Abandoned cities more likely if population was diverse, including Ellis Island diversity from the Gilded Age

Milwaukee blacks are providing yet another demonstration of why nobody wants to live in Milwaukee anymore.

Still, the degree of white flight is staggering -- in 2010, non-Hispanic whites were only 37% of the population, with blacks at 40% and Hispanics at 17% (Asians 4%). Most people probably don't even think of Milwaukee as a city with black problems, or if they were a little more in the know, might think of a sizable black minority next to a white plurality or even majority. In reality, blacks are the dominant group, and whites have mostly fled to the suburbs.

It's an utter shame to see producers and maintainers abandon an entire city to parasites and decomposers. Why didn't they stay around and push back? Not even violently, just banding together however a community can to repel invasions by corrosive outsiders.

You might first blame the wimpy whites who live in Wiscucksin, but you see it in many other cities around the Great Lakes where whites are under 50% -- Chicago (32% white), Detroit (8%), Cleveland (33%), Buffalo (46%) -- not to mention the East Coast, where Nordic Lutheran cuckolds are not that common.

Where don't you see it? Compared to the Great Lakes cities just mentioned, other large cities nearby are a lot whiter, despite all of the region being affected by the Great Migration of blacks out of the Deep South after WWI. Columbus OH, Grand Rapids MI, and Indianapolis IN are 59% white, Rockford IL is 58%, and Syracuse NY is 53%.

These big cities were not Gilded Age boomtowns, not lying directly on a large body of water that would have made them centers for trading and transportation. They had enough going for them to eventually turn into popular places to raise families during the Mid-Century, but not so much going for them that the millions of Ellis Island immigrants would have flocked there in search of easy employment.

In fact, these cities may actually have decent sized populations of Ellis Island ancestry -- just not rooted there from the very first ancestor who arrived in America, and therefore not forming ethnic enclaves that have lasted for generations.

We know from Robert Putnam's study on ethnic diversity and trust levels that the more ethnically diverse a place is, the less people trust each other. Quite simply, if individuals don't come from similar backgrounds -- with similar norms, similar expectations, and similar languages, foods, and customs -- how can any of them plan on coordinating their lives with the others?

Even worse, in a diverse area, members of the same ethnic group trust each other less than if they were in a homogeneous area. While they may share the customs, norms, etc. with those of their own group, they sense a certain futility in trying to convert that into collective action, when they're just one small group within a greater Tower of Babel.

Putnam was studying high-level group differences like blacks and whites. But something similar must have taken place during the Gilded Age, when "diverse" meant a wide variety of white European immigrant groups, who spoke different languages, ate different foods, followed different religions or sects, and lived by different norms and customs. Wherever the white population continued to be descended from these Ellis Islanders, the initial lack of trust and lowered ability for collective action by the citizenry would have persisted -- perhaps to this very day.

I think that's just what we see in all these Gilded Age boomtowns, where the influx of blacks after WWI gradually sent more and more white people out into the suburbs rather than stay and defend their city in one way or another. If trust and collective action potential were low to begin with, they could not have worked together to keep their city white-ish. And not trusting the other groups, or even their "fellow" members of their own group, they would have felt little sense of stewardship over their city's fate.

Let the city crumble, at least I will be safe once I move out into the suburbs.

The cities that saw their greatest growth after the Gilded Age -- especially after immigration was shut off in the 1920s -- would have had settlers who all identified as Americans, not as Poles, Italians, Irish, Germans, etc. Their ethnic distinctions were relegated to quirky things your neighbors did in the privacy of their own home that were of no larger importance, and you poked fun at them the way you do among friends who have strange tastes, instead of looking down upon them as fundamentally Other.

With minimal cultural diversity coming into these later-settled cities, ethnic enclaves were not as common, and trust and collective action for the common good were at higher levels.

Therefore, why abandon the city just because blacks are moving in? We can act in the common good to give them their place, while we keep ours. And they won't try to mess with us as much if they sense the high levels of trust and potential for collective action -- the last thing blacks want to do is start a fight with a tight-knit group of white folks. That's how a white community turns into a white mob -- something not possible when whites are all divided amongst themselves.

That won't stop every weenie from fleeing the city to the suburbs, but it will keep the city noticeably whiter than other big cities facing the same Great Migration of blacks. We're talking at least 20 percentage points more white.

There is one major exception to this general pattern -- Pittsburgh, a former Gilded Age boomtown whose white population has been almost entirely Ellis Islanders from way back, and yet which has resisted the temptation toward white flight. In 2010 it was 65% white, the whitest of any big, old city.

Why didn't the blacks in Pittsburgh drive out the Ellis Islander whites as in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo? My best guess is that it's the Appalachian cultural influence, which is not found in the Great Lakes and East Coast cities of lower elevation and proximity to lakes and oceans. The Poles, Irish, etc., who settled in Pittsburgh didn't adapt to any old set of founding stock American norms, but specifically Scotch-Irish Appalachian hillbilly norms, which still surround them in the suburban and rural areas outside the big city.

Appalachia, outside of the Deep South where blacks have been rooted since they got here, has remained the whitest region in the nation. The northern routes of the Great Migration forked around Appalachia -- one toward the Midwest, the other toward the East Coast -- because they weren't foolish enough to try to colonize hillbilly country, even if there were big cities like Knoxville TN up that way.

That would be trying to live next to the tight-knit clan kind of white people, so the hell with that, let's just go to some alienated city where the white folks will be too atomized to organize against us. Those would be the cities over-run by Ellis Islanders living in ethnic enclaves.

This suggests, sadly, that some of these Gilded Age boomtowns would not recover even if the non-white populations were magically moved somewhere else. Their roots would still reflect the low-trust divisiveness of the ethnic enclave era, and they would remain vulnerable to invasion, prone to corruption, cynicism about politics, and so on.

Those big cities that began to be heavily populated after the Gilded Age -- and of course before the current wave of immigration -- will probably make better sites for city living and urban culture. We do need to de-urbanize like crazy, but if big cities are going to stay around, it's better for people to live in more cohesive and all-American cities than in those that have proven to be ruined by immigration-induced diversity, whether from the first Gilded Age or the second.

We can also forecast that the Sun Belt cities whose populations have begun to soar due to recent immigration -- such as Phoenix -- will meet a similar fate as the Milwaukees, the Chicagos, and the Detroits further north. And it's not only the foreigners who are raising the cultural diversity of cities like Phoenix, Miami, and Houston, but transplants from highly different regional cultures within America. Throwing a bunch of New Englanders, Southerners, Midwesterners, and Mid-Atlantic people into the same city might as well be like the Ellis Islanders pouring into Chicago over 100 years ago.

The upshot of all this is that proper stewardship over our cities requires low levels of diversity, meaning deport the illegals, lower immigration in the future, and discourage transplanting within the country. We see what the result is when we pursue the opposite of these policies.