07/11/2023
From National Bureau of Economic Research (via Marginal Revolution):
White Flight from Asian Immigration: Evidence from California Public Schools
Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai & Tammy TsengWORKING PAPER 31434
DOI 10.3386/w31434
ISSUE DATE July 2023Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.
It’s obviously a challenging methodological problem to work out, but the researchers conclude that for every one Asian kid who moves into an upscale California public school district, 1.5 white kids leave.
The impact of the Asian influx on white upper middle class families strikes me as one of the most under-discussed topics of the time. We simply don’t have much of a conceptual vocabulary for talking about it without stepping on cancellable land mines.
As I’ve mentioned before, white parents are more fatalistic about having to pay for private education in a diverse world, whereas Chinese immigrant parents feel that, while maybe they haven’t paying taxes for as long as the white parents, their children deserve a topnotch taxpayer-subsidized education.
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