The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [123]
6. Zoltan Hajnal et al., “Immigration and the Political Transformation of White America: How Local Immigrant Context Shapes White Policy Views and Partisanship,” University of California, San Diego Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, International Migration Conference, March 12, 2010.
Research by Hajnal et al. confirms that the rise of the Hispanic population has led to a significant conservative shift of white Americans in locales with high concentrations of Hispanics:
[W]hite Americans who live in proximity to large numbers of Latinos tend to have more conservative views. All else equal, whites living in zip codes with larger Latino populations are less likely to want the federal government to reduce income inequality, less likely to seek increased spending on health care for the poor, less likely to want to do more to cover the uninsured, and almost significantly less likely … to view poverty as a serious problem. The implication of this set of findings is an important one. Latino context is now shaping core policy concerns of the American public. And it is doing so in a way that mirrors the negative reactions that have often faced the African American community in the past. In contexts where Latinos are prominent (and perhaps threatening), whites tend to be eager to reduce services and expenditures that benefit the bottom rungs of society. (pp. 21–22)
7. Congressional Budget Office, “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments,” December 2007.
8. Between 1900 and 1960, every president except Californian Herbert Hoover hailed from the Snowbelt: William McKinley (Ohio), Theodore Roosevelt (New York), William Howard Taft (Ohio), Woodrow Wilson (New Jersey), Warren Harding (Ohio), Calvin Coolidge (Massachusetts), Herbert Hoover (California), Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York), Harry Truman (Missouri), Dwight D. Eisenhower (Kansas), and John F. Kennedy (Massachusetts). After 1960, the only president from outside the Sunbelt was Gerald Ford of Michigan, who took office upon Richard Nixon’s resignation rather than by winning a national election. Ford went down to defeat in 1976, to Sunbelt candidate Jimmy Carter. The elected presidents between 1964 and 2004 include Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas), Jimmy Carter (Georgia), Ronald Reagan (California), George H.W. Bush (Texas), Bill Clinton (Arkansas), and George W. Bush (Texas).
9. The phenomenon at play is a result of America’s two-party system, in which the winning candidate (with 50 percent plus one vote) gets 100 percent of the power. The losing side gets no representation. This is different from a proportional representation system, as in much of Europe, where the share of national seats depends on the share of national votes. In our example, a national pro-government party would get 54 percent of the seats no matter where in the country the voters live.
10. The following data are from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “US Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation, Diverse and Dynamic,” February 2008.
11. For an overview of the increased sorting of American households by “education, income, race, and way of life,” see Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Paul Jargowsky and Todd Swanstrom, “Economic Integration: Why It Matters and How Cities Can Get More of It,” Chicago: CEOs for Cities, City Vitals Series.
12. The following data are from Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
13. Professor Larry Bartels of Princeton University has found similar views in his own recent analysis of survey data. He identifies several characteristics of public attitudes, including strong support for equal opportunity and a belief that “some people don’t get a chance to get a good education,” and for the view that “rich