Strategic Identity Diffusion

A response to Geographic Polarization.

Ethnic Balkanization, or Geographic Ethnic Polarization, is the process by which ethnicities become geographically differentiated within a shared political space. This phenomenon is one example of Geographic Identity Polarization (GIP), which includes political ideology.

The conflict in Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi Kurdistan is a result of GIP, where Kurds are geographically concentrated in a “homeland” for which they seek independence. The conflict in Artsakh-Nagorno-Karabakh was also the result of GIP. Had Armenians been evenly diffused throughout Azerbaijan, rather than concentrated in one province, the conflict would not have been possible. GIP allowed for the American Civil War to take place. Had slavery been distributed throughout America, it would not have been possible for a regional block to form and oppose federal direction.

GIP is also responsible for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, given the nationalistic aspirations of Serbians. Had they been evenly distributed throughout Austria-Hungary, there would have been no “Serbian nationalism.” GIP is highly relevant for the Ukraine War, where Russians are concentrated in eastern provinces, and Ukrainians are concentrated in the west. Had Russians been evenly distributed throughout Ukraine, Russia would not have been able to occupy eastern Ukraine as easily without facing partisan resistance.

GIP is largely responsible for the Taiping Rebellion, which began in the Hakka-dominated south of China. GIP can explain why, during the fall of the Soviet Union, many ethnic Republics broke away, but there was no post-Soviet German Republic. This is because ethnic Germans during World War II were dispersed throughout the Soviet Union, and those who were not killed or assimilated were spread throughout Kazakhstan.

The process of reducing Balkanization is called Strategic Identity Diffusion (SID). SID shows up in ancient times in the Bible as the “Babylonian captivity,” where Jews were forced into exile in order to diffuse them throughout an empire. SID was also used by Americans, including Andrew Jackson, to mix together native Americans and diffuse them amongst one another in reservation.

The dictator of Paraguay, José de Francia, enacted a law in 1814 which prohibited white ethnic endogamy. This is because he viewed whites as a competing elite or aristocracy to his autocratic rule and sought their integration into the wider native and African population. While this was not a geographic policy, it shares many similarities with SID in that it seeks to reduce or resolve ethnic tension by diffusing or mixing populations together.

For tribalists, nationalists, and identitarians, SID is an imperialist policy which erases homelands and threatens their existence. For empires, both ancient and modern, SID is a crucial tool for managing and reducing the threat of ethnic separatism and civil war. Depending on the moral perspective, it can be good or evil. Rather than attempt to defend or attack SID on moral grounds, an objective study of SID will model and predict various methods of its implementation. These models could provide guidelines for imperialists, or allow for nationalists to critique them.

Under certain interpretations of the United Nations resolution on genocide, SID could be considered genocidal. In the case of Tibet and Xinjiang, the diffusion of Chinese immigrants throughout the population, in an effort to decrease the proportion of Uighurs and Tibetans in their homelands, has been described as a state policy of genocide. On the other hand, comparing that to mass immigration to America or Europe, which among children has already produced a white minority, is a conspiracy theory called “the Great Replacement.” The purpose here is not to moralize about whether SID is good or bad, but to take it to its logical conclusion and predict what sort of policies would be implemented under SID.

Education

Education is one of the greatest tools that the governments have to move populations voluntarily. Around 31% of college students leave their home state to attend college, with a low of 9% from Delaware, and a high of 75% from New Hampshire.¹ Since 2 million students enroll per year, this means that education alone results in 620,000 relocations per year.

Much like the healthcare system, which is ostensibly private but extremely subsidized and controlled by the government, education is also ostensibly not government run, but is in fact government run. Even the most independent private schools depend on private funding in the form of government backed-student loans to survive. To put this in context, most 18 year old students are not able to go to a bank and take out a loan for $100,000. Most banks will not provide mortgages of that caliber without proven cash reserves and a solid income.

Given government control over student loans, the government would be able to control the flow of students from some institutions to others. What sort of policies would maximize SID?

In order to maximize SID, the government could relocate white conservatives to liberal leaning states. This could be done in various ways, and the manner and method mostly depend on the feasibility of identification.

The most straightforward method would be to force all citizens to, at the age of 18, declare their political affiliation. This could be done by forcing citizens to vote and make a political disclosure in order to attend college, or to require party registration as a prerequisite for college attendance. Prospective students who voted or registered as Republican would then be forced to attend college in blue states as opposed to red states. Students could also be forced to self identify as liberal, conservative, or moderate on their college application or student loan application.

Since less than 17% of prospective college students identify as Republican,² 340,000 young Republicans would be barred from college unless they attended university in Massachusetts. The average student loan payment is $300,³ and the average student debt is 30,000,⁴ and the average time to pay off student loans is 20 years.⁵ The government already has programs which help to pay off student debt conditional on participation in inner city teaching programs. In this scenario, the government could promise to pay off Republican student debt for as long as those students reside and work in Massachusetts. The result would be a net inflow of hundreds of thousands of conservative residents to Massachusetts every year. In the 2020 election, Biden secured a 1,215,000 vote lead over Trump. Assuming that 100,000 Republican voters could be induced to move to Massachusetts each year, then the government could make Massachusetts a swing state by 2033.

The same strategy could be applied to Wyoming, but in the case of Wyoming, new universities would need to be built in order to attract Democrat students. Trump’s lead in Wyoming, for example, was 120,068. Since the population of Arizona State University is 74,878, and assuming it would take 7 years to build a school and hire faculty, with 2 additional years for student immigration it is conceivable that the government could make Wyoming a swing state by 2032.

Many other Republican states with low populations, such as Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa could be turned into swing states in the next decade through this process. The most difficult state to moderate would be where Trump’s absolute margin was the greatest. This was in Tennessee, with a lead of 708,764 votes. Since Tennessee already has the infrastructure to enroll 50,000 new students per year,⁶ Tennessee could be made a swing state by 2037 with no new infrastructure.

The government could increase the speed of SID by building new schools to accommodate faster immigration. By incentivizing Republican students to move to Democrat states, and concentrating Democrat students in highly Republican states, geographic polarization can be reduced.

This kind of “ideological affirmative action” would receive legal pushback from first-amendment scholars, but would be less discriminatory than racial affirmative action. Students have the ability to lie about their political affiliation, but white students cannot pretend to be black in order to receive benefits.

Another form of SID would focus less on ideological balancing and more on racial balancing. Under racial SID, the government would ignore political affiliation, and instead seek to racially redistribute America’s students. The government could suspend funding for its historically black colleges and relocate them to majority white states. On the other hand, the government could relocate white students to states which were more racially diverse.

In 2022, based on self reporting, 42% of new college enrollments were by white students, 17.5% by Hispanic students, 11% by Black students, 6% by Asian students, and less than 1% by Native American students. 5.4% were considered "other" and 17.8% were considered "unknown/missing." Other studies eliminate this uncertainty by showing white students at 54%, black at 13.1%, Hispanic at 20.3%, Asians at 7.7%, and "two or more races" at 4.9%.⁷

Assuming these statistics are true, the government has access to up to 1 million whites, 200,000 blacks, 400,000 Hispanics, 140,000 Asians, and 90,000 of “two or more races.”

In Hawaii, 25% of the population is white, or 361,655 people. The current college population is 60,000, which allows for an enrollment of roughly 20,000 new students per year.⁸ In order to make whites 50% of the population through college enrollment, an influx of 823,770 white students would be required, which would be achieved by 2065.

In total, there are 20 million college students, despite new yearly enrollments only being around 2 million.⁹ California alone has 2.6 million students, and by national proportions, 260,000 incoming freshmen per year. The white-non-white gap (WNW) in California is 12 million, the largest gap in the country. By forcing white freshmen to attend college in California, and forcing them to live there for 20 years, California could be made 50% white by the year 2069.

Utah has one of the highest percentages of college students (12%). California, which is around the national average of 6%, is around double the lowest percentage in Alaska (3%). Given that freshmen students are roughly 10% of the total college student population, we can assume that states will have a freshmen population between 0.3% and 1.2%, averaging at 0.6%.

Despite the fact that California has a WNW Gap of almost 12 million, with Utah proportions of college infrastructure, California’s WNW Gap could be closed in 26 years through a 20 year student loan Strategic Identity Diffusion program. This would require almost 400,000 white college students to move to California every year, which would be roughly 47% of all white Freshmen. Texas, by contrast, would take 19 years, and require 37% of all white Freshmen. The following percentages would be required for other states: 1.72% in Hawaii, 2.54% in New Mexico, 7.42% in Maryland, 3.83% in Nevada, 27.13% in Florida, 13.24% in Georgia, and 0.81% in DC.

The states where the WNW Gap could be most quickly reduced via educational means would be Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and New York. These are states where the margin of the gap is small, and the population is big.

The states where the WNW Gap would take the longest to close by Freshmen would be West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. This is because in these states, the WNW Gap is relatively large compared to their total population.

Welfare Spending

70 million Americans receive welfare.¹⁰ However, welfare is not a single program, but a series of separate programs. In 2016, of the 70 million recipients of Medicaid, 43% were white, 18% black, and 30% Hispanic (with the remaining 9% presumably being Asian or of two or more races). In the same year, of 43 million food stamp recipients, 36.2% were white, 25.6% black, 17.2% Hispanic and 15.5% unknown.¹¹

Between 50-65 million students attend K-12 public school.¹² Assuming a fertility rate of 1.64 children per woman in 2024, we can assume that roughly 30 million mothers¹³ receive free K-12 schooling as a form of welfare, while less than 3 million mothers are willing or able to afford to send their children to private school. Of all students, 51% were white, 25% were Hispanic, 15% were black and 5% were Asian with a 4% remainder of "other."¹⁴

Among the 4.7 million K–12 students who were enrolled in private schools in 2019, about 66% were White, 12% were Hispanic, 9% were Black, 7% were Asian, and 5% were students of Two or more races.¹⁵

When we add the number of American students in public school together with their parents, we get a total of roughly 89 million people who are the recipients of free education, or who have children who are recipients.¹⁶

We can assume that between public education, Medicare, and food stamps, there is significant overlap. At minimum, there are 89 Americans who depend on the government to provide them or their children with K-12 education.

While college students are less than 0.7% of the population, Americans who receive public education for themselves or their children constitute 26.9% of the population, those on Medicaid are 20.5% of the population, and those on food stamps are 12.6% of the population. Therefore, if American demographics could be significantly altered through incentivizing 0.7% of the population, utilizing welfare recipient status would be 18 to 28 times as potent.

One of the issues with using colleges as vehicles for demographic transformation is that this would necessitate the creation of segregated schools. If the goal is to de-Balkanize the country, then segregation is counter-productive. On the other hand, offering welfare benefits in exchange for migration would be less inherently segregationist.¹⁷

Using welfare status as a means of incentivizing migration still presents challenges. The basic incentive structure would be to deny citizens access to welfare unless and until they migrated to the desired region. What this would look like, effectively, is telling Black Americans to leave states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Maryland, and telling them to migrate to states like Oregon. It would also mean telling Hispanic Americans to leave states like New Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida, and telling them to move to states like Alabama. Finally, white Americans would be incentivized to move to states like Hawaii or Puerto Rico.

The average cost of a cross country move is $5,000. Assuming that all 89 million Americans on welfare were relocated, this would cost $447 billion, which is roughly one third of the $1.9 trillion spent per year in welfare.¹⁸ Unlike other welfare programs, this would be a one time cost.

In order to make the program voluntary rather than compulsory, the options could be offered as follows:

1. Remain in your current state and receive a $5,000 cut to your net benefits.

2. Move to the new selected state and receive your benefits as well as a $5,000 check.

In 2021, 2.4% of Americans moved to a different state, or about 8 million Americans.¹⁹ Assuming that between 12% to 27% of these movers are on government assistance, this represents roughly 1 to 2 million Americans who would be eligible for this incentive program. Looking at just white Americans, of whom 15 million are on Food Stamps, there are likely (assuming all Americans move at the same rate) 360,000 white Americans on Food Stamps who will move to a different state in the next year.

Solely depending on welfare recipients to de-Balkanize America at a rate of 360,000 a year would require 138 years, but at a rate of 2 million per year, it could be achieved by 2048. Some states could be instantly flipped within a few years. With the exception of California, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, all states could be de-Balkanized within 10 years.

Whereas de-Balkanization by college Freshmen would result in racially or politically segregated classes, de-Balkanization by welfare recipients would stimulate the housing market, driving prices higher. It also means that states with a bigger WNW gap would be flooded with welfare users, while states with a smaller WNW gap would be deprived of their welfare recipients.

The worst affected states would be West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and Iowa. The least affected states would be Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and New York.

A further consideration to take into account would be the environmental impact of migration. Is it ethical to incentivize migration, if that migration destroys the natural habitat? What about areas which are threatened by climate change?

Yellow for new settlement, coastal region restricted.

Balkanization is not the only threat that America faces. The threat of rising sea levels, drought, wildfires, and other effects of climate change should be kept in mind when crafting an internal migration policy.

Summary

In 1944, for the first time in over a hundred years, General Eisenhower decided to integrate black volunteers with white combat units during the Battle of the Bulge.²⁰ This done at the urging of lieutenant general John C. H. Lee, who was by all accounts a devout Episcopalian, who Eisenhower called "a modern Cromwell."²¹ The decision was contentious, and integration would not remain a settled legal issue until 1971, when the government was granted the right to enforce integration through bussing.²²

Between 1971 and 1991, bussing was enforced as a means of desegregating the country. In response, the phenomenon of white flight led to whites abandoning the cities in favor of suburbs, where their children were too far from blacks to be bussed together. Between 1991 and 2007, bussing was recognized as a failure, and struck down in the courts.²³ Since 2009, Republicans have turned toward school choice, charter schools, and homeschooling as a means of resisting integration with majority non-white schools.

One of the greatest dangers of ethnic Balkanization is the creation of enclaves and ghettos. Gary, Compton, Memphis, Detroit, Ferguson, Birmingham, Baltimore and other American cities all have concentrated Black populations. The result is that the problems of these communities are concentrated, accentuated, and multiplied. In communities in the south west on the southern border, Mexican immigration has created enclaves where only Spanish is spoken.

When minority groups are evenly distributed or diffused around the country, they tend to integrate, assimilate, and adopt the norms of the majority around them. Gang violence is the greatest when ethnic minorities are isolated in their own culture, with no help from the outside.

Whether minorities are spread out throughout the country, or whether they are concentrated into quasi-ethno-states, they exist. The tendency of white Americans to prefer to deny their existence, to confine them to ghettos, or to price them out of the neighborhood real estate market will not make them go away. When ethnic communities are ghettoized, crime increases, literacy decreases, and gang activity increases, per capita. Desegregation will not increase America’s problems, but rather, it will decrease them.

Epilogue

America’s future lies in Mexico. If America can successfully integrate Hispanic Americans, it will have access to greater resources, cheap labor, an industrial labor pool, higher fertility, and a younger population. If America confines Hispanics to ghettos and borderlands, this process will be more difficult, and likely breed gang violence and fuel drug wars. If America intermarries heavily with Hispanics, it will have the cultural capital to move further south and expand its empire.

Critics of mass migration point out the threat of demographic change to national pride and identity, as well as to general intelligence. The problem with these arguments is that America already lost its “white identity” in 1944, at an elite level. Elites like Eisenhower were already in favor of desegregation, but delayed its implementation as a result of mass populist resistance. With that resistance completely crushed by 1971, whites have taken to running away to the suburbs, but do not have a hope of positively re-envisioning their identity on racial lines.

Ethnogenesis is an elite project. While a “mature or ripe” ethnic nationalism makes bold historical moves dressed in the robes of populism, its true origin, its “seed,” lies in the academic, philosophical, ideological, and intellectual foundations of elites. The importance of elite support for the creation and maintenance of ethnic and religious identity can be seen in the collapse of the mainline Christian churches, which have been “left behind” by the elites who once supported them.

If white Americans are to come to terms with race, if they are to stop running away from it, then they must confront it. The left has taken bold steps to confront racism, but their boldness comes from a sense of martyrdom and resentment rather than from a positive vision. Stepping beyond the post-Christian guilt complex requires a new vision of race.

Ancient empires have dealt extensively with the problem of ethnic and religious identity. The mixtures of peoples and syncretism of Gods are directly responsible for the Vedic religion, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, liberalism, and beyond. Man’s attachment to his own body, and therefore, to his flesh and blood, his family, his tribe, and his race are all egoic functions of biological survival. Despite the inward looking of tribalism, there is another force. The call to empire, to world domination, expansion and exploration bring us upwards and outwards, and draw our eyes toward great horizons.

Since the dawn of humanity millions of years ago, humans have always been differentiated into different groups, and perfect global homogeneity is impossible due to the law of speciation. What was revolutionary about civilization is that it, for the first time, allowed humans to envision a collective self beyond the family, beyond the familiar, which bound us together with strangers, and into a civilization. This is the great religious impulse which sent Columbus over the sea.

If America were to conquer Mexico tomorrow, its best move to integrate the two halves would be to migrate the Mexicans north, and to move Americans south. The resulting union would be no less “white” or no less “Mexican” than before, but would merely relocate existing groups toward a third unifying identity. The threat to this vision lies in a petty grifting class which appeals to our most suburban and banal instincts. Vivek and Nimrata arrive from distant shores as brown saviors to protect America from the “great replacement.”

Who were the conquistadors, if not “greater replacers”? In the final hours of Rome, its elites were subjugated in a “great replacement” by Germanic warriors. If Republicans could go back to that time, they would have built a border wall to keep the Germans out, to keep a corrupt and senile system limping on.

Instead, the healthy elements of the Roman aristocracy reemerged in the 12th century, likely infused with those Germanic invaders, to found the early Renaissance. If anything was responsible for the dark ages in Italy, it was not Germanic barbarians, but a lack of will, a lack of vision, and an inward turning represented by Christian monasticism. With the crusades, the inward looking quality of Christianity was supplanted by a spirit of evangelism and world conquest, which became the basis for alchemy, science, and the rediscovery of natural philosophy.

If Columbus was a nationalist, maybe he would have remained at home and dedicated himself to a monastery, praying for the poor. Instead he lobbied a foreign government to sail the ocean blue, and the rest is history. The spirit of America is the spirit of conquest, and the spirit of the frontier. With the west having been won, it is time to drive south.

1. https://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/news/on-the-move-new-study-shows-more-students-leaving-home-for-college/

2. The number is even smaller if we only include white Republicans: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319068/party-identification-in-the-united-states-by-generation/

3. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-payment/

4. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-debt/

5. https://educationdata.org/average-time-to-repay-student-loans

6. https://www.tn.gov/thec/news/2023/9/26/tennessee-higher-education-commission-announces-fall-2023-college-enrollment-data.html

7. I combined “native American” with two or more races: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/diversity-in-higher-education-facts-statistics/

8. https://www.univstats.com/states/hawaii/student-population/

9. https://dailycampus.com/2023/01/17/study-conducted-on-which-states-have-the-most-college-students/

10. https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/welfare-statistics.html

11. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/americans-welfare-perceptions-survey_n_5a7880cde4b0d3df1d13f60b

12. The census.gov website was down when I wanted to cite this. Maybe it’s up again.

13. While the term “mother” was used, considering the existence of single dads, the term “guardian(s)” would be most accurate.

14. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-enrollment.html

15. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55

16. This was calculated using the totals for number of public and private students, as well as the rate of single parenthood and fertility. Uninvolved fathers were not counted.

17. Even if ethnic ghettos emerge as a result of public housing projects, they are still less problematic than segregated schools.

18. https://budget.house.gov/press-release/7582

19. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/04/fewer-people-moving-between-2019-and-2021.html

20. Blumenson, Martin, “Eisenhower” (1971, p. 127). Also see Young, William, “World War II and the Postwar Years in America: A Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (2010, p. 534).

21. Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Crusade in Europe.” (1948, p. 139).

22. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.

23. See court cases such as Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991) and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007).