My Beautiful Mansionette
By PAUL KRUGMAN
or most
of the past year my wife and I lived in a rented house in central New
Jersey -- a McMansion, also known as a mansionette. It was in a brand-new
development, in what used to be a cornfield, that looks like a textbook
illustration of turn-of-the- millennium urban sprawl. These days they
aren't little boxes on a hillside, they're big boxes on flat ground. But
they're all still made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the
same.
Our neighbors, however, didn't all look just the same. Most
of them were immigrants, and most were nonwhite; the largest contingent
came from India.
Seeing this, some of my recent correspondents
would doubtless have felt confirmed in their prejudices. You see, a few
columns back I wrote a piece about urban sprawl and its attendant traffic
congestion, which is becoming a very serious issue -- a lot more important
to the lives of most people than the dollar or two per day they might
eventually get from George W. Bush's tax cut. And a surprising number of
the letters I received in response insisted, vehemently, that the real
culprit behind urban sprawl was population growth, and that therefore it
was all because of immigration.
A quick search of the Internet
reveals that my correspondents are not isolated individuals; they are part
of a still small but growing movement. On casual observation I would say
that the anti-immigration movement today is where the anti-globalization
movement was a couple of years before Seattle: not yet large enough to be
a political force to be reckoned with, but quite possibly on its way to
achieving critical mass. And complaints about the alleged linkage between
immigration and urban sprawl is a popular theme.
Like so much of
what the anti- globalization activists say, these complaints are mostly
but not entirely off base. The grain of truth in the argument is that
other things being the same, a growing population means more houses, more
cars and hence more sprawl. But population growth is only a secondary
contributing factor to a disastrous pattern of land use driven by skewed
incentives that encourage people to spread out in a low-density sprawl
that in turn forces them to spend more and more of their time in cars.
What's really impressive to me is the way that medium-size metropolitan
areas, like Atlanta or Houston, have managed to mismanage their
development so completely that they have worse traffic congestion than
metropolitan New York, which has five times their population. (I know, I
know, I sound like the kind of person Dick Cheney loves to hate. But as it
happens I do own an S.U.V.)
So why the vehemence? Psychoanalyzing a
political movement guarantees a fresh wave of hate mail, but my best guess
is that the passion of my correspondents is ultimately fueled by cultural
unease. The changes one sees in central New Jersey are the same as what
one sees everywhere in this country: farms and traditional towns submerged
by a rising tide of malls, highways and McMansions. And since some of the
faces behind the wheel or the fake Palladian window are brown, it's all
too natural to blame them for the trend.
Obviously I don't feel the
same way; I am one of those people who feel that immigration is a good
thing -- most of all for the immigrants, but good for America too. To some
extent this position rests on mundane economic arguments. Foreign-born
talent has been crucial in this country's technology boom, and plays a
large role in many less glamorous industries too. (For some reason all the
gas stations around here seem to be run by Sikhs.) And one can make a good
case that demography -- the perils of a low birth rate -- is a key factor in
the economic malaise of Japan and some European countries; America's
openness to immigration is one of the things protecting us from that
fate.
And I have my own cultural prejudices. Isn't the immigrant
experience part of what this country is all about? Without immigrant
families climbing the social ladder, what would become of the American
dream?
But never mind the rational arguments. Over the horizon new
and possibly quite nasty political storms are brewing. If you think people
get angry and irrational when arguing about taxes, wait till you see them
argue about immigration.
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