Creative Class

American attitudes toward immigration are hardening, according to a new Gallup poll. Half of all Americans say immigration should be “decreased” – up 11 points from 39 percent last year.

Anti-immigration sentiment is growing across all major political groupings. Some 61 percent of Republicans say they would like to see immigration decreased, up from 46 percent in 2008, compared to 46 percent of Democrats, up from 39 percent; and 44 percent of Independents, up from 37 percent.

Southerners show the greatest anti-immigration sentiment with 54 percent saying they would like to see immigration decreased, followed by easterners (51 percent), midwesterners (48 percent), and westerners (44 percent).

The poll also saw a shift in American attitudes toward whether “immigration is a good or a bad thing for the country” with more than a third (36 percent) saying it is a bad thing.

Gallup notes that this marks “a return to the attitudes that prevailed in the first few years after 9/11.”

Immigration in America has gone in great cycles over the past century or two. While immigration has typically fallen during economic crises, the U.S. has prospered from its relative openness to global talent. America saw an influx of leading scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians during the Great Depression which helped bolster its position at the frontiers of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and the arts during the long post-war boom.

Economic crises are transformative periods when talent flows can be reset and countries and regions rise and decline. The future belongs to those countries and regions that can attract the best and brightest across the entire world.

Growing anti-immigrant sentiment, should it continue, is bad news for American technology, entrepreneurship, and the economy in general. Let’s hope it turns around.

Anti-immigration sentiment may be growing in some parts of the country, but this Philadelphia non-profit welcomes them as part of a new urban future.

Stephen Walt spells out the advantages of tolerance, openness, and cosmopolitanism from the realist respective (thanks to Jon Rauch for the pointer). He goes to great pains to point out that he is talking about cosmopolitan openness not just ethnic assimilation.

[T]he pressures of international competition give an advantage to any society that can “cream” some of the smartest and/or hardest working people from all over the world. How? By making that society an attractive place to live and work, mostly by creating an atmosphere of equality and toleration…

And note that this argument isn’t just about ethnic assimilation. In effect, what I’m suggesting is that from a realist perspective, there is a strong case for “small-l” liberal toleration. All else equal, societies that establish strong norms and institutions that protect individual rights and freedoms (including those governing sexual preference, I might add) will become attractive destinations for a wider array of potential citizens than societies that try to maintain a high degree of uniformity. And when you can choose from a bigger talent pool, over time you’re going to do better.

Same-sex couples have been getting married for five years now in Massachusetts. Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute has done the number-crunching and identified intriguing economic benefits.

“Data from the American Community Survey suggest that marriage equality has a small but positive impact on the number of individuals in same-sex couples who are attracted to a state. However, marriage equality appears to have a larger impact on the types of individuals in same-sex couples who are attracted to a state. In Massachusetts, marriage equality resulted in an increase of younger, female, and more highly educated and skilled individuals in same-sex couples moving to the state… The evidence that marriage equality may enhance the ability of Massachusetts to attract highly skilled creative class workers among those in same-sex couples offers some support that the policy has the potential to have a long-term positive economic impact.”

One of the more controversial ideas in Richard’s Creative Class theory is the Gay Index. To review, he doesn’t say that gays cause creativity, but that their acceptance by the straight community is a sign of tolerance which is important to creative class folks. Well, it looks like a lot of America is becoming more tolerant.

With Iowa and Vermont becoming the third and fourth states to allow same-sex marriage this week, there is obviously a trend. New Hampshire’s State Senate is preparing to vote on a House-passed measure. California is awaiting a state Supreme Court ruling on Proposition 8, which prohibited gay marriage. The Washington, D.C. council unanimously passed a same-sex marriage ordinance but it has to be approved by Congress, so will probably be overturned.

What all of this is showing is a remarkably fast change in public attitudes. The larger public image of gays has shifted from promiscuous pedophiles to 25-year couples who want to get married.

• A third of Americans think same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, up from 22 percent in 2004. This five-year change is indicative of a major cultural shift.
• Sixty percent think some sort of legal recognition is appropriate for same-sex couples.
• California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage, passed by 52 percent, meaning that 48 percent or almost half of the state’s population approved.
• The vote in the D.C. council, which has six of 13 black members, rebuts the idea that the African Americans are uniformly anti gay rights.

News stories point to churches like Quakers and Unitarians that perform same-sex marriages. However, a couple of decades ago no denomination would do so. The difficult changes in Quaker Meetings took years and some members leaving to happen. There’s a saying in Quaker circles that it took 200 years for Quakers to oppose slavery – but they did it 100 years before the rest of the country. The same thing is proving true with gay marriage.

So if America is becoming more accepting of gays, what does this mean for the creative class and the economy?

West Virginia politics blogger, Clem Guttata reports that, “The notorious Russell S. Sobel, author of the West Virginia Republicans’ (failed) blueprint for electoral success last cycle, Unleashing Capitalism,” has strong words of support for state legislation that would provide equal treatment for gays and lesbians.

So why should a conservative state pass legislation that p the notorious Russell S. Sobel, author of the West Virginia Republicans (failed) blueprint for electoral success last cycle, “Unleashing Capitalism”, saying: provides protected status for gays and lesbians?The answer is because diversity and acceptance — not just tolerance — are among the missing pieces of the state’s economic puzzle, according to Russell S. Sobel, an economics professor and the James Clark Coffman Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at West Virginia University.

It may be a small building block to success, but it’s still important, several interviewed said. That’s because entrepreneurship often starts with people who don’t always fit in with what is considered “mainstream” society and think about things in a different way than others might. Those different thoughts and approaches often lead to entrepreneurial ideas.

“The idea is real entrepreneurs are different people, strange, quirky. They think differently,” Sobel said.

He said Richard Florida’s studies on creative class theory, while more sociological than economical, has some credibility. Florida, who wrote the international bestseller “The Rise of the Creative Class,” teaches at the University of Toronto and has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University and MIT.

Florida’s study said there is a link between the areas that creative people — such as architects, engineers, musicians and writers — live and work and the areas where gays and lesbians live and work.

Entrepreneurship tends to flourish in such areas, Sobel said.

“It makes 100 percent sense. More entrepreneurial climates are in more accepting, diverse areas,” he said.

Economists who study entrepreneurship also suggest there is a correlation between areas accepting gays and lesbians and business success, Sobel said.

“If we want the state to be entrepreneurial, we want a place that is accepting and diverse,” he said.

AMEN.

Take a look at Richard Florida’s recent appearance on Allan Gregg in Conversation where the pair discuss the power of the bohemian and gay and lesbian factors on a city, tolerance, prosperity, Who’s Your City?, and more.

This AP report is just sickening.

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars. Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America. From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders. There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

Bloomberg reports:

Tour buses have hit San Francisco’s well-known gay district, and some residents are none too happy about it. While the visitors may consider themselves tourists just taking in another site, locals call them something else: quick-hit voyeurs who disrupt traffic and parking and rarely spend any money …  Castro residents say the buses started showing up about four months ago, and now arrive every Thursday and Sunday, typically between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.

The Castro district became a haven for gays during the political and social activism of the 1960s and 1970s. One of its merchants, camera shop owner Harvey Milk, became San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor. Milk was assassinated in 1978, further uniting the community. A movie based on his life is planned for release later this year, which may draw even more tourists to the neighborhood, residents say.

Your thoughts?

A couple of weeks ago I was invited back home to Toronto to attend the Canadian Youth Arts Network Forum wherein a group of about 40 young artists were brought together with various leaders in the cultural and creative industries and policy advisors.  We discussed ways to strengthen the youth arts sector and our common predicament under this government among other things. It was a really interesting meeting of minds and practices, and a lot of critical information, expertise, and advice were made available not just to the youth delegates of the conference, but to the leaders and advisors as well. It was the fortunate situation of us mutually needing a better sense of the others’ perspective.

There has been much made of the business argument for the arts. As artists, we’re fortunate that it’s within the mandate of institutes like the MPI and that they’ve made the kind of point that might resonate with our current federal regime: the arts are drivers of regional income. They help people make money – that’s a compelling argument to Conservative values. Another potentially persuasive argument to Conservatives or those of any political persuasion is the outreach potential of the arts to two oft neglected groups that I hope to hear addressed in the upcoming debates: youth and the homeless.

In both cases, the arts have shown themselves to be the most effective tools to affect the lives of youth at risk or otherwise, and the homeless as well, particularly in urban environments. This is on target with much of the latest research and theory on cities. Prof. Adam Krims’ latest work, Music and Urban Geography theorizes about how music affects and has affected the tremendous physical upheaval that urban and ex-urban space experienced in the modern, post WWII era. One of his most interesting observations is the way in which the city has moved toward design intensity which he defines in the introductions as “the tendency in advanced societies for products and services to owe much of their value to aspects of design and informational content, and for design and informational aspects of products and services to develop rapidly.”

As young people and (sub)urbanites, the bar has been raised as far as our tolerance and expectations of design. The simple fact is that unless the content of our products and services appeal to this heightened design sensibility, they are disadvantaging themselves with respect to young people as well as urban populations who are native to this design intensive era we occupy. The value of art has never been higher. It’s no surprise that, at the international level, the UN has acknowledged hip hop’s outreach potential with their Messenger of Truth program. At the local level in Toronto, programs like Sketch make this point more poignantly than I ever could. Even at the most crass level of pop culture in these media-intense times, not supporting your ability to compete in the arts is like surrendering your access to the interest of the youth contingent, at least.

If the arts are understood to be the most effective outreach tool for affecting change in youth, then by cutting funding for the arts are we diminishing our ability to communicate with our young people? What is the potential fallout of a less engaged youth population? If arts programs are helping those without homes get on their feet and contribute to society then why do we not understand contributions to the arts as “investments” rather than “funding”?

Much will be said at the debates, but it will be more important to see what our politicians actually do.

And now as always, some music.