Concentrations of immigrants sometimes crop up with little to no pattern. Immigrants like to move to places where there are already people like them. As a result, we have Armenians in Los Angeles, Hungarians in Cleveland, Nigerians in Dallas, Poles in Chicago, Ethiopians in the DC area, Hmong and Somalians in Minneapolis, and so on.
On a related note, how did free movement of people and goods develop within the ASB? Obviously, each state started with their own border and immigration policies, and ended up with a single confederal policy, but when and how did this come to be? At some points in history, did certain states in the ASB require passports or visas to visit from other areas of the ASB?
This is a good line of questioning, and I'm sorry it took me so long to respond. So freedom of movement - especially the commerce type of movement - was one of the earliest priorities for the Affiliation movement. The guns from the Wars of Independence had barely had time to cool when leaders from the Loyalist and Republican states started getting together to discuss freer trade and an end to tariff wars. The result was the renewed Anglo-American Congresses. They proved to be not so good at preventing another war, but they did create a regime for (relatively) free trade and movement that was restored after the next war and gradually extended to all the states as the confederation formed in the first half of the 19th century.
In those crucial decades between 1830 and 1860, most of the barriers to trade and movement between the states came down. I’d like to think that by the 1850s, there was something like a customs union and nearly open borders, though some of the more peripheral states like Newfoundland would not be fully integrated for a few years yet.
By the 1860s, all signs point to more complete integration. Political pressure has led to a serious curtailment of member states’ ability to engage in their own foreign and military policy: at least eight states sent troops to California to support various colonial claims, and this provoked a major backlash by states who feared getting pulled into someone else’s reckless adventures. And as states become less and less able to make deals with other countries on their own, and as the ASB’s own Grand Council begins to take over this diplomacy, the states are going to take down the remaining barriers between them. A directly elected Parliament exists by now and has emerged as the dominant institution by the end of the decade. And this is also the era when railroads really start to expand, making interstate travel much, much faster. People are going to demand free movement for the sake of convenience if nothing else.
Probably the last barriers to come down relate to imperial privileges. The states of loyalist New England, for example, will want to continue to buy Jamaican sugar more cheaply than their neighbors, and mark up the price a bit Now this kind of thing is not always going to be economically viable, since in this example, there are numerous states in the ASB that are perfectly capable of producing their own sugar and selling it for less than the British stuff. So these kinds of things diminished over time as well. The last vestiges were abolished in c. 1910-1920, when the ASB more or less cut the remaining ties between the colonial powers and their remaining loyalist states, leaving mostly ceremonial and symbolic connections (with some exceptions, see below).
Are/were there restrictions on becoming a citizen of another state at any time? For example, was there ever a situation where a person from X state might live permanently in Y state, but wasn't allowed to vote or obtain government-issued ID in Y state, having to instead do these in X state?
And yes, that’s a whole different question. It started to become an issue around the middle of the 19th century, when for the first time some people in some states started to turn sour on immigration. Until then, of course, pretty much every community was desperate for manpower and was happy to see any newcomers. And even then, the states in the interior still were. So it was pretty easy for the states to reach tacit or even explicit agreements where some coastal states put up policies to discourage immigrants, and the inland states put things in place to attract the same people.
This system fluctuated with politics; less nativist governments in some states might change the laws, and more nativist governments might change them back. But on the whole it seems rather stable. I imagine that outside pressure would do more to change it than anything internal to the ASB. Foreign countries from which people migrated did not like dealing with a patchwork of policies. This pressure gradually led to more uniform laws as foreign diplomats pressured the President and the Grand Council, and the President and the Grand Council pressured Parliament. But even today, I am inclined to think that citizenship requirements are not completely uniform, but immigration and residency laws are.
Do some states, by some quirk of the web of treaties and agreements that make up the ASB, still have the theoretical power to close their borders to the rest of the ASB, even though they would never use that authority?
That’s an interesting idea, can you elaborate on what you have in mind? My first thought was to say probably not, since free movement has been a policy goal for over 200 years; but it sounds like you have a specific idea and it sounds interesting. Were you thinking of a particular state or bloc of states that would want to reserve the right to close their borders?
Like I mentioned, I think it’s possible for citizenship status to remain a state responsibility and for these laws to vary at least a little from state to state, even if the ASB has taken over related things like issuing passports. One is primarily a citizen of one’s state rather than of the ASB. Does this mean that you have to change your citizenship when you move across a state line? Yes, but if you are a native-born citizen it is a simple process… though I can imagine a state like Iroquoia still requiring some sort of test and oath. If you are not native born, you would have to make sure that you meet the requirements of citizenship of the state you want to move to.
Now I don’t think that the variation is extreme from state to state, but I do think that confederal law spells out an acceptable range within which states can choose to set their requirements, rather than a uniform set of requirements. Some of the variation is still tied to the old imperial connections, today represented by various commonwealths. That is to say, Christiana, as an Imperial Commonwealth member, has to have policies that are particularly welcoming to migrants from other Imperial Commonwealth members. Other states don’t have to let the same people become citizens so easily, though they must allow them to travel and become residents freely. The same applies mutatis mutandis for New Scotland, the English loyalist states, St. Pierre, and so forth.
I don’t know, what do you think about that? It feels right to me, but I’m probably not seeing some of the implications of such a system.
Thanks. Sometimes it becomes hard to remember what has been written about. I was just thinking about the time my wife and I toured wineries in Michigan (which would be part of ATL Upper Country) and was wondering if the subject has been touched on.
Certainly there are some very good vineyards in that section of Lake Michigan, along with Lake Erie, the middle Ohio valley, and other parts that we know are good for growing grapes. The alcohol stereotypes map isn’t about production, it’s about the standard drink of the different areas. Is someone likely to say let’s have a beer sometime, or have some wine? That’s what it’s about.
On the alcohol map, probably the biggest difference from OTL is the preponderance of rum in most parts of the coast. This follows the colonial pattern. Because of the trade agreements that I mentioned above, West Indian rum did not go through the slump that it went through in OTL after the Revolution, and it remained the principal drink in most of the port cities. It was mainly inland, where rum was less available, where Scots-Irish whiskey and German beer unseated rum.
But all that isn’t to say that you can’t get most kinds of drink in a bar or liquor store anywhere in the country. Or that different areas don’t produce many kinds of alcohol. In fact, the ASB is the kind of place where
Catawba wine for example, once the pride of Ohio, thrived to the present day and is highly prized everywhere. It’s just that it’s made in regions that might stereotypically drink more whiskey than wine because of the historical and cultural connection to Virginia backwoodsmen.
And yes, I the alcohol stereotypes map did require a ridiculous amount of reading into the history of the wine, beer and whiskey industries of the United States. Worth it for a 40x40 pixel map that forms one ninth of a joke image. So worth it.
I like the detail in the map, but maybe keeping the colours consistent by language family would have been more logical and readable?
It's not really a language map, more an ethno-cultural map. The colors follow a general pattern of blue for French, red for English, orange for Dutch.
