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was acceptable, but busing children long distances was another step over the line. Nor did it help that the civil rights era was cut in two by race riots and a surge in urban violent crime.
    The emergence of white evangelical Christians as a solid Republican voting bloc also has a racial background. Up until the late 1970s, white evangelical voters divided their loyalties between the two parties. It was in the late 1970s, mainly in reaction to intensified federal pressure to desegregate religious schools, that the white evangelicals moved en masse into the Republican fold. 4 The swing of these middle-income white voters to the Republican Party made an enormous difference in the emergence of Republican presidents for twenty of twenty-eight years between 1980 and 2008.
    The Hispanic Immigrant Surge
    The rapid rise of the Hispanic population in the United States created yet another huge source of political and ethnic division, pushing white voters toward a philosophy of low taxation and retrenchment of the federal government. In 1965, the United States adopted theImmigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This legislation, which ended quotas on national origin introduced in the Immigration Act of 1924, decisively changed America’s demography. Figure 5.1 shows the remarkable dip in the share of foreign-born population in the United States after 1924 and then the sharp rise beginning after 1965. As of 1970, the Hispanic population in the United States was an estimated 10 million, equal to around 5 percent of the U.S. population, and heavily concentrated in California and Texas. By 1990, under the liberalizing provisions of the 1965 act, the Hispanic population had doubled, to 22 million and 8.6 percent of the population, and by 2009 the Hispanic population had doubled again, to 48 million and 15.7 percent of the population, with sizable communities in the Southwest, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and the Northwest. 5 Hispanic votes have become decisive in key national and state elections, including the 2008 presidential election, in which Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
    The surge in Hispanic immigration exacerbated racial tensions and put immigration policy back at the forefront of national politics, feeding directly and powerfully into the growing anti-tax sentiments of the 1970s and afterward. The national tax revolt movement began most vividly in California’s referendum on Proposition 13 in 1978. California’s tax revolt was strongly influenced by the surge in the state’s Hispanic population and the opposition in much of the white community to the added property taxes being levied to provide schooling for an increasingly Hispanic student population. 6
    Figure 5.1: Foreign-Born Percentage of U.S. Population, 1850–2010

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau.
    It is important to understand the special animus attached to illegal immigration. The political backing for programs that assist the poor (for example, with health care, education, income support, food stamps, and other programs) depends entirely on there being a sense of shared community among the members of the society. That sense of community is hard enough to achieve in America’s ethnically and religiously divided communities. It is nearly impossible to achieve when the borders are open to illegal inflows. With a vast, impoverished world of literally hundreds of millions if not billions of people who are eager to enter the United States, middle-class and working-class American taxpayers understandably believe that the fiscal demands on their checkbooks will be essentially without bounds if America fails to secure its frontiers. The animus is probably less toward specific groups, e.g., Hispanics, than it is toward the sense of unfairness of working very hard and then being called upon to support perfect strangers who number in the millions and rising.
    This sentiment needs to be taken seriously. Social transfer programs must go hand in hand with a