The Washington Post has a message that Democrats need to pay attention to: You won’t have demographic dividends for long. And it’s coming from what you think will help you most (Mexicans).

If someone looked at state-by-state polls, there’s a wonderful positive correlation between the states that went Romney and those with the highest proportion of African-Americans. But wait! Didn’t basically all the African-American vote go to Obama, isn’t it the whites who broke Romney? Yes, but, importantly the state that was most fiercely liberal was Vermont, which, basically, has no blacks.

This article confirms something I’ve always suspected about the Northeast. It’s not less racist and not inherently more egalitarian vis-a-vis illegal immigrants. Randomly selected, liberal, New Englanders who were “treated” by a period of exposure to Spanish-speaking Latinos noted a significant shift to the right on immigration policies and deportation. 

So it’s not that the liberal city of Boston, where this study was conducted, is any more enlightened than Birmingham. It’s just richer, and more isolated. I’ve long argued that the negative effects of immigration (which are certainly outweighed by the positive effects) ought to be borne equally by those near Mexico, and those afar. Indeed, it almost seems easy sitting in Newton to disparage the nativists in Arizona.

I don’t support a regional visa program, because to prevent illegal domestic immigration, we’d need a police state (not like we don’t have the infrastructure, but still). I would argue that some of my argument is diminished by the fact that California, the Midwest, and New England basically fund the South. However, a deeply segregated United States will continue to result in the gridlocked politics that damn us today. Latinos too.

This project would be a shining example of a public-private partnership. While it seems pretty racist for the government to incentivize black and latino migration to the north, corporations have, for a long time, employed affirmative action to diversify their workforce. Affirmative action policies should be lowered in the South and Southwest, with a strong increase elsewhere, including paid relocations for interested workers (given a certain level of productivity, contract to work, etc.)

This might even result in a Red state or two in New England (because, as the Post notes, whites will become more racist), but will free the south from Richard Nixon’s curse.