During the early decades of the twenty-first century, how did issues related to growing inequality in the United States, including immigration, education, poverty, and criminal justice, sharpen public debate about America's social and cultural future?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should include:
- Immigration: During the 1990s, one-third of the nation's population growth since 1990 came from the influx of immigrants; foreign-born workers made up nearly 15 percent of the workforce by 2011; the Immigration Act of 1965, which had limited immigration from the Western Hemisphere, resulted in Asian immigrants becoming the fastest-growing, best-educated, and highest-earning ethnic group in the United States; NAFTA and greater integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies that began in the 1990s encouraged Hispanic immigration so that by 2016, Hispanics made up about half of all unauthorized immigrants to this nation; communities took action against unauthorized immigrants, including California's Proposition 187, which denied basic services to immigrants until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional; as international terrorism continued to grow, Americans began to fear and question the influx of refugees from war-torn Islamic nations; in the 2016 presidential election, the Republican candidate persuaded many voters to support him by championing the interests of ordinary people while simultaneously appealing to racial hatred, economic nationalism, and xenophobia to advance the interests of native-born Americans over immigrants; his political platform called for a complete shutdown of Muslim immigration to the United States, verbal attacks on Mexican immigrants, and a promise to build a wall along the Mexican border that Mexico would pay for
- Education: controversial education reforms sparked by the growing racial, ethnic, religious diversity and the expansion of rights for gays, women, and the disabled in the United States; multiculturalism demanded an acknowledgement of the unique attributes and achievements of formerly marginalized groups and recent immigrants; reformers advocated changes in teaching materials, teaching strategies, and staffing and wanted to make instruction more relevant by examining racism and economic inequality; critics of multiculturalism panned it as a divisive "politically correct" effort that compromised academic integrity for political ends; a widening gap in proficiency levels between students of color and white students continued to expand due largely to differences in family wealth; most public schools that students of color attended were not integrated and composed mostly of students from low-income families; No Child Left Behind, which increased standardized testing and promoted charter and private schools in place of failing public schools, was passed to decrease the achievement gap between the United States and other developed nations; NCLB did not contribute significantly to educational achievement
- Poverty: during the 1990s, poverty reemerged amid growing social inequality as a major national problem; unemployment and poverty rates rose after the financial collapse of 2007; one in eight Americans lived in poverty by 2016; more children of color lived in deep poverty than white children; lack of affordable health in addition to poverty raised the maternal mortality rate to the highest in the developed world; urban poverty increased due to the economic recession, high unemployment, a shift from high-paying manufacturing jobs to service jobs, and racial segregation; rural communities in Appalachia and elsewhere bore the brunt of deep poverty that was exacerbated by a growing opioid crisis; growing economic inequality resulted in the publication of the Distressed Communities Index in 2017, which revealed the starkest gap between metropolitan prosperity and rural economic distress to be in the Southeast
- Criminal justice: second-highest adult incarceration in the world as a result of growing social inequality; 2.3 million incarcerated in a heavily decentralized prison system by 2017; beginning with the Reagan administration's war on drugs, many of the incarcerated have been jailed for offenses involving illegal drugs; violations of immigration laws have also resulted in incarceration or time in detention centers; growing rate of female prisoners, although 90 percent of the imprisoned population is male; African Americans and Hispanics constituted more than half of the prison population although their rates of arrest and imprisonment are higher than those for whites who use illegal drugs at a similar rate; protests by minorities both inside and outside of prisons focused on bad conditions and prisoners' rights; disproportionate police brutality against black men led to the organization of Black Lives Matter