GSS – The Isaac Brock Society

Inspired by a recent TaxProf Blog post showing the percentage of each U.S. state’s general revenue which consisted of intergovernmental revenue (primarily federal transfers) in 2011, I went and re-did the same calculation for each U.S. census region based on 2004 budget data, and graphed it against the proportion of native-born GSS respondents that year who lived in that region as teenagers (GSS question REG16) and stated that it was “very important” to live in America most of your life in order to be considered “truly American” (GSS question AMLIVED). As you can see from the graph, the two variables are somewhat correlated, with an R² of 0.23.

(Edit: Because I made a data entry error, an earlier version of this post left out the South Atlantic region, which is a major outlier — far more anti-emigrant than their low proportion of federal aid would otherwise predict. Without them in the mix, the R² would be 0.60).

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1996 seemed to be a pretty good year to be an American abroad. The U.S. was at the height of its global prestige. The State Department had several years earlier ended its policy of automatically revoking U.S. citizenship from Americans who naturalised elsewhere. And there was little motivation to give up the blue passport anyway: ordinary diaspora wage-earners with non-U.S. retirement accounts and mutual funds ignored all the international financial reporting forms created under the Nixon administration’s Bank Secrecy Act or the Reagan administration’s Tax Reform Act — and the IRS had no complaint because it knew that none of this paperwork could possibly generate more revenue than it would cost to process in the first place.

Yet this benign neglect of Americans abroad was by no means an expression of support. Homelanders were hostile to the idea of an American diaspora: in a national survey, nearly three-quarters of people in the U.S. thought that “living in America for most of your life” was an important part of being “truly American”. This widespread societal consensus on the territorial nature of Americanness was even supported, and supported quite strongly, by a surprising group: native-born Americans who had lived abroad for five years or longer, among whom 85% agreed with this proposition. And over the next decade, this view would only strengthen.

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The Isaac Brock Society

Tag Archives: GSS

The more money your state gets in federal aid, the more likely you are to think Americans abroad are un-American

The General Social Survey and Americans abroad: “true Americans live in America”