THERE ARE SOME EXPERTS you treasure: Charlie Cook and Michael Barone on elections, Peter Gammons on baseball, People magazine on the best and worst dressed celebrities. For me, William H. Frey belongs on that list.
Frey is a demographer and research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, who studies how population is shifting within the United States. As the results from the 2000 census have come in, Frey has produced a series of authoritative, provocative, and eye-opening essays on how America is changing. Much of his material is available on his website.
Though it is not yet posted on his site, Frey has a piece coming out in the Fall issue of the journal of the American Planning Association that summarizes many of the trends he has been describing. Increasingly, he says, it no longer makes sense to divide America along urban-suburban-rural lines. Instead, regions matter more.
The red and blue election map we all saw in 2000 gave us a view of an American regional divide. But in fact, Frey says, there are not two Americas, there are three.
First, there is the New Sunbelt. These are the fast-growing suburbs in the South and Southwest that I recently described in a piece called Patio Man and the Sprawl People. This is not the old sunbelt, Frey emphasizes, which was dominated by Florida, California, and Texas. The big growth these days is in places like Nevada, Georgia, and Colorado. Only 24 percent of the people who live in Nevada were born there, compared to 78 percent of the people who live in Pennsylvania.
This is the region for people with intact two-parent families. There are only 10 states that gained such families during the 1990s. Nine of them are in the new sunbelt. People move to these places to escape creeping urbanization, and their collective population grew by 24 percent over the past year, compared to the national rate of 13 percent.
Then, Frey says, there are the melting pot states such as California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. These states are growing because of new immigration. The national immigration policy that encourages family reunification means that new immigrants tend to settle in places where there are already immigrants–to the places where their kin already live.
These states are home to three-quarters of the nation’s Hispanic and Asian populations. Even the suburbs in these places are multi-ethnic. The good news, Frey continues, is that many of these immigrant groups value strong families. The cities with the highest percentage of intact two-parent families include Santa Ana and San Jose in California and El Paso in Texas.
Finally there is the heartland. This region consists of the remaining 28 states, including New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, and the upper Midwest. This is the overwhelmingly white, slow-growing part of the country. Since young people have been moving out of these places, baby boomers make up an especially large share of their populations, and, Frey notes, will have even more influence over their politics than in other regions.
There are several interesting things that leap out at you about Frey’s analysis. First, it’s clear we are in the middle of a controlled immigration experiment. If you don’t like our relatively open immigration policies, just move out of the melting pot states. If the policy is in error, it won’t touch you so immediately there.
Second, we don’t usually lump New York, California, and Texas politically, the way he does demographically. Texas doesn’t vote like the other two. Similarly, we don’t lump New England in with Indiana and Ohio. But maybe electoral blocs will catch up with the new demographic blocs (or maybe culture trumps demography).
In any case, as jobs become more mobile, the country changes more rapidly. William H. Frey is as good a guide as we’ve got.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
