Our Damaged Democracy by Joseph A. Califano

Author:Joseph A. Califano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

THE IMMIGRATION AND RURAL/URBAN DIVIDES

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The changing demography of America is provoking racial and ethnic tension and nasty political skirmishes between Democrats and Republicans about immigration policy.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the migration of Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews prompted the passage of a national origins quota act.17 From the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s, that law largely limited immigration to the English and northern Europeans. The 1965 immigration reform act opened the nation to Central and South Americans, Asians, Africans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Middle Easterners.18 The racial, ethnic, and religious composition of immigrants flipped. In 1965, 85 percent of immigrants were white; 15 percent were nonwhite. Today those percentages are reversed.19 Over this period, the share of Central and South American immigrants climbed from 9 percent to 52 percent; of South and East Asian immigrants, from 5 percent to 26 percent; and of sub-Saharan immigrants from less than 1 percent to 4 percent.20 Immigrants rose from 6 percent to 15 percent of the US population.21

This change in demographics has hatched a partisan racial divide. Recent immigrants are overwhelmingly black- and brown-skinned, Indian and Asian, and often of the Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu religion. In the 2016 campaign, Democrats embraced a pro-immigration approach and sympathized with the discrimination claims of these new Americans. This positioning fit nicely into the party’s emphasis on identity politics and its overwhelming share of minority voters. Donald Trump played on the fears of white middle- and lower-middle-class Americans that the influx of immigrants threatened their jobs and pay. He tapped into the feeling of many Republicans that, like minorities, white Christians were being discriminated against. Seventy-three percent of Republicans, but only 29 percent of Democrats, identify themselves as white and Christian.22

The racial, ethnic, and religious makeup of rural and urban residents, along with their cultural and economic differences, contribute to a political divide reminiscent of the north/south split during the last half of the nineteenth century.

A 2017 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 70 percent of white rural residents believe their values differ from those of urban residents. Most white rural Americans feel they are living in a separate and unequal society with different moral standards and fewer attractive opportunities. Rural Americans consider good jobs more difficult to find. They are likelier than city dwellers to believe that they will have to encourage their children to leave the area to find economic opportunity.23 Perhaps this is why what so many white rural citizens once saw as the American Dream they now experience as a nightmare. Rural sections of the country are 78 percent white; urban areas are only 40 percent white.24

The economic and cultural disparity between rural and urban America helps explain the vast political party difference. In 2016, Trump won 62 percent of the vote in rural areas, almost twice Hillary Clinton’s 34 percent. In urban centers Clinton captured 60 percent of the vote, compared with Trump’s 35 percent.25 Clinton won 88 of the nation’s 100 most populous counties by a margin of thirteen million votes.

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