Inductivist

American needs smart people, especially those who excel in science.  We also need people who believe in core American values, and I think perhaps the best single General Social Survey question to measure this asks respondents if they feel that someone who believes in racial inferiority should be allowed to give a public speech on the topic. Denying this right to people, in my opinion, is the type of behavior that belongs somewhere else, not America.

To capture which groups score highest on the above qualities, I created a scale that sums measures of IQ, basic scientific knowledge, and favoring free speech.  Here are the mean scores for any ethnic group with at least 10 respondents (sample size = 985):

Mean desirability score

Russian  22.72
English/Welsh  21.73
Swedish  21.43
Norwegian  20.93
Scottish 20.78
Irish  20.56
Jewish  20.54
French  20.47
German  20.28
Dutch  20.27
Polish  20.19
Italian  19.63

Total US  19.61

American Indian  19.07
Chinese  18.55
Spanish  18.15
Black   17.78
Asian Indian  17.42
Portuguese  17.30
Puerto Rican  16.17
Mexican  15.83

Russians score the highest, and northern Europeans, in general, do well.  Southern Europeans and non-whites tend to do poorly.  The gap between Russians and Mexicans is 1 1/2 standard deviations -- an enormous difference.  (I included immigrants to maximize sample size, but rankings don't change much if I exclude them. The Chinese and Mexicans rise a little.)

If the US had a rational immigration policy, we would be growing the top groups.  The country, however, desperately blinds itself to these kinds of facts, so we are growing the bottom instead.

President Trump told the audience at CPAC today that the economy is so strong, we need legal immigrants to fill certain jobs, but it should be based on merit. Unless the GOP wants to become the next Dodo bird, "merit" should be the type of immigrants who vote conservative.

What kinds of immigrants are likely to vote that way?  The General Social Survey asked people which candidate they voted for in 2012.  I looked at immigrants to see what predicted voting for Romney over Obama (sample size = 192).  I looked at sex, age, race, education, IQ, income, religion, and religious attendance.  Only two factors were statistically significant: being white and religious.  Immigrants who are white and go to church often are more likely to have voted for Romney, and being white was the more important predictor.

So if the GOP wants a future, they had better stop the mass immigration of nonwhites and the irreligious.

UPDATE: 62.5% of white immigrants who attend church more than once a week voted for Romney.  By contrast, 96.3% of black immigrants and 75.0% of other non-white immigrants voted for Obama.

If you believe that people basically can't be changed and children are like their parents, you should be concerned with the kinds of people who are coming into the US with plans to stay here for good.

The picture does not look good when we focus on IQ.  I typically use a vocabulary test given to participants of the bi-annual General Social Survey.  One problem with this measure is that it is biased against people who weren't raised speaking English.  For this blog post, let's focus on non-whites who also not black as a rough way to capture people born in this country whose family came to the U.S. in recent decades. It's crude (for example, American Indians get included), but we do what we can. Here is the mean IQ for this group listed by decade:

Mean IQ for nonwhites (blacks excluded, N = 764)

1980s  88.4
1990s  93.0
2000s  94.0
2010s  92.4

(If you're familiar with the GSS, you know surveys were conducted in the 70s, but not enough native-born non-whites were surveyed to be included.)  Mean IQ improved for this group for 30 years (80s, 90s, 00s) but that has reversed in this decade.

This is consistent with most of the IQ trends I've looked at recently. This past decade has seen a downturn for every group I've looked at (all whites, English/Welsh, German, Italian, Mexican, East Asian) except for blacks and the Irish.

The cause of the fall in IQ is, I imagine, different for different groups, and I assume that the drop for non-whites (excluding blacks) is due to changes in the mix of immigrants.  Whatever the reasons, most trends do not look good for America. 

Despite what Nassim Taleb thinks, average IQ predicts quite well how a country performs, and the US seems headed for mediocrity.  This, of course, could be reversed if we were picky about who gets to come to America, and if intelligent citizens had more babies, while dull ones had fewer.

The General Social Survey asks respondents the following: "What about the number of immigrants from Europe? Should it be increased a lot, increased a little, left the same as it is now, decreased a little, or decreased a lot?"  People were asked the same about immigrants from Latin America.

These questions enable us to measure a preference for one group or the other.  I created a variable that ranges from 1 to 9 where 9 is a person who wants to increase immigration a lot from Europe and decrease it a lot from Latin America.  A person who scores a 1 wants a large increase from Latin America and a big decrease from Europe.  A person who wants the same level for both groups, regardless of the level, is given a 5, which indicates no preference.  All the other numbers indicate milder forms of preference for either one group or the other.  So let's show the results by race of the respondent:

Immigration preference (%)

Whites (n = 1,033)

Very strong European  0.1
Strong European  2.6
Moderate European  5.3
Mild European  8.7
No preference  77.1
Mild Latin  5.5
Moderate Latin  0.4
Strong Latin 0.2
Very Strong Latin  0.1 

I was pretty sure the most popular score would be "no preference," but there are small percentages of whites who do show a European preference.  It's 16.7% of whites that show at least a mild European bias, and I imagine there are more who were unwilling to admit the preference to an interviewer.  So conservatively speaking, we can conclude that 17% of whites could be classified as at least mildly Eurocentric.  Some might want to put a nastier label on it and say that 17% of whites are white nationalists or white supremacists.

Notice, too, that over 6% of white Americans have a Latin American preference.  Let's now turn to black respondents: 

Blacks (n = 191)

Very strong European  0.0
Strong European  1.6
Moderate European  4.2
Mild European  4.7
No preference  83.2
Mild Latin  4.7
Moderate Latin  0.5
Strong Latin  0.1
Very Strong Latin  0.0

Blacks are even more likely than whites to not have a preference, but 10.5% have a Euro preference, compared to only 5.3% having at least a mild Latin preference.  These numbers are not consistent with blacks viewing Hispanic immigrants as brothers in the fight against whites.

Other Races (n = 77)

Very strong European  0.0
Strong European  7.8
Moderate European  3.9
Mild European  6.5
No preference  68.8
Mild Latin  10.4
Moderate Latin  2.6
Strong Latin  0.0
Very Strong Latin  0.0

You actually have a higher percent of people from other races showing at least some Euro bias than whites: 18.2% to be precise.  Slightly over two-thirds report no preference, while 13% have a Latin preference. Keep in mind that many of these "other race" are Hispanics.  I would have expected more people from this group to show favoritism to other Latinos.

Overall, there is a noteworthy number of people from each race who are more favorable to immigration by whites than immigration by Hispanics (or at least less unfavorable). So if these people are indeed white nationalists, then we have white nationalists of all colors.

In this new meta-analysis of 51 studies, liberal researchers found a whopping correlation of -.03 between immigrants and crime. In other words, even when liberals try REALLY hard, they cannot say that more immigration results in less crime.

And further, even they have to admit that the children and grandchildren of immigrants have MUCH higher crime rates.

Notice, too, how all of their studies conflate legal with illegal immigration. What they have attempted to do is show everyone that conservatives are wrong in saying illegals are more criminal than native-borns by showing the effect of overall immigration on crime. Dishonest.

They also confuse the issue by mixing groups, for example, Mexican and Chinese immigrants--two VERY different groups in terms of street crime (the Chinese, of course, have very low rates).

Anyway, they have talked very loudly about lower crime rates among immigrants, but this meta-analysis shows that this is false, and they fail to acknowledge that their own data and methods indicate that LONG-TERM our crime problem gets much worse with mass overall immigration.

As for illegal immigration, they have a lot more research to do. And I don't trust them.

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.

This new study looks to see if the flood of Cuban nationals into Miami in 1980 had a negative impact on the fertility of non-Cuban Miami women.

The researchers found that it reduced, at least in the short-term, the number of births to women who rent because rental costs went way up.

By contrast, women who owned homes were unaffected. As expected, it looks like working-class Americans are hurt the most by mass immigration.

Sociologists are such dumbasses. For almost a century, they have been predicting high crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods. Such a prediction comes from their view that strong institutions -- families, schools, churches, community organizations, etc. -- effectively control young people. If the institutions are weak, people are "free" to follow the shortcuts of crime.  Since immigrants are new to the country, they haven't had the time and stability to build high-functioning institutions.

But over the past couple of decades, anti-immigration sentiment motivated sociologists to find that immigration actually lowers crime, or at least doesn't affect crime levels.

But instead of admitting their views were wrong and accepting the idea that immigration (notice how they don't differentiate legal from illegal) often selects for types of individuals not especially prone to crime, and that institutions are not that important for behavior, we see studies like this new one that propose that immigrants -- people still wet from the Rio Grande -- are now instantly supposed to have stronger institutions than citizens who have been building up their American institutions for centuries.

They will do back flips on top of back flips to avoid biological or any kind of internal explanation of crime.

The details give me a headache, but this new study reports that, overall, 1999-2016 immigration in Great Britain has hurt native wages.

As an example of how this works in real life, college students should be thrilled with all these immigrant professors. You can't understand what the hell they're saying in class, and the low salaries drive native-born talent into other fields, but just think of all the additional multicultural services and administrators the cheap professors pay for!

UPDATE: Keep in mind that even among economist researchers, the ratio of progressives to non-progressives is 5:1. All research disciplines are organized to generate liberal-friendly findings. The idea of objectivity is laughable. A rational person can dismiss liberal results as due to bias, and conservative results as a case of the data screaming too loudly to be silenced.

A new meta-analysis of 24 studies found that ethnic minorities are at higher risk than members of the majority to have psychotic experiences (odds ratio = 1.4) and symptoms (odds ratio = 1.4). The risk was highest for minorities from the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) and the Middle East (odds ratio = 3.3) living in Europe, and Hispanics (odds ratio = 2.0)  and blacks (odds ratio = 1.9) in the United States. The authors also reported a heightened risk of delusional symptoms among immigrants (odds ratio = 1.5).

Of course, the researchers suggest discrimination is the cause of these manifestations of mental illness, but whether it's due to social or biological causes (or both) why don't we have folks stay in their home countries? It's better for us, and it might be better for them.

Research universally shows that the offspring of immigrants are much more criminal than their parents. If I were contemplating a move to the United States and had kids, I might think twice.

America ranks number one in the world in locking up criminals. The incarceration rate is 655 inmates per 100,000 population. Even though rates have dropped a bit in recent years, on any given day, roughly 2 million adults are either in jail or prison.

Compare our imprisonment rate with that of the countries that send the most immigrants to the US each year:

Imprisonment rate for top 10 immigration countries (ranked in terms of numbers of immigrants) 

1. Mexico  165
2. India  33
3. China  118
4. Philippines  172
5. El Salvador  610
6. Vietnam  122
7. Cuba  510
8. Dominican Republic  244
9. South Korea  109
10. Guatemala  136

Only El Salvador and Cuba are even in the same universe with the US. How often do we see immigrant kids join a gang and end up with a long stretch in prison? The chances of this are much higher than back home.

Of course, the risk of becoming a criminal is much higher for some groups than others, but how many parents worry that if they move to the United States, their child could end up in prison?  I moved specifically to lower the risk of my kids getting into drugs (few white kids end up in gangs).

The bigger income you will earn in America comes with an increased risk that a child's life will be ruined by prison. Even when he gets out, he may never get a decent job for the rest of his life. Parents need to think about this.  

I ran across an interesting study that looks at immigration and crime. In typical fashion, it doesn't do a good job of looking specifically at illegal aliens because the government does not keep good stats on this population.

The author reviews 125 studies from many countries. He cites the well-known finding that immigrants overall have lower crime rates than native-borns. He fails to stress that this is not the case in Europe. Immigrants are more criminal there. He does acknowledge that not all immigrant groups are the same: some have high rates of criminality, some don't.

He does a decent job of explaining why immigrants sometimes have lower crime levels: 1) they are typically older than the most crime-prone age group (15-24); 2) they are sometimes better educated; 3) they are typically employed here; and 4) their foreignness makes them self-conscious. I would add that being in a foreign country makes a person more fearful, and fearful people try to stay out trouble. Immigrants are much more fearful of police than natives.

But then we get to the headline of this review. ALL research indicates that second- and third-generation immigrants are much MORE criminal that their parents and grandparents. This is a universal finding. The author chalks it up to social factors like not being able to mainstream, etc.

You should consider a genetic perspective to make sense of these research findings. You've got to be a risk-taker to leave your home country and start a new life in a new place, especially if the move is very difficult. You have to be the type of person who sees a distant goal, typically more money, and will do whatever the hell it takes to get it. So immigrants have more of these traits than the average compatriot they leave behind.

But the children of the immigrants for genetic reasons tend to turn out not much different than the typical person from the Old Country. And so it goes for future generations.

Americans need to take the long view. When a person, legal or illegal, moves to our country, we don't get an individual, we get a family line. That person might leave 100 descendants over the next few decades. What kind of population do you get?

For example, first-generation Mexican immigrants probably have been risk takers and goal-oriented, but many years and tens of millions of people later, you have a population that is comparatively poor, prone to gang formation and crime, allergic to education, and that votes Democrat. And neither the free market nor all the social programs in the world will change that brute reality.

David Brooks in a NYT's piece claims that immigrants are superior to Americans--they "outhustle" us. Is this true?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asks non-retired participants about their work status. Let's use full-time employment status as our measure of "hustlers." According to the data, 61.3% of white and 53.4% of black Americans work full-time. For immigrants of all races, it's 56.3%.

Where exactly is the mind-blowing hustle Brooks is referring to? I think Brooks is doing what liberals often do: take a black reality that's troubling and then pretend it's whites who have the problem. For example, private gun ownership is portrayed as scary, and images of white rednecks are drummed up, but progressives are actually afraid of blacks having firearms.

People like Brooks have an instinctive dislike of ordinary whites because this group is seen as actually being capable of organized nastiness, while brown people are not. He is wrong about this. I'm no historian, but I do seem to remember something about whites not doing very well in Haiti around 1791.  

Continuing on the theme of how the foreign-born vote, I used the General Social Survey (GSS) to go back as far as we can on presidential elections. Here are estimates of what percent of them voted for the Republican presidential candidate. I divided it by sex since the GSS over-samples women:


Percent voting for candidate--Men

2012 Romney 26.7
2008 McCain  31.2
2004 Bush  38.3
2000 Bush  41.2
1996 Dole  26.2
1992 Bush  37.4
1988 Bush  70.6
1984 Reagan  56.6
1980 Reagan  43.2
1976 Ford  35.8
1972 Nixon  60.0


Percent Voting for Candidate--Women

2012 Romney  28.9
2008 McCain  23.1
2004 Bush  50.4
2000 Bush  43.6
1996 Dole  19.2
1992 Bush  35.8
1988 Bush  71.1
1984 Reagan  60.6
1980 Reagan  43.2
1976 Ford  42.7
1972 Nixon  57.5

The numbers for the last two cycles are pathetic. You might argue that Republicans did well in the past with immigrants, at least during certain elections, but you'll notice that even though it's a roller coaster, there is an overall tendency towards smaller numbers over the past 40 years. Based on previous analysis, I'll wager that the decline, at least some of it, is due to the browning of immigrant voters. Third Worlders and their descendants love Big Government. The vast majority of immigrants eligible to vote in the 70s and 80s were white, I bet, but much less so now. I'll look at that in the next post.

If you claim that immigrants would vote for Republicans if the candidates were pro-immigrant, then the only bad year should arguably be 2012 with Romney saying illegal immigrants should self-deport. Yet no matter what Republicans do, the immigrant vote has generally stayed well under 50% for more than two decades.

So many elite conservatives are lamenting the current embrace of anti-foreigner populism over intellectual conservatism.  A recent example is Matt Lewis' Too Dumb to Fail. His message seems to be that we need to sell smart conservatism to the masses who are inclined to be stupid.

But look at the above map. Five important states--Texas, Florida, Virginia, Arizona, and Nevada--have large foreign-born populations, and I showed previously that our current foreign-born are typically non-white, and some are non-Christian. And those folks and their descendants do not vote Republican. And they never will vote majority Republican.

Who is stupid, exactly?

According to Pew Research:

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. The educational credentials of these recent arrivals are striking. More than six-in-ten (61%) adults ages 25 to 64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history.

Compared with the educational attainment of the population in their country of origin, recent Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group. For example, about 27% of adults ages 25 to 64 in South Korea and 25% in Japan have a bachelor’s degree or more. In contrast, nearly 70% of comparably aged recent immigrants from these two countries have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Recent Asian immigrants are also about three times as likely as recent immigrants from other parts of the world to receive their green cards—or permanent resident status—on the basis of employer rather than family sponsorship (though family reunification remains the most common legal gateway to the U.S. for Asian immigrants, as it is for all immigrants).

The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans—foreign born and U.S born, adults and children—to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8% of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1% in 1965. By comparison, non-Hispanic whites are 197.5 million and 63.3%, Hispanics 52.0 million and 16.7% and non-Hispanic blacks 38.3 million and 12.3%.

Asian Americans trace their roots to any of dozens of countries in the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Each country of origin subgroup has its own unique history, culture, language, religious beliefs, economic and demographic traits, social and political values, and pathways into America.

But despite often sizable subgroup differences, Asian Americans are distinctive as a whole, especially when compared with all U.S. adults, whom they exceed not just in the share with a college degree (49% vs. 28%), but also in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800) and median household wealth ($83,500 vs. $68,529).

Here's a DHS report of the number of U.S. naturalizations in 2011. I've listed below the top twenty sending countries. Next to the country, I show the median personal income for people born in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 64 whose family came from the respective country (ACS data) . The overall median American income is $45,149.

Median personal income
1. Mexico 29,076
2. India 50,000
3. Philippines 39,460
4. China 51,921
5. Colombia 38,422
6. Cuba 40,000
7. Vietnam 39,910
8. Dominican Republic 30,000
9. Jamaica 30,969
10. Haiti 32,036
11. El Salvador 30,000
12. S. Korea 41,701
13. Pakistan 41,537
14. Peru 38,000
15. Brazil 39,460
16. Nigeria 34,300
17. Canada 37,376
18. Iran 41,537
19. United Kingdom 45,559
20. Poland 41,537

People from Mexico dwarf all other countries in numbers of 2011 U.S. naturalized citizens (95,000 Mexicans vs. 46,000 Indians--the next largest group) but the median income of Mexican-Americans is only a fraction of the average. It is the poorest group on the list, even lower than black groups. But the news is worse than that. Of the 20 countries listed, only Asian Indians, Chinese, and those whose families came from the UK earn above-average incomes. Americans with ancestors from the other 17 countries are below-average. And Dominicans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, and Nigerians are really low. Immigration from these countries is leading to more low-income Americans. And I'm focusing on native-born Americans, not their immigrant parents. (The reality is probably a little better since the average age of the native-born of many of these groups is lower than the overall American average, and income, of course, is related to age.)

The only bright spot is that two of the large immigration groups--Indians and Chinese--earn a lot of money.

Back to the bad news: not only do the poor groups tend to vote Democrat, their better off members do too, and even wealthy immigrant groups like Indian and Chinese Americans lean Left.

Here's a recent study from The European Journal of Paediatric Neurology:

Progressive encephalopathy (PE) in children is a heterogeneous group of individually rare diseases with a cumulative incidence which compares to that of neural tube defects and infantile hydrocephalus. The main cause of PE is metabolic disease, but neurodegenerative disorders lacking known metabolic or other causes also exist. PE poses a challenge to our health care system due to difficulties in its diagnosis and management, 4–6 and a high case fatality. For example, in a cohort study we showed that the case fatality of PE was 36.9%. In the same cohort, the incidence rate was 6.4 per 100,000 person years at risk, and the cumulative incidence was 0.6 per 1000 live births, comparable to that of other reports.

Using data from this cohort combined with outstandingly detailed national-wide population statistics we wanted to pin point the increased risk of PE associated with consanguinity. Over the past 20 years there has been a six-fold increase in non-Western immigration to Norway (the nomenclature regarding non-Western has recently been suggested revised). In 2006, non-Western immigrants accounted for 18.6% of Oslo’s total population of 538,411 inhabitants. The largest non-Western group is from Pakistan. In Pakistan, approximately 60% of marriages are consanguineous and unions occur primarily between first cousins. Norway is the only country in the world collecting data on consanguinity for its entire population at birth. Approximately 50% of children of Pakistani origin born in Norway are the result of consanguineous unions, defined as parents who are second cousins or more closely related. Of first generation Pakistani immigrants, 43.9% were first cousins. In Norway, parental consanguinity in the Pakistani population is associated with an increased risk of stillbirth, congenital malformations, and infant death, all considered complex genetic conditions.

When autosomal recessive gene defects are rare, the likelihood of unrelated parents being carriers for the same defect is small. The less frequent the recessive gene, the stronger the likelihood that an affected individual is the product of a consanguineous mating. Since many of the diseases causing PE are determined by single mutant genes, for example in autosomal recessive inborn errors of metabolism, it was reasonable to assume that children of consanguineous unions had a higher risk of PE, and that PE consequently would be more common in children of Pakistani origin. However, the degree of increased risk of PE caused by consanguinity has not been precisely assessed in previous studies. Here we report an approximately seven-fold increased risk of PE in children of Pakistani origin and an eleven-fold increased risk when consanguineous Pakistanis were compared to the general Norwegian population. We also estimated that avoidance of consanguinity in the Pakistani population would result in 50% reduction of PE in this group.

Michael Barone on U.S. demographic trends:

Since 1990, Americans have been moving out of California to other states in large numbers. The Golden State's population growth in the last two decades has reached the national average only because of Latin and Asian immigration.

That immigration, to California and elsewhere, is one of the two big demographic trends that have reshaped the country over the last 40 years. The other is the movement of vast numbers of people from high-tax states in the Northeast and industrial Midwest to lower-tax and more economically vibrant states elsewhere.

Both these movements have halted, at least temporarily. American mobility is near an all-time low. As in the Depression of the 1930s, people tend to stay put in hard times. You don't want to sell your house if you're underwater on your mortgage.

And immigration has plunged. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that from 2005 to 2010, more people have moved from the United States to Mexico than the other way around. I suspect that reverse migration is still going on.

The question is whether those trends will resume when -- if? -- good times return.

My prediction is that we won't ever again see the heavy Latin immigration we saw between 1983 and 2007, which averaged 300,000 legal immigrants and perhaps as many illegals annually.

Mexican and other Latin birthrates fell more than two decades ago. And Mexico, source of 60 percent of Latin immigrants, is now a majority-middle-class country.

Asian immigration may continue, primarily from China and India, especially if we have the good sense to change our laws to let in more high-skill immigrants.

But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya.

Continued domestic out-migration from high-tax states? Certainly from California, where Gov. Jerry Brown wants to raise taxes even higher. With foreign immigration down, California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population.

Fortunately, governors of some other high-tax states are itching to cut taxes. The shale oil and natural gas boom has job-seekers streaming to hitherto unlikely spots like North Dakota and northeast Ohio. Great Plains cities like Omaha and Des Moines are looking pretty healthy, too.

It's not clear whether Atlanta and its smaller kin -- Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville, Jacksonville -- will resume their robust growth. They've suffered high unemployment lately.

But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you've just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America.

Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter century. One in 12 Americans lives there.

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that's one trend that I hope continues.