In his 1995 article about Mexico, Jorge G. Castañeda discusses the tension between U.S. worries of Mexican instability and Mexican immigration.
Any attempt to clamp down on immigration from the south — by sealing the border militarily, by forcing Mexico to deter its citizens from emigrating, or through some federal version of California’s Proposition 187 — will make social peace in the barrios and pueblos of Mexico untenable.
Mobility, in other words, can be a safety valve. And it isn’t just a safety valve for people migrating to a different country. Migration within the U.S. has often eased tensions too.
Americans who were not making it in eastern cities escaped westward. Just a few generations later, many of those very same homesteaders packed up again when faced with the Dust Bowl.
Whenever there is a crisis, political or environmental, a very American response is to pick up and move. And American government, fearing the instability that comes with desperation, often encourages it.
Even when there isn’t a crisis, Americans have tended to move around a lot. Few people I run into are from the state where they live. Most have moved for jobs or school – for opportunities.
But American mobility may be starting to change. According to a new article by Joel Kotkin in Newsweek,
Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people.
The Newsweek article speaks about this change in terms of localism. Kotkin surmises that people who move around less will be more likely to support community organizations and local businesses. And he speculates about how this new rootedness might effect our politics.
There are well over 65,000 general-purpose governments, and with so many “small towns,” the average local jurisdiction population in the United States is 6,200, small enough to allow nonprofessional politicians to have a serious impact.
Let’s say his assumption is correct, that these more rooted Americans will begin to participate more in the governance of their local communities. The question is, what kind of impact will that have on our politics?
Will we become more cooperative? More insular? What if our economy continues to decline or stagnate? How will communities react when 10 – 15% of the citizens who are actively looking for work cannot find it? What will happen if those out of work citizens start directing that free time toward political and social change?
It is possible that a crap economy and a new rootedness may just be an incubator for radical change. People who no longer see the opportunity, or have the desire, to move on to greener pastures may just start to get pissed off and organized.
That could be very interesting.
