05/10/2007
Michael Barone had an article in the WSJ the other day about the demographic shift away from "hip cities" like San Francisco and Chicago to places like Idaho. (Steve Sailer blogged about it here.) Barone wrote
In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly.It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South.[
The Realignment of America
| The native-born are leaving “hip” cities for the heartland. By Michael Barone, May 8, 2007]
Barone has an amusing Red State/Blue State graphic, but this topic was covered in Alien Nation in 1995, before Red States and Blue States were invented, so the reference, instead was to "White Flight." Peter Brimelow wrote, (in 1995)
And Americans are flinching–they are polarizing geographically. "We are now seeing white flight from whole states and regions," says William H. Frey, a demographer and research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. He calls it "the flight from diversity." The most dramatic case: California–which is being abandoned by lower-income whites in particular, exactly the group that would appear to be most vulnerable to competition from unskilled immigrants. Much of this white flight is flocking to the intermountain West, which seems likely to emerge as part of America’s white heartland.Alien Nation,Chapter 3, P. 69 of the paperback edition
See also the chart on pp 70-71, which I may reproduce later.
Later in the in the same chapter, Peter Brimelow wrote
The demographer and economist B. Meredith Burke reports asking an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Refugee Affairs what size of population he considered too much for California.
"Oh, 100 million or so," he replied airily. "Look," he instructed me, "eventually it will get unpleasant enough so that everyone will move out and the situation will resolve itself. That’s the free market solution."[Counterpoint: An environmental impact statement for immigration Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1993]
Maybe this is a free market solution. But it’s not a free market problem–any more than it would be if the government decided to stop enforcing the law … or allow an invasion.[Alien Nation, P. 72]
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