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Race, Ethnicity and the 2020 National Election

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 4, 2020 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PDT)

Marriott Marquis, Grand Ballroom 2
Hosted By: National Economic Association & American Society of Hispanic Economists
  • Chair: Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew Research Center

A Look Ahead at the 2020 Elections: How Important is Diversity in the Candidate Pool?

Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes
,
University of California-Merced
José R. Bucheli
,
New Mexico State University

Abstract

In the midst of a hyperpolarized political climate, when the 116th Congress took office in 2019, it became the most gender, racially and ethnically diverse in the history of the United States. For the first time, about 22% of the House of Representatives and Senate voting members are now racial or ethnic minorities, and about a similar percentage are women (Bialik 2019). Diversity is also characterizing the candidate pool seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, which stands to be the most diverse candidate pool in U.S. history. Our main aim is to gauge how diversity in elections’ candidate pools influences political participation. Of special interest to us are groups with a historically lower participation record, including some minorities and younger eligible voters (e.g. Generation Z in the next elections) since their views on social and political issues differ notably from those of older generations. In addition, we are interested in heterogeneous responses based on the composition of the electorate where eligible voters reside, and on their geographic location in ‘swing’ states.

Federal Job Guarantee, Baby Bond and Reparations: A Three-Legged Stool of Racial Economic Justice

Darrick Hamilton
,
Ohio State University

Abstract

This essay is going to make the case that in order to break out of this rut of increasing inequality and growing despair that we need a shift from neoliberal and poverty governance frames, which attempt to manage “seemingly” bad behavior and the work ethic of the poor and black and brown people, to an economic rights frame administered in a race-conscious way in which a baseline public provision of services and opportunities are guaranteed to empower all people and to shield vulnerable populations from predatory firms in which their for-profit motives and distorted economic power incentivize them to extract and exploit. I will focus on three such policies, the first two are universal but race-conscious, a substantial child trust program – widely known as baby bonds, and a federal job guarantee; while the third, reparations, is demonstrably a race- specific program in which the recipients would be tied to a lineage of state assisted and complicit extractive atrocity stemming in U.S. chattel slavery. These three policies, together, would establish a firm three-legged stool for racial economic justice specifically and U.S. economic justice more broadly.

Predicting the Effect of Adding a Citizenship Question to the 2020 Census

J. David Brown
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Misty Heggeness
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Suzanne M. Dorinski
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Lawrence Warren
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Moises Yi
,
U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract

The addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census could affect the self-response rate, a key driver of the cost and quality of a census. We find that citizenship question response patterns in the American Community Survey (ACS) suggest that it is a sensitive question when asked about administrative record noncitizens but not when asked about administrative record citizens. ACS respondents who were administrative record noncitizens in 2017 frequently choose to skip the question or answer that the person is a citizen. We predict the effect on self-response to the entire survey by comparing mail response rates in the 2010 ACS, which included a citizenship question, with those of the 2010 census, which did not have a citizenship question, among households in both surveys. We compare the actual ACS–census difference in response rates for households that may contain noncitizens (more sensitive to the
question) with the difference for households containing only U.S. citizens. We estimate that the addition of a citizenship question will have an 8.0 percentage point larger effect on self-response rates in households that may have noncitizens relative to those with only U.S. citizens. Assuming that the citizenship question does not affect unit self-response in all-citizen households and applying the 8.0 percentage point drop to the 28.1 % of housing units potentially having at least one noncitizen would predict an overall 2.2 percentage point drop in self-response in the 2020 census, increasing costs and reducing the quality of the population count.

Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence

Trevon Logan
,
Ohio State University

Abstract

This paper explores the historical roots of low tax rates in Southern states. I provide the first estimates of the effect of Reconstruction-era tax policy on the likelihood of violent attacks against black politicians. I find a strong positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increases the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25%. I also find that counties where black oficeholders were attacked had the most aggressive negative tax revenue changes between 1870 and 1880. The result is robust to numerous economic, social, historical, and political factors. I further show that violence against black politicians is unrelated to other forms of post-Reconstruction racial violence. This provides the first quantitative evidence that political violence at Reconstruction's end was related to local public finance and black political efficacy.

Communities under Siege: Ethnic Profiling under Auspices of 287(g) in North Carolina

Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba
,
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Abstract

The strengthening of the Latino threat narrative and the push to localize and criminalize immigration enforcement has arguably worked to debase Latino communities in the U.S. Specifically, programs operated by the Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency (ICE) under the Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS), such as the 287(g) Delegation of Immigration Authority, have provoked concerns of racial profiling and intimidation by local law enforcement officers (GAO 2009). The 287(g) program allows local and state law enforcement agencies to partner with ICE to “combat specific challenges in their communities” (ICE 2008) – a localization of immigration enforcement on the basis of community safety.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of 287(g) agreements on ethnic profiling of Latinos in traffic stops by local law enforcement agencies in North Carolina. The concern is that Latino Americans may experience a heighted level of policing and interrogative scrutiny of citizenship by local law enforcement officers, given a potential typecasting of Latinos as the “usual suspects” in a pejorative sense. This construction of social illegality, coined by Flores and Schachter (2018), along with the delegated authority of ICE, may unintentionally endorse the ethnic profiling of Latinos.

The preliminary results uncover the unfortunate reality that Latino Americans are experiencing increased levels of policing as a result of the localization of immigration enforcement. Furthermore, these results suggest that 287(g) agreements shift the terrain by which local law enforcement officers engage with Latino communities. The ethnic profiling of Latino Americans by local law enforcement officers, on the basis of suspect citizenship, is not inconsequential. It is likely that ethnic profiling, a concomitant of ethnic based inequalities, adds an additional strain to the socioeconomic wellbeing and upward mobility of Latino Americans living in these communities.

Estimating the Present Value of Black Agricultural Land Loss in the United States, 1910 –1977

Dania V. Francis
,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Abstract

The discussion of reparations for African Americans has gained national attention as prominent Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for reparations as part of a progressive Democratic platform in the 2020 elections. Many argue that, in addition to restitution for slavery and the violence of the Jim Crow Era, reparations should also address federal, state, and local laws, policies, and ordinances that worked to deny African Americans access to wealth-building economic opportunities -- like home and land ownership -- while simultaneously subsidizing those opportunities for White Americans. A key component of any reparations program will be to estimate the effect of discriminatory laws and state sanctioned actions on black wealth accumulation.

In this paper, we focus specifically on estimating the value of lost black agricultural land. Countless black farmers fell victim to violent dispossession of their land prior to the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s. Many more, however, lost land due to discriminatory federal farm credit policies, and the discriminatory implementation of federal, state and local agricultural policies, before, during and after the Civil Rights Era. We use Census of Agriculture data on black ownership of agricultural land from 1910 to 1997 to estimate the present (2018) value of average yearly land losses to black land owners. By our most conservative estimate, the dispossession of black agricultural land resulted in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of black wealth. Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns, and other factors, it could reach into the trillions.
JEL Classifications
  • J4 - Particular Labor Markets
  • J7 - Labor Discrimination