nt than the simple poverty and foreign origin of other immigrants. In the 1940s even northern cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were openly racist when it came to housing. In many neighborhoods (usually those with higher real estate values) homeowners had clauses in their mortgages specifically forbidding resale to blacks or other non-whites. The practice of red-lining, whereby banks would not give blacks loans in predominantly white residential areas, or even finance mortgages in black areas, insured that racial segregation in the northern cities of the United States was nearly universal.
During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s new influxes of immigrants from the Third World dramatically altered the housing crisis of inner-city residents. New arrivals from the upper classes of their home societies (with generally whiter skins, better education, and well-connected relatives) all opted for suburbia, because, with very few exceptions, no one would want to move to the urban ghettos by choice. Increasing numbers of Latin Americans and Asians have arrived, many illegally, and in places like New York, Miami, and Los Angeles have entered into competition for the scarce economic and social-service resources that were inadequate for the blacks and other groups already living there.
Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca studied the subject of the elites that rule every known society. The elite is
always the less numerous, performs all of the political functions, monopolizes power, and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent (Mosca, 1939, 50).
Such objective and realistic analysis of power, exercised in the name of "the people" or not, is anathema to American popular and media discourse, although there is never any shortage of fingers being pointed at the pow...