How Would Migration From The Rust Belt To The Sun Belt Change Demographics In The Rust Belt?

This summer, in A tale of 2 Rust Belts, I explored how diverging economic paths in the Great Lakes region help explain political patterns we are seeing today. Since last year'southward election in which Rust Belt states delivered the decisive victories for President Trump, interest in the economic plight, anxieties, and frustrations of the residents of these communities has been intense.

Yet the region'south economy is not the only factor behind its shifting politics. Its unique demographic and racial geography matters, as well. While recent events in Charlottesville and debates throughout the South over removal of Confederate statues have focused the nation'southward increasingly heated discussion of race on that region of the country, the sharpest black-white racial divides and most intense segregation in the country today can exist constitute in the older industrial city-regions of the Midwest. Indeed, the white supremacist charged with Heather Heyer's killing in Charlottesville traveled from Maumee, Ohio, exterior of Toledo.

Fully fifteen of the nation's 25 major metro areas with the sharpest black-white segregation are in the Rust Belt region. This reflects several historical trends, including the Keen Migration—black and white—from the South and Appalachia to the mills, factories, and machine shops of northern cities; the disharmonism and subsequent flight of white residents from these cities; urban renewal and highway building that destroyed blackness communities and aided white flight; and the strict housing and education policies that enforced segregation in the North, fabricated vividly clear in Richard Rothstein'due south The Color of Constabulary.

And at present, immigration has become an unambiguous factor in this racially charged Midwestern landscape. While immigrant-rich states like Arizona, California, and Florida are often at the center of immigration policy discussions, the political contend almost the role of immigrants burns hottest in the heartland. For years, these communities take hemorrhaged population to the Lord's day Belt and other parts of the land. But legal immigrants have kept coming.

Evidence shows that immigration has benefited the Rust Chugalug demographically and economically. A steady stream of immigrants from United mexican states, Central America, Asia, Africa, and the Centre East—a very different immigrant population than the Europeans who settled in the Midwest showtime more than 150 years ago—has slowed the hollowing out of the region's bigger cities and pocket-sized manufacturing plant towns in recent decades. In most of the Midwest today, immigrants are a major source—and in some communities the merely source—of population and new business organisation growth. According to the Chicago Council on Global Diplomacy, from 2000 to 2015, non-native born populations in Midwest metros grew 34 percentage (more than 1 million people), and deemed for 37 percent of all Midwest communities' population growth. From Racine and Janesville, Wis. in the west, to Akron, Ohio and Erie, Pa. in the e, growth in immigrant populations has compensated for losses or outpaced modest growth of native-born populations.

Despite these upsides, immigration has added to the region'due south sharp racial fault lines. Celebrated blackness-white segregation patterns now extend to divisions amongst black, white, and brown, with consequent impacts on the region'south social and political dynamics. Whites in suburban enclaves of the larger metropolis-regions, and blueish-neckband white populations that fled the mid-sized and smaller cities for pocket-sized towns and rural areas nearby, are seeing (and beingness told by some to fearfulness) growing populations of Asian, Latino, and Arab-American immigrants in their communities, as well as a more mobile blackness middle class. Michigan provides stark examples of this human relationship between shifting Rust Belt demographics and politics. In Macomb County, perhaps the largest county of predominantly white, working-course voters that swung for Trump (in numbers large enough that on their own they may have moved Michigan into the Trump column), incomes are up again with the Detroit auto industry rebound, and population is really growing. But all the recent population growth in the county—3 per centum over the past six years—has come from minorities, equally the white population continues to drop. New residents include a 34 pct increment in African-Americans, a 27 percentage increment in Asians, and a 14 percent increase in Latinos. And migrants from away business relationship for fully threescore pct of the county's recent population increase. Simply these minority and immigrant population gains are concentrated in a handful of Macomb's 20-plus cities and towns. While all Macomb communities saw movement from the Autonomous cavalcade in 2012 to Trump in 2016, in magnitudes ranging from ane percent to xiv percent, the shift was greatest in the white enclave communities.

Yet at that place are exceptions; communities that are bucking the tide, where black/white racial fault lines have been softened a bit, and new immigrants are being purposefully integrated into the community:

In the Detroit suburb of Oakland County (which stayed Democratic in 2016), communities such as Troy, Southfield, and Auburn Hills have seen growth amid immigrants and African-Americans amid a more than integrated residential landscape.
The once-Polish enclave of Hamtramck merely outside the metropolis of Detroit is now a diverse, multi-racial, multi-ethnic (and newly economically vital) modest metropolis, resembling parts of today's Queens, New York.
Washtenaw Canton to the west, abode to the Academy of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University, has attracted a highly educated and diverse community.
Farther west, Kalamazoo has successfully helped contrary white flight and the seemingly inevitable and intractable segregation found in very like older industrial cities in the Rust Belt, cheers in role to the Kalamazoo Promise, which guarantees a college education for all student residents.
Even in polarized Macomb Canton, there are communities like Sterling Heights where local political leaders have organized robust immigrant and ethnic welcoming programs and services designed to highlight the benefits of a changing population to the community.

In Michigan, our statue debate concerns whether to remove one depicting onetime Dearborn mayor and notorious racist, Orville Hubbard. Information technology gazes over a one time lily-white, now l percent Arab-American, thriving community. The communities that are making some progress at racial and ethnic inclusion seem to be doing better economically and are less likely to accept voted for Trump in 2016. We should reap any insights nigh what makes these successful transitions possible to inform the economic and community development strategies around the residuum of the Rust Belt.

John Austin directs the Michigan Economic Center, and as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, created and led the Great Lakes Economical Initiative.