Barack Obama roared onto the political stage in 2004 with a speech many Americans found soothing. "There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he said. “There’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Twelve years later, the Obama era is ending with a lesson—taught by Donald Trump—in how deep political divisions of race and geography remain. The electoral map that emerged on Nov. 8 looked like a sea of red speckled with islands of blue. Hillary Clinton won the cities and close-in suburbs where affluent professionals, millennials and people of color are clustered. Donald Trump prevailed in the farther-flung suburban, exurban and rural places where residents are disproportionately white and aging.

It will take a long time to fully understand why this election turned out the way it did. But part of it, undeniably, has to do with anxiety about how America is changing. Some voters idealized a picture they grew up with, in which culture and politics were dominated by a white Christian majority. They found a voice for their disorientation in Trump’s rhetoric and his promises that he could restore an older vision of the country.

Demographic change, however, is not a force that is easy to halt — and as American leaders and policymakers grapple with the country’s real challenges and political trajectory, it’s the actual face of Future America they’ll need to deal with, not an imagined one. It might sound unknowable, a kind of crystal-ball exercise with numbers, but in many ways the picture is already becoming clear. The big trend lines in our population are powerful and hard to budge. The next official snapshot will arrive in the form of the 2020 Census, which experts project will show an America becoming slightly less white and more diverse: white Americans will likely make up 2 percent less of the population than they did in 2015, while Hispanic Americans will make up 1.5 percent more. Asian Americans, foreign-born Americans, and those who identify as multiracial will all make up a larger share of the country, while the black population will hold steady.

What happens after that? We decided to find out, sketching a picture of the nation by talking to a range of demographers who specialize in tracking and analyzing American population shifts. They are experts on race, immigration, aging, changing family structures and urban planning, along with how all these factors affect electoral politics. They emphasized that demographics aren't destiny. No political party can count on perpetual support from any particular demographic group. But the big changes they study will shape the issues we'll be debating for decades to come. By examining their research, it’s possible to envision the potential America of 2050 right now.

That nation will have gone through two big shifts: It will likely be browner and more polyglot than the America of 2016, and it will also be much older. Though those two trends both pose major policy challenges, they’re also interlinked; as the country ages, it will depend on the productivity of a shrinking number of young people to support its retired and elderly population, and those young people will be much less white.

Census projections show that by the census of 2050, the United States will no longer have a clear white majority—at least as we define “white” today. Fifty-three percent of the population will be multiracial or nonwhite, compared with less than 40 percent currently. Because the growth of the nonwhite population is driven more by fertility than by immigration, researchers believe this racial shift will occur even if the federal government enacts new immigration restrictions. “If you reduced new immigration to zero, you’d still see growth in immigrant communities, more so than in white, native-born communities,” said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute. “Immigrants just have more children and have them younger.”

Most of these new Americans will have roots in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Although the Trump administration is setting itself up to crack down on undocumented immigration, anti-immigrant sentiment tends not to depress legal immigration—as long as jobs remain available. Research from states that passed recent laws targeting undocumented people, like Arizona and Georgia, finds the laws had no significant real-world effect on the number of immigrants living in a state. (It’s possible Trump could go after legal immigration as well, by reducing the number of visas granted to workers with special skills and to those with family members already living in the United States. But that would create a fight with the business community, which relies on access to legal immigrant labor at all levels.)

Alongside these ethnic and racial changes, the growth in the population over 85, those most likely to be ill or disabled, will be especially stark. Currently, there are approximately 33 working adults for each American 85 and up; by 2050, that ratio will fall to 13 workers per American over 85.

What all of this means for politics depends on factors that are more difficult to predict — and on battles that might be fought in unfamiliar places. With rapidly diversifying populations, the swing states of the future may be Oklahoma, Georgia and Texas, rather than Ohio or Pennsylvania, which will, even in 2050, remain majority white. It’s not at all clear who, in the future, will consider themselves white, or whether regional segregation by education and wealth, which has become more acute in recent years, will deepen or ease. Will the cities that have recently exploded in population, mostly in the Sun Belt, remain economically vibrant, or will new growth cities emerge, in other parts of the country? How will climate change impact where and how people live?

Many of those questions are unanswerable for now; they depend on the course of policies not yet formulated. But when it comes to the face of Future America, there are places where the likely demographics of 2050 – and the conflicts it’s likely to bring – are already coming into focus. Below, we take a look at three of them: the expansive metropolis of Houston, Texas; the aging rural areas of North Carolina; and Detroit, where a neighborhood called BanglaTown is being revived not by white gentrifiers, but by South Asian immigrants. These regions offer hope for a newer America that works smoothly, showing that diversity can drive economic growth. But they also offer cautionary tales about just how hard it may be to craft a shared American identity in an increasingly multicultural country.

HOUSTON, TEXAS: A FRAGILE BOOMTOWN

Stephen Klineberg gets excited when he talks about Houston. “Wherever you go, you think you’re on the edge of town. Then—all of a sudden!—there’s a new patchwork of civilization,” he said. Klineberg is a sociologist and the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Like lots of other Houstonians, he is a transplant from the Northeast. He has spent the past three decades tracking the economic and demographic transformation of his adopted home.

Houston’s wide-open spaces, surrounded by oil fields, have helped make it America’s boomtown. With 6.5 million residents, it is the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan region; a sprawling, flat, dry metropolis whose ethnic diversity reflects what America will most likely look like in 2050 and beyond. There is no racial majority in the Houston metro area. Forty-two percent of Harris County residents are Hispanic; 31 percent are non-Hispanic white; 20 percent are black; and 7 percent are Asian. Between 2000 and 2015, the Hispanic, black, and Asian share of the population grew, while the proportion of whites shrank.

“All of America will look like Houston looks today in 25 years,” Klineberg said. “Houston is one of the cities where the American future is going to be worked out.”

Houston is becoming more Democratic, if not as uniformly progressive as the nation’s older big cities, like New York and Chicago. Eight years ago, Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Harris County in over four decades, by just 2 points. In 2016, Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in Houston by 12 points. According to a survey of Houstonians conducted by Klineberg and colleagues, only about 20 percent of area residents believe undocumented immigration is a major problem, down from 50 percent in 2000. Feelings about the poor and Muslim-Americans seem to be more complicated. Fifty-seven percent believe that welfare recipients are “taking advantage of the system.” Half of survey respondents expressed negative views on Islam.

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During the Great Migration of the 20th century, Southern black families moved to Northern cities looking for economic opportunity. Today, many of their middle- and working-class descendants are remigrating to Sun Belt hot spots like Houston and Atlanta, drawn to abundant jobs and affordable housing. Klineberg said three industries are driving Houston’s growth: oil and gas; health care at the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest facility of its kind; and the Port of Houston, the nation’s busiest seaport. Immigrant African doctors and Filipina nurses have flocked to the city, as have Mexicans and Salvadorans who work in the oil fields. Houston is also known for its lack of zoning regulations, making it easy for developers to construct new housing at a variety of price points, whether in glass apartment towers or single-family subdivisions.

But Houston’s economic and environmental sustainability are less than certain. It has a hot climate, lacks mass transit and is vulnerable to hurricanes. Forty percent of its jobs are in the energy sector, which has contracted since 2014. Like the rest of the Sun Belt, Houston will be heavily affected by global warming.

“This city is the most spread out, least dense, most automobile-dependent city in America. It covers 600 square miles,” Klineberg said. “Can we make the shift to being an energy capital rather than an oil and gas capital?” He is hopeful about alternative energy sources. “Texas is nothing but wind. We have big, open spaces.”

Houston is also at the forefront of another big demographic change: the growth in the share of Americans who identify as multiracial. Nationally, about one-quarter of Asians and Latinos, 17 percent of blacks, and 9 percent of whites marry someone from outside their own group. Today, 2.6 percent of Americans identify as multiracial; in 2050, 5.3 percent will. As the demographer Richard Alba has pointed out, some of the descendants of multiracial unions will inevitably identify as white. Already, 16 percent of Hispanics nationwide consider themselves white, according to the U.S Census. Whiteness is an inherently flexible category. Less than 100 years ago, few considered Jewish or Italian Americans to be white; decades from now, it is conceivable that whiteness could expand further. People with Asian and Latino heritage could one day be receptive to conservative political appeals that are currently attractive mostly to mono-racial whites.

African-Americans may not benefit equally from the collapsing of racial boundaries. While black-white intermarriage is also becoming more common, historically, the category of whiteness has not expanded to include the children of one white and one black parent. The durability of the white-black hierarchy in terms of income, wealth, education and access to safe neighborhoods is one of the enduring features of American life, and one that will likely remain a fault line in our politics.

In Houston, a vibrant economy has helped unify a diverse population. The test of the region’s long-term political and economic strength will come if and when the job market slows down, pitting individuals and interest groups in greater competition for scarcer resources.

BANGLADESHI MICHIGAN: A RUST BELT SUCCESS STORY

Donald Trump spun a specific narrative about immigration: that the United States is being flooded by a mass of undocumented Latinos who are edging native-born Americans out of the job market in the heartland.

The data tell a different story. Unauthorized immigration peaked in 2007, when George W. Bush was president. During President Obama’s two terms, more Mexican immigrant families left the U.S. (about 1 million) than arrived (about 870,000). The slowdown was due to several factors: increased border security, more deportations and fewer job opportunities during the Great Recession. Only six states have experienced net growth in their undocumented populations in recent years: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Louisiana and Washington.

Currently, three-quarters of the immigrants in the United States are here lawfully. And while 52 percent of all foreign-born residents hail from Latin America, among the newest arrivals, South and East Asians outnumber Latinos. About a third of today’s foreign-born Americans are highly educated, with college or graduate degrees. Many have created jobs, not stolen them.

Consider Ehsan Taqbeem. He emigrated from Dhaka, Bangladesh to Detroit in 1980 to study engineering at Wayne State University. He later earned an MBA and today is the founder and owner of mQrg, which supplies auto parts to companies like Fiat Chrysler and BMW. It has 70 employees, the majority of them white.

Taqbeem is also an advocate for Michigan’s growing Bangladeshi-American community, which comprises an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people. “You see a lot of physicians, engineers, academics and also low-end factory workers,” Taqbeem said. “A big mix of people.” Many of them live in Hamtramck, a neighborhood of Detroit that is incorporated as a separate city. Hamtramck’s city council is the first in the nation to be majority Muslim. Taqbeem has worked in the neighborhood to register immigrants to vote and ensure they have access to Bengali ballots. The area has become known as BanglaTown, and is bustling with new businesses.

“Ten years ago, there was a lot of vacant land. If you go there today, there is zero vacant property and the home value has gone up nearly double,” Taqbeem said. “There is a lot of traffic, restaurants, stores, small industry, gardening projects, a music school. This is a destination community created on the theme of South Asian hospitality.”

Of course, cultural change creates tension. The majority-Muslim city council attracted spurious accusations of instituting Sharia law. Taqbeen recalled a homicide investigation 10 years ago, in which local police believed Bangladeshi female witnesses were not being truthful. “The longtime police chief was telling me that these women were always lying to him. He said, ‘They were never looking into my eye.’ Well, these women were taught not to look into the eye” in order to be modest, Taqbeen explained.

Donald Trump built a movement around the idea that immigration threatens the American economy. But the example of BanglaTown suggests that resisting immigration may actually handicap cities. Rust Belt cities that are attracting immigrants are in better shape than those, like Dayton, Ohio, with fewer foreign-born residents, according to Alan Mallach, an urban planner and a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress. “The people who are upset about immigration live in areas where immigration has had very little impact,” Mallach said. “A lot of the upset is symbolic.”

Barring drastic changes to immigration law, by 2050, 18 percent of Americans will hail from another country. Where these upwardly mobile families settle will help determine which regions thrive and which stagnate.

NORTH CAROLINA: RURAL AMERICA CONFRONTS GENERATIONAL CONFLICT

North Carolina has become a magnet for affluent retirees moving to planned communities. Its rural areas are also aging rapidly, as younger, upwardly mobile families move closer to educational and job opportunities. Now the state’s older white and black population is coming into contact with a new group of rural residents: poor Latino immigrants. North Carolina is a right-to-work state where it is difficult to form a union, making it attractive to industrial employers. Migrants are finding low-paid work in the agricultural and food industries.

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In 2008, sociologists Kevin O’Neil and Marta Tienda conducted a survey of residents of two rural North Carolina counties: Person, north of Durham, and Chatham, south of Chapel Hill. Both counties had aging populations, but Chatham County was also experiencing a significant influx of Latino immigrants, attracted by jobs in chicken processing plants. The researchers found that in Chatham County, where white and black residents came into more daily contact with immigrants, there was less anti-immigrant sentiment. However, there was an important exception: Native-born parents in both counties who perceived that there were more immigrants in their children’s schools were more likely to believe that immigration posed a threat.

In 2014, nonwhite children, for the first time, accounted for more than half of public school students. With younger generations significantly browner than older ones, some demographers foresee political conflict between white senior citizens and nonwhite young families.

“The aging of rural America is a two-sided blade,” said Tienda, of Princeton. “On the one hand, in many declining towns, the growth of the Latino population has revitalized and re-energized a community and restarted the local economy. But if there are communities that have experienced population decline for a long time and have consolidated schools, the Latinos put strain on local resources to revamp those school systems. That’s where the rubber hits the road” in terms of anti-immigrant sentiment.

However, the fact that the senior population is becoming less white may mean that in the America of 2050, the elderly population is more widely dispersed and also more tolerant. Today, 15 percent of the population is over 65; in 2050, 22 percent will be. The number of white senior citizens will remain stable, while the nonwhite elderly population will grow. Currently, older people are a reliable conservative voting bloc, but that does not mean they will be into the future. “Political behavior is predicted by past political behavior,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress. “Right now, the dominant generation among seniors, especially white seniors, is the Silent Generation, the most conservative in the electorate. We are replacing those folks with Baby Boomers, and after that it will be Xers. Based on the data we have, that should have a liberalizing effect.”

Today’s senior citizens generally live in low-density suburban and rural areas, in single-family homes. The fastest-growing census-designated place in the United States is The Villages, an upper-middle-class, age-restricted planned community in central Florida, where 98 percent of residents are white. The seniors of 2050, more of whom will be Latino and Asian immigrants, could have different lifestyle preferences. They might choose to live in multi-generational configurations alongside their children and grandchildren, or to stay in urban areas.

Wherever they are, their health care needs will be acute. The demand for nurses and home health aides will continue to grow. Those jobs are often filled by immigrants, generally women. A key question will be whether services for the elderly, such as Medicare and Social Security, crowd out the federal budget so that there will be little money left to fund education from early childhood through college—the tools that could allow the daughter of a home health aide to transcend her origins.

Currently, 15 percent of the federal budget is devoted to Medicare, 28 percent to Social Security and 10 percent to support for families of all ages, through programs like the child tax credit, food stamps and housing assistance. Just 3 percent of federal dollars are spent on education. Of course, there are two ways to control federal spending on the elderly: raise taxes, or cut benefits. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has announced his intention to replace Medicare with a voucher program for private insurance, which would cost the government less while asking seniors to pay more out-of-pocket. Ryan also wants to cut federal spending on programs that serve kids.

Will President-elect Donald Trump embrace this conservative vision or chart a more centrist path? Last year, he said, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” After the GOP convention in August, he rolled out a plan, promoted by his older daughter, Ivanka, to provide child care tax credits. However, Trump’s transition website now mentions “modernizing” Medicare, often a code word for a Ryan-like privatization plan, and does not discuss child care at all.

THE BIG SORT

Since the Great Recession, the giant, global economic story has been the rise of economic inequality within nations. While demographers are fairly confident in projecting the age and racial breakdown of the America of 2050, there are other crucial trends they’re far less able to predict, such as what our poverty rate will be, or how unequal a society we will have. That’s because the policy decisions we make today, in areas like health care and education, will change those trend lines in ways we can’t yet see coming.

In setting big national policies, it’s tempting to imagine that democracy means we hash out decisions about the public good collectively. But that’s not always how it works, as this year’s election showed, in which a relative minority of voters in the middle of the country chose a president, and a set of ideas, that big cities and coastal states profoundly oppose. This is a dynamic we’ll likely be reckoning with long into the future. Social scientists call it The Big Sort, in which college-educated, affluent, and nonwhite Americans increasingly congregate in major metropolitan regions, while 80 percent of the nation’s land mass is dominated by more conservative working- and middle-class whites. This sorting means fewer of us come into sustained daily contact with those with whom we disagree.

Geographic conflict exists at the state level, too. Albany and Springfield, for example, exercise veto power over mass transit planning in New York City and Chicago. In 23 states, schools that serve affluent children, who tend to live in the suburbs, are funded at higher rates than urban schools that serve poor kids.

One way to ease political polarization could be to uncluster ourselves spatially. Immigration is helping us to do that, by bringing economic growth to aging neighborhoods currently dominated by poor whites and African Americans. But immigration alone will not solve the problem, in part because immigrants themselves are bifurcated between those who come on visas meant for workers with special skills, like doctors and engineers, and those who come for difficult jobs that native-born American generally avoid, in low-paid industries like farming and food processing.

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Another way to un-sort ourselves is economic, but this is also difficult. Research shows that if you are born poor, whether native or foreign-born, your best chance at economic mobility is to grow up in a suburb or midsize city close to a thriving job market, such as Bergen County in northern New Jersey; DuPage County, west of Chicago; or Contra Costa County, outside San Francisco. Yet because of zoning restrictions that severely limit the supply of affordable housing, there are a very limited number of communities with good schools and jobs where it is possible for poor families to move.

For an America concerned about divisions, making spatial mobility easier, through efforts to construct more affordable housing, could help decrease inequality and political sorting. And greater access to quality education—from early child care to affordable college to vocational training—is another promising path toward a less-divided society in 2050, demographers said. “What we’re watching is a growing gap between rich and poor predicated above all else on access to education,” said Klineberg, the Houston sociologist.

Higher education and exposure to diversity breed tolerance. But geographic and educational mobility are constrained by declining wages and a lack of affordable housing, child care and college tuition. Obama’s famous 2004 speech urged us to continue to think of ourselves as a melting pot nation, or perhaps as a salad bowl, in which people of different backgrounds are tossed together and learn to co-exist. But what if rich and poor, white and non-white, older and younger, live apart, in separate bowls? Will we reconsider our identity as Americans; less one culture than many, uneasily tied together into a fractious electorate? Demographics raises the question, though it can’t answer it. Not yet.



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