the general population.”
Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New
America Foundation and a scholar at Pepperdine
University’s Institute for Public Policy, argued it’s
time for Americans to rid themselves of the idea of
multiculturalism and push instead for assimilation because
interracial marriage, community accommodation and
acceptance, mixed with the lessening of ethnic segregation,
will change immigrants into Americans.
“What will it mean when two-thirds of
Hispanic kids don’t speak Spanish?” Rodriguez asked,
adding that while he doesn’t advocate English-only laws,
most second-generation immigrants already speak English.
“What will it mean when politicians,
instead of appealing to the alienation of an ethnic group,
plays the politics of aspiration and makes an appeal to the
hope felt by the immigrant population to make a better
life?” he added.
CALIFORNIA VS. TEXAS, FLORIDA
After noting that the largest immigrant
population in 2025 will be Hispanic, Rodriguez drew a sharp
contrast between how California has handled the assimilation
issue and how Texas and Florida have done so.
When Republican Pete Wilson was
California’s governor, Rodriguez said, Wilson reversed
assimilation with his anti-illegal immigrant measure,
Proposition 187. “Hispanics who were voting the
conservative line stopped in their tracks and sided with the
politics of grievance as Wilson leveraged the racial
wedge,” he said.
In contrast, Republican Govs. George W.
Bush of Texas and Jeb Bush of Florida have handled things
differently, Rodriguez said.
At the same time Jeb Bush got rid of
affirmative action policies in Florida he boosted access to
colleges by accepting the top 20 percent of students and
making it easier to get college loans, Rodriguez said.
In Texas, he said, George W. Bush, a GOP
presidential candidate, helped the Mexican border city of El
Paso, Texas, sell itself as a Latino city with an economy
fueled with good jobs made possible by the North American
Free Trade Agreement.
“Three-fourths of El Paso’s population
is Hispanic and they advertise as a city with strong
families, low crime and a working population,” Rodriguez
said. “Instead of having low-wage garment-industry jobs,
El Paso has pushed to have a NAFTA economy and is currently
building a university on its border so its young people
won’t have to think about going to Austin for college.”
Miguel Llanos and The Associated
Press
Related Links:
Database
of U.S. migration statistics
MSNBC's
Race in America reports
