An Urban's Rural View

To split the year between the Oregon coast and the District of Columbia after nearly a decade in Omaha, as I've been doing, is to get a slap-in-the-face reminder of America's ethnic diversity.

The last time my wife and I lived in Washington, in the 1970s, the town had an African-American majority. Today it's a bit less than 50% black but teeming with other ethnic groups.

Maybe it's because our D.C. condo is near George Washington University, but when I venture out on the streets I see scores of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indians from India. Everywhere I turn in the capital I hear Spanish.

Omaha had ethnic diversity as well, of course, but by and large it felt plain vanilla. Washington, by comparison, foreshadows the coming of the "non-majority America." By 2042, the Census Bureau has said, the United States will be a country unlike any other in history. Thirty years from now no race or ethnic group -- white, black, Hispanic or Asian -- will have a majority of the American population.

Our culture already reflects this coming in ways big and small. So do our politics. Immigration reform _-- an issue of no little interest to agriculture -- is back on the table largely because some leading Republicans think Mitt Romney's stance on immigration reform cost him the election. He got only 27% of the Hispanic vote, versus the 44% George W. Bush, a proponent of immigration reform, received in 2004.

Awareness of this coming multi-ethnic, multi-colored society has arrived much faster in some parts of the country than in others. If you're in agriculture in Florida or California or Texas, you know all about it. If you're in agriculture in Montana or Iowa or South Carolina, it may have less effect on your daily life.

But if the trend is variable in its impact, it is very real and almost certainly unstoppable. Were the U.S. to deport all 11 million of its illegal aliens -- which it won't -- that might affect the date the non-majority America arrives. But arrive it will. It's baked in, demographically. The question, politically, is how fast it spreads from Washington, D.C., to Omaha.

For the moment it's concentrated in the big cities and on the coasts. Republicans hang on to their majority in the House of Representatives because in our gerrymandered system so many Congressmen represent safe, white-majority districts in the heartland. How long will that last? And will the Republicans ever figure out how to woo the Hispanics and the blacks and other ethnics to vote GOP?

If diversity is one of America's strengths, as I have long believed, the country is about to become stronger. But many of its consequences are unpredictable, including some of the implications for agriculture. Labor-intensive farm operations have a keen interest in immigration reform, but all American farmers will feel the reverberations of the coming changes in our culture and our politics.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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