Good fences make good neighbors.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_r oom/2011/07/01/denvir_westchester_segreg ation/index.html

“Tony Westchester locales like Scarsdale and Bedford have long been bastions of limousine liberalism, home to Ralph Lauren, Glenn Close, Martha Stewart, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and many others. Super-rich “entrepreneurs” like Donald Trump live here too, and it’s a haven for Wall Street bankers — from Jay Gould in the late 19th century to hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt today.

Meanwhile, working-class black and Latino residents remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of municipalities, most of which hug the Bronx border.”
…
“When I was a kid I remember Eisenhower sending federal troops down to Arkansas,” Levy said. “That’s where we are in Westchester County.”

1. How can that be sustainable if via immigration you had a majority who were opposed to that?

“Interestingly you can’t even calculate a real ratio for British Muslims to the general public, not one British Muslim surveyed would admit to homosexuality being morally acceptable.”

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2 010/12/admissions-of-illiberalism/

2. There’s also the issue of historical rivalries being imported into new places.

“We are disappointed that in its public statements, the EUMC downplays its own conclusions that the new anti-Semitic outbreak is connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict and that incidents are being primarily perpetrated by Muslim immigrant youth, and concerned by the report’s narrow approach to the connection of anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism.

Even after a previous EUMC report produced in 2003 was not released by the Centre, reportedly because of the report’s conclusion that Muslim immigrants were responsible for the sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence in the Spring of 2002, the EU still appears unwilling to acknowledge its own findings that Muslim immigrant youth are increasingly responsible for anti-Semitic violence motivated by the conflict in the Middle East.”

http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASInt_13/447 3_13.htm

“What has taken place here is that Frits Bolkestein, the former leader of the Liberal Party, which now heads the Dutch government, has advised “recognizable Jews, orthodox Jews” that their children should emigrate from the Netherlands to Israel or the United States. He said, “I see no future for them here because of anti-Semitism, above all among the Moroccan Dutch, whose numbers continue to grow.”

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340, L-3995574,00.html

2. Just in terms of the point regarding intergenerational lags in earnings and academic attainment, Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their work, “Falling Behind or Moving Up?”

They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.

If these results continue to hold, the low skills of yesterday’s illegal immigrant will negatively shape the U.S. work force into the 22nd century.

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/ R_502JGR.pdf

3. Jason Richwine discusses some of the implications of this here.

“The consequences of a large ethno-cultural group’s lagging behind the majority in education and income are significant. In strictly economic terms, perpetually poor immigrants and their descendants will be a major strain on social spending and infrastructure. Health care, public education, welfare payments, the criminal justice system, and programs for affordable housing will all require more tax dollars. When pro-immigration conservatives declare that these government programs should be scaled back or eliminated entirely, I am sympathetic. But a large public sector is a reality that cannot be wished away — we will not be abolishing Medicaid or public schools anytime soon. Immigration policy needs to take that reality into account.”

What about the longer term costs if groups have lower levels of academic attainment and earnings over subsequent generations?

The Economist had an article on the ‘Decline of the working man’ (28 April 2011). It was noted:

“A second explanation is that American men have let their schooling slide. Those aged between 25 and 34 are less likely to have a degree than 45- to 54-year-olds. As David Autor of MIT points out, they are also less likely to have completed college than their contemporaries in Britain, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. In recent years America’s university graduation rates have slipped from near the top of the world league to the middle. Men are far likelier than women to drop out. Their record at school is bad too. This educational decline has a racial edge. Black and Hispanic boys are far less likely to graduate from high school than white or Asian youths. A smaller fraction starts college and a larger fraction drops out.”

This issue is particularly acute in California, as Alex Aleviev explains:

The unhappy picture in Los Angeles is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state’s economic competitiveness and long-term prospects. California’s educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity near the bottom among the 50 states as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in math, science, reading, and writing.

Perhaps even more important than the collapse of educational achievement among the lower strata is a deterioration of the higher education that was for decades the basis of California’s preeminence in science and technology. California currently ranks 40th among the 50 states in college-attendance rates, and it already faces a significant shortage of college graduates. Studies have shown that the economy will need 40 percent of its workers to be college-educated by 2020, compared with today’s 32 percent. Given the aging white population (average age, 42), many of these new graduates will have to come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age, 26). By one estimate, this would require tripling of the number of college-educated immigrants, an impossibility if current trends hold. The state’s inability to improve the educational attainment of its residents will result in a “substantial decline in per capita income” and “place California last among the 50 states” by 2020, according to a study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story .php?storyId=112167023

As with businesses going bankrupt, there’s a trade-off here between a kind of institutional capital that is impaired by change (any change) and the obvious value to re-optimizing when things change. A large business, even if it’s insolvent and can’t pay its bills for a time, may be worth more intact than in pieces; on the other hand, it may be that it’s time has passed, and there’s certainly something to gain from allowing a better-run (or more up-to-date) entrant to take its place. Similarly, social institutions are of real value, and as you shuffle people from place to place, you lose some of that; this is the excuse for the mortgage interest rate deduction. On the whole, the US has surely benefited from internal mobility more than it has lost, though this may have been facilitated in part by a degree of cultural homogeneity that, while nowhere near absolute, is higher than that between the US and the rest of the world. I suspect that entirely open borders would cost more in social capital than it would gain in allowing aspiring migrants to be more productive, but that the optimum lies at a higher level of legal immigration (and certainly a better considered policy on legal immigration) than the US at least currently uses.

Incidentally, I was under the impression that residents of Puerto Rico don’t pay federal income taxes, so it seems strange that American residents of foreign countries would. If someone can clear up my confusion, please do.

While the segregationist label does not seem to apply to you at this stage of life, New Yorkers are famous for ferociously forging figurative fences for themselves, especially after having children.

Perhaps you will never have children, to avoid risk of catching this unspeakable disease?

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/ explorer

What is astonishing about New York is the mind-boggling prices many New Yorkers are willing to pay to achieve segregation for themselves. New York is not really so expensive if New Yorkers were willing to give up their segregation, but that would be unthinkable.

I thought New York real estate was a bubble until I understood that they were driven by the powerful and quite stable segregationist urges of New Yorkers.