Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (99 page)

90
. Ibid., April 6, 1998.

91
. Robert Samuelson,
The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945–1995
(New York, 1995), 214; Wolfe,
One Nation, After All
, 176.

92
. David Whitman,
The Optimism Gap: The I’m OK—They’re Not Syndrome and the Myth of American Decline
(New York, 1998). For a similar view, see Easterbrook,
The Progress Paradox
.

93
. Samuelson,
The Good Life and Its Discontents
, 261.

1
. David Frum,
How We Got Here: The ’70s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)
(New York, 2000), 144. For earlier developments of many of the social issues described in this chapter, see chapters 1 and 2.

2
. Steven Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do”: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America
(New York, 2000), 192–94.

3
. Krugman, “For Richer,”
New York Times Magazine
, Oct. 20, 2002, 62ff.

4
. By early 2005, following several years of very high migrations, it was estimated that there were 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
New York Times
, March 14, May 20, 2005.

5
. For statistics,
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 10–11; and
New York Times Almanac, 2003
, 291–98. The percentage of the population that was foreign-born kept increasing in the early 2000s, to an estimated 11.5 by 2003 and to 35.7 million in number by 2004.
USA Today,
March 22, 2005. Key sources on American immigration include Hugh Davis Graham,
Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
(New York, 2002); John Skrentny,
The Minority Rights Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Tamar Jacoby, “Too Many Immigrants?”
Commentary
113 (April 2002), 37–44; David Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,”
American Historical Review
108 (Dec. 2003), 1363–90; Reed Ueda, “Historical Patterns of Immigrant Status and Incorporation in the United States,” in Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, eds.,
E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation
(New York, 2001), 293–327; and Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do,”
163–99.

6
. Immigration accounted for 19.4 percent of American population growth in the 1970s, 32.8 percent in the 1980s, and 27.8 percent in the 1990s.

7
.
New York Times
, June 19, 2003. According to the census, America’s population grew from 203.3 million in 1970 to 281.4 million in 2000, or by a little more than 38 percent over these thirty years. Between 2000 and mid-2003, it grew by another 9.4 million, to 290.8 million. During these three years the Hispanic population increased by 13 percent, the Asian population by 12.8 percent, and the white population by 1 percent. Ibid., June 15, 2004.

8
. Ibid., June 6, June 16, 2003. By that time the number of foreign-born had swelled from 28 million to 32 million.

9
. For details of this important legislation, see Roger Daniels,
Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
(New York, 2002), 338–44.

10
. Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do,”
163–99.

11
. Orlando Patterson,
The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis
(Washington, 1997), 155–56.

12
. For debates over affirmation action and immigration, see
chapter 1
.

13
. For opposition to high levels of immigration, see Peter Brimelow,
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster
(New York, 1995); and Ronald Steel, “The Bad News,”
New Republic
, Feb. 10, 1997, 27. Arguments pro and con are well presented in Roger Daniels and Otis Graham,
Debating American Immigration, 1882–Present
(Lanham, Md., 2001).

14
. America’s population grew from 248.7 million in 1990 to 281.4 million in 2000. The
rate
of population growth in the 1990s was 13.1 percent, higher than in the 1970s (11.4 percent) or 1980s (9.8 percent), but below the rate of 18.5 percent in the 1960s, when population had grown by 28 million (the second highest number, next to the 1990s, for any decade in American history). Most of the growth in the 1960s had come from natural increase of the resident population—not from immigration.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 8.

15
. For discussion of this law, see
chapter 11
. In 1997, some of these provisions were softened.

16
. Jacoby, “Too Many Immigrants?”

17
. David Brooks, Op-Ed,
New York Times
, Feb. 24, 2004.

18
. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent”; Christopher Jencks, “Who Should Get In?”
New York Review of Books
, Dec. 20, 2001, 94–102.

19
. For these laws, see John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865–1925
(New York, 1963), 264–330.

20
. For this law, the Immigration Reform Act of 1986, see Daniels,
Coming to America
, 391–97.

21
. Otis Graham, “The Unfinished Reform: Regulating Immigration in the National Interest,” in Daniels and Graham,
Debating American Immigration
, 152–57.

22
.
Chicago Tribune
cartoon, syndicated in
Providence Journal
, June 1, 2003.

23
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 13, 41; Andrew Hacker, ed.,
U/S: A Statistical Portrait of the American People
(New York, 1983), 35–36; Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent.”

24
. See Lawrence Levine,
The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History
(Boston, 1996).

25
. Nathan Glazer,
We Are All Multiculturalists Now
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Glazer, “Multiculturalism and a New America,” in John Higham, ed.,
Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations Since World War II
(University Park, Pa., 1997), 120–33; Anthony Appiah, “The Multicultural Misunderstanding,”
New York Review of Books
, Oct. 9, 1997, 30–36.

26
. Skrentny,
Minority Rights Revolution
, 337–39. In 1998, the state of Washington approved its own version of California’s Proposition 209. A referendum in Arizona also abolished bilingual education there.

27
. (New York, 1993), 115, 66–67. Some other contemporary writers went well beyond Schlesinger and predicted dire consequences if high immigration continued in the future. See Brimelow,
Alien Nation
.

28
. Schlesinger,
The Disuniting of America
, 15–17.

29
. David Hollinger,
Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
(New York, 1995), 137–42; Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998).

30
. Hazel Carby, “Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence of Political Apartheid? Or, the Multicultural Wars, Part Two,” in Austin Sarat, ed.,
Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education
(New York, 1997), 221–28.

31
. Patterson,
The Ordeal of Integration
, 2. Other cautiously optimistic accounts of race relations in the 1990s are Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza,
The Scar of Race
(Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom,
America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible
(New York, 1997); and Howard Schulman et al.,
Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

32
. Andrew Hacker,
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, 1995), 245. See also Derrick Bell,
Faces at the Bottom of the Well
(New York, 1992); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
(Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Tom Wicker,
Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America
(New York, 1996); and Carl Rowan,
The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-up Call
(Boston, 1996).

33
. Terry Anderson,
In Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
(New York, 2004), 277–79.

34
. The other black senator was Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who served two terms between 1967 and 1979. In 2004, Barack Obama of Illinois, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, became the third black person to be elected to the Senate. During Reconstruction in the 1870s, two African American men had been appointed to the Senate.

35
. Blacks, however, still held a smaller percentage of elective offices in America than their numbers in the population would otherwise have suggested. For the armed services, see David King and Zachary Karabell,
The Generation of Trust: Public Confidence in the U.S. Military Since Vietnam
(Washington, 2003), 46–48.

36
. Median household income for people classified by the census as Hispanics rose in constant 2000 dollars during the 1990s from $28,700 to $33,400, or by 17 percent. For Asian Americans it increased from $49,400 to $55,500. Overall, household income rose in constant 2000 dollars during the 1990s from $38,400 to $42,200.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 433.

37
. James Wilson, review of Orlando Patterson,
The Ordeal of Integration
, in
New York Review of Books
, Nov. 16, 1997, 10.

38
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 441. Poverty among people classified as Hispanics decreased during the 1990s from 28.1 percent to 21.2 percent. Poverty among whites, already far lower, fell more slowly, from 10.7 percent to 9.4 percent. Poverty among Asian Americans decreased from 12.2 percent to 10.7 percent. The overall poverty rate was 13.5 percent in 1990 and 11.3 in 2000, which was the lowest recorded rate since such statistics had first been gathered in the early 1960s.

39
. Estimates of William Julius Wilson,
New York Times
, June 16, 2003. Total black population in 2000 was 34.7 million, or 12.3 percent of overall population.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 41. Wilson used a common definition of such areas: census tracts in which at least 40 percent of residents were poor. Some other estimates of the black “underclasses” were considerably lower. James Wilson,
New York Review of Books
, Nov. 16, 1997, 10, placed the numbers at only 900,000.

40
. Patterson,
The Ordeal of Integration
, 42–45.

41
.
New York Times,
March 14, 2005. A notable exception, from social scientists, was a highly controversial book that highlighted the importance of hereditary factors in the development of human intelligence: Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray,
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(New York, 1994). Widely denounced as racist, the book received a dismal reception from reviewers.