The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs Read Free Book Online

clearer immigration policy and clearer standards for the participation of new immigrants (documented or undocumented) in social programs. Washington has so far been unable to take up these questions honestly and directly and has squandered the public’s trust as a result. Fortunately, the fiscal costs of immigration, including illegal immigration, are nowhere near as adverse as anti-immigrant groups believe. Millions of illegal immigrants pay federal taxes, partly in the hope of an eventual amnesty. Social Security collects billions of dollars per year from undocumented immigrants, and millions of illegal immigrants file personal income tax returns. 7
    The Sunbelt Overtakes the Snowbelt
    The civil rights movement and the surge in immigration not only divided Americans according to race and ethnicity but also helped to change the geography of political power. For a century after the Civil War, American national power was centered in the North, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. Almost all American presidents hailed from the North. Industry, too, was concentrated in the North, as was great wealth. The South lagged for many complex reasons beyond the obvious one of defeat in the Civil War: an agrarian rather than industrial economy, low technological skills, poor public education, and the burdens of tropical diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and hookworm. All those factors meant that economic power remained concentrated in the North.
    Then came the great political change. Between 1900 and 1960, the Snowbelt states provided every U.S. president but one. But between 1964 and Obama’s election in 2008, the Sunbelt states provided every one! 8 The civil rights movement created a stark dividing line between the Snowbelt and Sunbelt presidential eras. Starting with Nixon, Republican candidates garnered the bulk of the South’s electoral votes. Until Obama, only two Democratic candidates (Carter and Clinton), both from the Sunbelt, were able to shake loose even a few electoral votes in the now strongly Republican region. Northern Democrats tended to face a wall of southern white middle-class opposition, making them nearly unelectable. (Lower-income white voters tended to remain in the Democratic Party column.)
    The rise of the Sunbelt to presidential power in the 1960s and afterward was far more than merely a civil rights backlash, however. It also reflected the gradual rise in economic power of the South after World War II, especially as electrification, air-conditioning, public investments in infrastructure (such as western dams and large-scale water projects), and greatly improved health care and education all made possible the migration of industries such as textiles and apparelfrom the high-cost, highly unionized Northeast to the low-cost, nonunionized Sunbelt. The shift of industries from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt was, in many ways, a dry run of the later transfer of industry from the high-wage United States to the low-wage Asia. As the Sunbelt economy boomed and the U.S. population (including both native-born Americans and Hispanic immigrants) increasingly settled in the Sunbelt, political power necessarily gravitated to the South. Figure 5.2 shows the remarkable rise of the Sunbelt relative to the Snowbelt along three crucial dimensions: the share of population, the share of national income, and the share of total congressional seats (which also tracks the share of electoral votes for presidential elections).
    On all three dimensions, the Sunbelt was far smaller than the Snowbelt in the 1940s to 1960s but rapidly caught up and overtook the Snowbelt by 2000. Political power has followed suit with the rising share of population and income.
    Here is a funny thing about the rise of the Sunbelt anti-government political power: it created Sunbelt power without necessitating a nationwide swing in values. The shift in the Sunbelt’s demographic and economic weight was enough to give rise to a new national political