Michael Barone has written an article describing American demographic trends that basically casts the coastal megalopolises as emerging third-world cities with highly stratified societies of rich Americans and their poor immigrant laborers.
Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole. ...This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
Sounds about right to me; my wife and I left Los Angeles because we're neither rich nor immigrant laborers.
The rest of the article is interesting to me less for its political implications than for its societal and economic implications. I don't relish the idea of third-world coasts, which is one of the reasons I'm so concerned about illegal immigration. Demography is destiny, and I'd prefer America to continue in greatness than to be absorbed by the kleptocratic masses that envelop the rest of the world. We can assimilate immigrants up to a certain rate, but when the flow comes too quickly they begin to assimilate us. There's a difference between drinking and drowning.
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