Country of Exiles Read Free Page B

lunch-table about the intolerable misfortune of being born in Ohio or Tennessee—a recognition of the validity of place which we ourselves accord to the Welshman, Irishman and Scotsman at home. It is a pity to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values.” From “Landscape and Characters,” collected in Durrell,
Spirit of Place, Letters, and Essays on Travel
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969), pp. 156–63.
    47. Timothy J. Hutton and Jeffrey G. Williamson,
The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 232–33, 245. After World War I and theimposition of immigration quotas, “the globalization-inequality connection was broken” (p. 245).
    48. See Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.,
Immigration Policy and the American Labor Force
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Labor historian David Montgomery also writes that “closing the door to Europeans accelerated the stabilization of ethnic communities in industrial towns and cities. It reduced the rate of return to Europe to less than half its prewar level, increased the proportion of women among those let in to roughly half the total, and encouraged foreign-born residents to apply for citizenship as some protection against deportation.” See Montgomery,
Fall of the House of Labor
, p. 462.
    49. Robert Reich,
The Work of Nations
(New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 43–57; and Alan Ehrenhalt,
The Lost City
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 90–110.
    50. See, on this historical tenacity, Frederick Hoxie, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation Before World War I,”
South Dakota History
10 (Winter 1979), 1–24.
    51. John Bodnar,
The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 212.
    52. Schrag,
Out of Place in America
, pp. 12–13. Alan Ehrenhalt’s book on Chicago in the 1950s,
The Lost City
, captures the place-oriented character of the times.
    53. George W. Pierson,
The Moving American
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 29. See also, Kenneth T. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), for another view of this historical pattern. “The American population,” says Jackson of the nineteenth-century tendency, “was very transitory. The United States was not only a nation of immigrants, but a nation of migrants.” Yet, “despite such mobility, permanent residence was considered desirable, and, then as now, home ownership was regarded as a counterweight to the rootlessness of an urbanizing population” (pp. 50–51).
    54. Peter Berger,
The Homeless Mind
(New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 75–77.
    55. On decline in mobility rates in the 1970s, see Larry Long,
Migration
and Residential Mobility in the United States
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 52.
    56. “No-Fault Divorce Law Is Assailed in Michigan and Debate Heats Up,”
WSJ
, November 5, 1996, 1; for a fine account of the way expanded social security and federal housing loans facilitated mobility, see Deborah Dash Moore,
To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Dream in Miami and L.A
. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 27–63; and, for a journalistic, data-filled portrait of the
extreme
mobility patterns of educated Americans in the 1990s, see “America’s Most Educated Places,”
American Demographics
, October 1995, 44–51.
    57. “Geographical Mobility: March 1993 to March 1994,”
Current Population Statistics
, P20–485 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1995), viii.
    58. Louis Winnick,
New People in Old Neighborhoods: The Role of Immigrants in Rejuvenating New York’s Communities
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), pp. xv–xvi. For current immigration figures, see
Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997
(Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census), 10–13; Bureau of the Census,