A White Migration North From Miami
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
WESTON, Fla.—Fifth in a series of occasional articles
Everything here is nice and neat, just the way Joanne Smith likes it. The
developers call their new city on the edge of the Everglades "Our Home
Town," and Smith agrees. "It's more like America," she says.
Like thousands of others, Smith moved to this planned community 40 miles
north of Miami just a few years ago, searching for a safe and secure
neighborhood like this one, where both modest homes and rambling
mansions sit against the manicured landscape of palm and hibiscus, and
gated streets called Wagon Way and Windmill Ranch gently curve around
the shallow lagoons and golf links.
Weston is a boomtown filling with refugees. But the migrants pouring into
this part of Broward County are rarely those from the Caribbean, Central
and South America -- the immigrants to the south who have transformed
Miami and surrounding Dade County into a metropolis proudly called by
its business and political leaders "The Gateway to Latin America."
Instead, the refugees here are mostly native-born and white, young and
old, and they have been streaming up from Miami for years now, creating
a
new version of the traditional "white flight" in reaction not to black
inner
cities, but to immigration.
While Miami is unique in many respects, because of both geography and
politics, the out-migration of whites is occurring in other high-immigration
cities. New York and Los Angeles, for example, each lost a million
U.S.-born residents in the last decade, as they gained a million immigrants.
According to an analysis of the most recent census data, for almost every
immigrant who came to Miami-Dade County in recent years, a white
non-Hispanic left.
"I loved Miami, but it's a mad scene down there now," said Smith, who is
semi-retired and asked that her occupation not be given. Before her move
to Weston, Smith lived in Miami for two decades, "in a nice neighborhood
gone bad. People say things, 'Oh that's change and that's progress,' but
I
like it clean and green -- and everybody speaking English," Smith says.
In discussions about the historic demographic transformations occurring
in
the United States, which is absorbing almost 1 million immigrants a year,
most of the attention focuses quite naturally on the newcomers: Who are
they and where are they from and how do they make their way in
America?
But immigration is a two-way street -- and the welcome the immigrants
receive from the native-born is crucial for the continued idea of America
as
a fabled "melting pot." Of course, there are many whites -- and blacks,
too
-- who have remained in Miami-Dade County, to either continue their lives
as before or accept, even embrace the Latin tempo of Miami, who have
learned how to pronounce masas de puerco at lunchtime and to fake a
respectable merengue dance step, who enjoy the culture, the business
opportunities and caffeinated hustle of a metropolis dominated by
immigrants. No one could call Miami dull.
But it is almost as if there are two kinds of native whites -- those who
can
deal with multiculturalism that has transformed Miami over the past several
decades and those who choose not to. Either way, if the country is to
successfully transform itself into a completely multicultural industrialized
nation, what these internal migrants say -- and there are millions of them
around the country -- needs to be heard and understood.
Those transplants interviewed by The Washington Post, including those
who asked that their names not be used, take pains to explain that, for
the
most part, the people like them who are moving out of Miami-Dade to
Broward are not anti-immigrant xenophobes.
In several dozen interviews with a cross-section of these "domestic
migrants," a picture emerges of a segment of the non-Hispanic white
population in Miami-Dade County that feels marginalized, exasperated and
sometimes bitter, and who move from Dade to Broward with a mix of
emotions.
Migrants to Broward give many reasons for the move north: Their money
buys a bigger, newer house in Broward; they are tired of the traffic and
congestion; they worry about crime; they complain about the overcrowded
schools; those with young families often say they are looking for a place
where their children can play ball in the front yard and ride their bikes
down the block.
But all these things, the good and bad, can also be found in booming
Broward County. Sooner or later, many of the refugees moving north
mention immigration and the sense that they are no longer, as many
transplants describe it, "comfortable."
Phil Phillips was born and raised near what is today downtown Miami,
where his father worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service
during the postwar years, at a time when the immigrants to Florida were
mostly from Europe. Phillips served in the Navy, taught vocational classes
at Miami High School, and made a living running a small air conditioning
and refrigeration business.
Until the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, Phillips described the Miami of
yesteryear as a more sleepy, more southern town. It had its glitz in the
fanciful playground of Jackie Gleason's city of Miami Beach, but the
county was still filled with open land and farms.
"Miami was a very happy place," Phillips remembers with nostalgia. "We
had our demarcations, don't get me wrong. But we didn't have the
animosity." When pressed, Phillips does remember that the beaches,
restaurants and nightclubs were often segregated, not only for African
Americans. Jews had their own country clubs.
The Miami of black-and-white all began to change with the arrival of the
Cubans in the early 1960s. "The vast majority of the Cubans came here
and worked two and three jobs," said Phillips, who is retired and living
in
Weston. A man who worked with his hands all his life, Phillips respects
that. "I saw them do it. And in time, they took over, and some people
resent that. But that's the way it is."
"There's this myth out there that a Cuban will screw an American in a
deal," Phillips says. "I don't think that is so, but that's the feeling
the whites
have, and it's because the two sides don't communicate, sometimes they
can't communicate, and so they don't understand the other guy."
Phillips has seen decades of change, as the demographics of his home
town kept skewing toward Hispanics, in fits and starts. After the first
big
influx of Cubans in the 1960s, there was Cuba's Mariel boatlift in 1980.
Then all through the proxy wars and upheavals in Central America and the
Caribbean through the 1980s and 1990s, refugees from Nicaragua,
Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti kept coming to Miami.
"We're great in America at blaming somebody else for our problems,"
Phillips said. "But I will tell that for a lot of the people who leave
Miami,
they might not tell you, but they're leaving because of the ethnics."
Phillips offered his opinions as he sat sipping soup at the counter of
a new
restaurant here in Weston opened by Tim Robbie, whose family owned the
Miami Dolphins for years, before they sold out to Wayne Huizenga, who is
"The Man" in Broward County, as much as Jorge Mas Canosa, the power
behind the Cuban American National Foundation, was "The Man" in
Miami before his death last year.
Robbie was raised in Miami. His family, lead by his father Joe, was a civic
institution. But Robbie himself recently moved to Weston, too.
"I know a lot of our friends down in Miami were disappointed with us,"
Robbie said. "They asked: How can you do this to us?"
Robbie agreed that something akin to "the tipping point" phenomenon
might be at work, whereby one or two families in a social or business
network can leave a community and nothing much changes. But at some
point, if enough people leave, the balance suddenly tips, and large groups
start selling their homes, and over a period of several years, they create
mass demographic shifts.
Robbie himself said he was comfortable down south in Miami, but
concedes that many are not. "Anglos are accustomed to being in the
majority, and down in Dade, they're not. And that puts some people
outside of their comfort zone. People tend to like to stick together."
Robbie's business partner is Bob Green, who also moved from Miami to
Broward. A longtime denizen of funky and fun Coconut Grove, Green
describes himself as one of those who never would have thought about
moving north to Broward.
But then he saw the new business opportunities, and also found himself
liking a place like Weston. "It has this midwestern feeling," Green said.
"More downhome and friendly."
This mass internal migration is the latest version of a classic "push-pull"
model of residential segregation, whereby many whites in Miami feel lured
north by the offerings of a development like Weston, but also feel pushed
out of Miami -- not only by their fatigue with crime or congestion, but
the
cultural and demographic upheavals caused by three decades of
immigration.
Peter Schott is a tourism official who is changing jobs and, reluctantly,
moving with his wife, who works for a cruise ship line, to Broward. The
couple, both in their thirties and expecting their first child, are looking
for a
bigger home. Schott says he will miss the exotic, foreign feel of Miami.
Miami, Schott says, is a media noche, the name for a Cuban sandwich,
while Broward he fears is "white bread and baloney." While he will miss
Miami, Schott knows that many of those moving north to Broward may
not.
"Some people are real frank," he said. "They say they want to be with
more people more like us. If they're white Americans, they want white
Americans around them."
For non-Hispanic, non-Spanish-speaking whites to survive in Miami, there
is no choice but to move, or to adapt. "It is our city now," many Cuban
Americans say, and the numbers tell part of the story.
In the 1990s, some 95,000 white non-Hispanics left Miami-Dade County,
decreasing that group's presence by 16 percent, to around 492,000, or
about one-fifth of the county population.
They either moved away or, in the case of elderly residents, particularly
in
the Jewish community, died. (The Jewish population in Miami-Dade
County has decreased from about 250,000 to 100,000 in the last two
decades. The new destination for Jewish retirees and younger migrants is
Broward and Palm Beach counties).
As whites left Miami, they poured into Broward. Between 1990 and 1997,
the white non-Hispanic population here increased by about 82,000, or 8
percent, to more than a million residents.
These dramatic numbers follow an equally large out-migration of whites
during the 1980s. So many non-Hispanic whites left Miami-Dade in the
previous decade that Marvin Dunn, a sociologist at Florida International
University, who has followed the trend, said in 1991, "You get down to
the
point below which those who are going to leave have left and the others
are committed to stay. I think we're close to that with whites."
But Dunn was wrong. The whites keep leaving.
"White migration to Miami-Dade has essentially stopped," said William
Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan, who coined the phrase
"demographic balkanization" to describe the ongoing trend of ethnic and
racial groups to self-segregate -- not only within a city, but from city
to
city, and from state to state.
"The two appear almost like mirror images of each other," Frey said of
Broward and Miami-Dade counties. "There is definitely something going
on here and we can only guess what it is. But this 'One America' that
Clinton talks about is clearly not in the numbers. Segregation and
non-assimilation continue."
Many times, native whites on the move explain that Miami now feels to
them like "a foreign country," that they feel "overwhelmed" by the presence
not just of some Spanish-speakers, but so many.
"You order a Coke without ice," said an executive and mother of three
who moved to Broward from Miami in 1996 and asked that her name not
be used. "And you get ice. You say no starch and you get starch. You call
government offices, and they can't take a decent message in English. You
spell your name letter by letter and they get it wrong. They keep saying
'Que? Que? Que?' (Spanish for "What?') You go to the mall, and you
watch as the clerks wait on the Spanish speakers before you. It's like
reverse racism. You realize, my God, this is what it is like to be the
minority."
"The white population feels increasingly beleaguered," said George Wilson,
a sociologist at the University of Miami who is studying the phenomenon.
"Their whole domain is changing at the micro-level," Wilson continued.
"At
the malls, in the schools. A lot of the whites I talk to say they feel
challenged by the rapid ethnic and cultural change. A whole population
of
whites has gone from a clear majority to a clear minority in a very short
time . . . and a lot of them simply say, 'To hell with this,' and move
up the
road."
This feeling of being the beleaguered minority is creating among some a
new consciousness of "white ethnicity," and for those who see America's
future as a relatively harmonious multicultural state based on shared ideas
of capitalism and freedom, this may not bode well.
For if whites do not want to share power and place, or if they feel
increasingly shoved aside or overwhelmed in the cities and states with
high
immigration, they will continue to vote with their feet, by moving away,
creating not a rainbow of citizens, but a more balkanized nation, with
jobs,
university enrollments, public spending, schools all seen through ethnic
or
racial prisms, including among whites.
Several of those interviewed complain that the politics of Miami-Dade are
dominated by the issues of the newcomers, particularly the Cuban
Americans, who wait for the fall of Fidel Castro; they see in the city
hall,
where a number of officials were recently indicted and convicted of taking
kickbacks after it was discovered that the city was broke, a "banana
republic" of ethnic cronyism; they dislike being referred to in Spanish
media
as "the Americans" by Miami's Hispanic residents and politicians, as if
they
were the foreigners.
And many balk at the dominance of Spanish -- on television, in official
news conferences, on the radio, in schools and meetings and in their
day-to-day lives. The movement of so many whites from Miami-Dade to
Broward is viewed by many Hispanics as understandable, even natural,
though hardly something to be encouraged.
"We had a tremendous exodus of Anglos, especially Anglos who did not
feel comfortable with the new demographics of Miami, who were
intimidated by the Spanish language and the influx of different people,"
said
Eduardo Padron, a Cuban American and president of the Miami Dade
Community College. "It is a natural trend for them to move out. Many of
them kept working in Miami, but they found refuge in Broward."
Padron believes the rapidity of demographic changes, and the creation of
a
Hispanic majority, was "intimidating" for many whites, particularly those
who did not speak any Spanish.
Some whites interviewed say they know they may seem like "whiners," as
one woman put it, but they feel they are not being met halfway by the
newcomers, and this is an especially acute feeling in Miami, where Cuban
Americans and other immigrants from Latin America now dominate the
political landscape, serving as city and county mayors and council
members. Both of Miami's representatives to Congress are Cuban
Americans.
Recent elections reveal that voters in Miami-Dade select candidates along
stark racial and ethnic lines in classic bloc voting. The 1995 county mayor's
race, pitting Cuban American Alex Penelas against African American
Arthur Teele, Jr., turned almost entirely on demographic lines, with exit
polls showing that the overwhelming majority of Cuban Americans voted
for Penelas, as most blacks voted for Teele. What did whites do? A lot
of
them did not vote at all.
Over the years, there has been sporadic, organized resistance by whites
in
Miami to hold back the changes. One group, calling itself Citizens of Dade
United, was successful in passing a referendum in 1980 that declared
English the "official language" of county government. But it was overturned
in 1993. Enos Schera, who is a co-founder of the group and who is now
71, is still filled with vinegar, and says he refuses to move from Miami
--
though he says he and his group have received death threats.
"I'm staying to fight this crazy thing," Schera said. "I'm not a bad guy,
but I
don't want to be overrun. They come here and get all the advantages of
being in America and then they insult you right on top of it." He is writing
a
book about the changes. "That will tell all," he promises.
But it seems as if Schera is fighting in retreat. He, and his group, have
largely been relegated to the role of stubborn whites whose time is over.
Many of the others, like Weston resident Joanne Smith, have already left.
"There's no room for us in the discussion," said Smith. "It's like we were
the oppressors."
Smith says she likes to eat at Cuban restaurants, has Hispanic neighbors
in
Weston and admires the strength and striving of the newcomers. She
herself is the granddaughter of immigrants, from Europe. But Smith feels
the immigrants should try harder to understand the feelings of native
Americans. "If they can survive coming here on a raft," she says. "They
can
learn to speak English."
Here at Weston, almost all of the communities are closed with security
gates, requiring a visitor to punch a code or be cleared by a guard before
entering the enclaves. In addition to the gates, a private security firm
patrols the neighborhoods.
One researcher on the topic, Edward Blakely of the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles, says that gated communities like Weston's are
the fastest growing new developments around the country. Blakely
deplores the trend, claiming it creates "fortress neighborhoods," dividing
citizens, creating walls between "us" and "them."
But obviously, many home buyers like the concept, and many of the
residents of Weston say one of the things they like most about the
neighborhood is its sense of community, of safety and the ability of their
children to ride their bicycles on the streets.
Yet the gates cannot keep demographic change at bay. Though two of
every three residents in Weston is white, most of them in their thirties,
about one in four are Hispanic. But these are the most assimilated, often
second-generation, solidly middle-class Cuban Americans who come north
for the same new schools and golf courses as the white migrants, allowing
almost everyone to continue to live within their comfort zone.
But not all. As one three-year resident, who declined to give her name,
observed, "I keep hearing more and more Spanish in the grocery store. I
don't know if they live here or are just working here. But I started to
see
some Spanish magazines for sale. Maybe I didn't move far enough north."
Special correspondent Catharine Skipp contributed to this report from
Miami.
White Flight
As Hispanics immigrate to Dade County, non-Hispanic whites are leaving
for neighboring Broward.
1997 population, estimated
Broward County
Hispanics 151,454
Non-Hispanic whites 1,023,614
Dade County
Hispanics 1,082,989
Non-Hispanic whites 492,397
Population change, 1990-97
Broward County
Hispanics 56,680
Non-Hispanic whites 80,539
Dade County
Hispanics 179,475
Non-Hispanic whites -92,130
Causes of growth, 1990-97
Broward County
Immigration 54,480
Domestic migration 127,612
Dade County
Immigration 158,035
Domestic migration -165,414
SOURCE: William H. Frey, Milken Institute and University of Michigan;
U.S. Census
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company