The Problem With the USA's Borders

on december 7 1787 delaware ratified the newly written united states constitution becoming the first state to enter into the union over the next two years 12 more states did the very same thing totaling 13 original states by 1790. just a year later vermont was added as the first new addition to the country and the 14th member of the union a year after that it was kentucky then tennessee then ohio by 1803 this year however saw the purchase of the louisiana territory from france doubling the size of the country and jumpstarting a new age of american expansion starting in 1812 with the addition of louisiana over the next hundred years the country added a total of 31 states averaging one new state every three years until the country assumed its final contiguous form in 1912 with the admission of arizona as the 48th state and just like that there was no more space for the country to grow it wouldn't be for 47 years that another change came to the american map when in 1959 alaska was annexed as the 49th state and less than nine months later hawaii became the 50th and final state to be admitted to the union now it's been 62 years since any change to the american map has occurred by far the longest period in the country's history while this very well might change in the upcoming years as the case for both puerto rican and dc statehood gather momentum what's clear is that america is no longer the dynamic country it once was and virtually all progress in developing the country's borders has ended of course in a lot of ways this makes sense the united states era of expansion is over and now all the land on the continent is claimed by someone but now that we've been stuck with the same borders for over a century a new possibility has opened up instead of looking outside of our borders for ways to expand we can finally bring our attention back to the lines that actually define the inside of the country and use what we know now about how america and its states work together to improve its overall ability to function after all with a new state added every three years not a lot of thought was put into these borders and how they'd come to impact the states they defined instead of taking into account the landscape and natural barriers many states resorted to cutting up territories with straight and uncompromising borders often to their own detriment and left plenty of room for improvement it might be time for the u.s to reassess its own internal divides and begin a new era not of expansion but rather optimization now i know what a lot of you are thinking already what's wrong with the borders we already have and okay i'll be honest a very strong argument could be made to keep everything how it is seeing how successful the country as a whole has been over the past hundred years what need is there to change right to this i'd say that while yes the usa has accomplished a lot not all states were created equal and so while some have risen to become remarkable contributors to the country a lot of states have been left behind doomed by their own geography and the thoughtless borders that encompass them to understand what i mean i'd like to walk us through three examples where states have suffered as a direct result of their haphazard creation since its separation from virginia in 1863 west virginia has occupied one of the poorest and most underdeveloped corners in the entire country the state ranks 50th out of 50 or dead last in terms of median household income 49th in per capita income 44th in overall poverty rate 50th in life expectancy 50th in college education i could keep going but what's clear is that no matter what metric is used west virginia always seems to find its way towards the bottom of the list and we don't need to look any further than the state's geography to understand why nestled entirely within the appalachian mountains there's no flat land for farming no easy way to transport materials in and out for manufacturing nowhere to develop large cities and no easy way for people just arriving in the country to move here the only thing west virginia is good for is coal mining which has been the primary driver of its economy for its entire history except now with the coal industry in decline people are destined to leave as opportunities for employment often follow where large numbers of people can be located without any other large industry to fall back on the state is essentially powerless to prevent its population from jumping ship and has little to offer to attract new people by trapping west virginia solely within the confines of the appalachians the state simply lacks many of the necessary qualities that make for self-sufficiency and if i'm to be honest the state might be better off as well not a state but rather the more rural part of a larger more diversified state while the obvious choice might be to recombine with virginia with the appalachians clearly severing this area from the east coast it might actually be a better idea to merge with ohio or kentucky as that would allow much easier access through their shared rivers gaining entry to the great lakes or mississippi river and give people who want to leave the harsh mountains a place to move to while staying within the state in the end while it's easy to blame west virginia for its own shortfalls it's important to remember the state's borders were drawn not as the result of settlement patterns or careful planning but rather in a rushed move to break away from a virginia that was trying to secede as part of the confederacy west virginian's choice to remain loyal to the union at all costs shouldn't mean condemning them to a state destined to fail moving over west will come to the state of nevada while the economic situation here isn't nearly as bad as that in west virginia nevada suffers from its own problems with geography or more specifically topography you see in most places around the world rivers flow from mountains to the coast together with a river's mini tributaries the area that feeds a river is what's known as a watershed or a drainage basin where all the water that falls within this area eventually ends up in the same place however sometimes when mountains arrange themselves in a certain way all routes to the ocean can be blocked off and water has no choice but to stay where it is these are called endoreac basins as it just so happens the rocky mountains have produced a massive internal watershed in the form of the great basin thousands of years ago during the last ice age when more moisture reached the area the basin captured enough water to fill a lake producing the ginormous lake bonneville in the far more arid climate of the present however the lake has been reduced down to only its deepest section the great salt lake leaving the rest of the basin as the largest of the country's four deserts while its size means that the great basin desert spans several states from wyoming utah and idaho all the way into oregon and california and even into parts of mexico nevada is the only state that sits almost entirely within the basin what this means for nevada is that the majority of it lacks access to water and without water you can't have anything that's why before 1940 nevada was by far the least populous state in the country with only 110 000 people a trend that only changed due to the state's decision to legalize gambling which led it to become the fastest growing state from 1940 all the way until 2003 filling the state with millions of residents crowded into the few places where there is water but as nevada remains one of the fastest growing states in the country it'll only suffer more and more from extreme water shortages and will have to compete against california for water rights looking for a reason as to why such a state would end up being created in the first place we can actually thank the american civil war again as the republicans rushed to ensure lincoln would win the election nevada was admitted to the union just eight days before the election despite it at the time having only a little over 10 000 residents far below the 60 000 people typically required for statehood in fact politicians were so hell bent on making nevada a state that it originally looked like this in this form the state wouldn't even have had access to the colorado river and lake mead meaning no las vegas and 80 percent of nevada's population while the state's absorption of part of the arizona territory was definitely an improvement gaining the state access to the water from lake mead the rest of the state's poor access to water continues to its ability to grow beyond vegas the last example i have doesn't relate to a single state but rather several of them see if you're familiar with the geography of this country you'll be aware that there are a number of states in the middle of it that are basically all the same specifically i'm talking about oklahoma kansas nebraska iowa south dakota north dakota and let's be honest a lot more all of these states occupy the great plains region where the once sprawling grasslands have created some of the best lands for agriculture in the world in turn these lands have been transformed into a corridor of continuous farming an agrarian powerhouse within the country this all begs the question though why have multiple states to govern what's essentially a single area after all state governments are expensive to run meaning breaking an area like this up into many smaller states only forces residents to pay more in taxes for the same thing on top of this having multiple governments makes cooperation between states far more difficult and decisive actions less possible than would be in a single state which just so happens to be necessary for an industry like agriculture where regional land management plays a big role in your economy remember this is where the dust bowl happened precisely because of poor land management and we can see this becoming an issue again today with the draining of the ogallala aquifer what is the ogallala aquifer you ask simply put before this was all farmland over time a large amount of water was absorbed by the soil here storing it beneath the ground in what's essentially a huge underground lake ever since world war ii large scale agricultural operations have been extracting this water for use in crop irrigation making possible much of the production that comes out of this region this transformed a huge part of the country from a dry and grassy landscape what we'd call prairie into acres upon acres of cornfields at the expense of slowly draining the aquifer falling under the borders of eight different states management of this resource requires a lot of cooperation between competing interests which means cooperation doesn't really happen you see as a public resource each individual state benefits economically at least in the short term by extracting as much water as possible for growing food even if that means eventually there will be no water left this type of scenario is taught in every high school environmental science class as the tragedy of the commons and can only be combated by regulation from a higher authority which in this case means the federal government telling a bunch of states what to do which if you know anything about america you know is hard and doesn't always work but if it were the responsibility of fewer states maybe even just one with the understanding that their economy wholly relied on agriculture all of a sudden the whole issue falls onto a single entity to fix you no longer have a situation where a state like texas which has a far more diverse economy than any other state occupying the prairie has relied heavily on groundwater for irrigation and as a result has experienced some of the most drastic drops in the level of the aquifer anywhere in the region the thing is once the aquifer dries up here texas has the rest of its economy to fall back on while the rest of the states that depend far more on farming could be destroyed by a sharp drop in production predictions for how much longer we'll be able to continue pulling water out of the aquifer span from 20 years to only 10 more years and action needs to be taken soon to avoid this again these borders were drawn before we knew any of this but now we know better and we might have to start acting on this knowledge after all what would be the purpose of preserving these state lines if it meant everyone in the states will be out of a job and have to move in a matter of years trust me last time something put thousands of farmers out of jobs here we saw nearly two and a half million people abandoned states like texas oklahoma kansas and nebraska fleeing to states like california and the country as a whole entered the worst economic period in its entire history overall what i hope i've convinced you of is at the very least the possibility that the borders we have right now might not be the best and it could be beneficial to begin rethinking some of them so finally let's take a look at what some improved borders might actually look like perhaps the most common place for the united states to be compared against is europe this for a lot of reasons makes sense to do not only because of our shared histories and cultures but also in a geographical sense these two places have a lot in common measuring 9.8 million square kilometers the united states very nearly equals the 10.1 million square kilometers europe covers which by extension ends up making america's 50 subdivisions of comparable sizes to the 44 countries of europe but here's the problem europe has a population of 746 million people while the united states sits with only 330 million meaning that here in europe more than twice the number of people have fit themselves into fewer sovereign states so while many european countries are of comparable sizes to many united states the same definitely cannot be said about their populations texas for example the second biggest state measures bigger than europe's second-largest country though ukraine still contains 44 million people or 15 million more than texas france which i never realized until now is europe's third largest country is only slightly bigger than our third california but holds a population nearly 20 million greater the same holds true if we look at other large countries like china which has only 33 major subdivisions despite having 1.4 billion people india with 36 subdivisions while having 1.3 billion people or even africa which has 54 countries for a total population of 1.2 billion all of this points to the possibility that the united states may in fact have too many states so sticking with europe as a baseline for now a simple proportion of its population over subdivisions shows us that around 20 states would be adequate for a country with 330 million people now let's be clear there are an infinite number of ways you can make 20 states out of 50 and everyone is going to have a different opinion on the best way to do this initially what i wanted to do was simply take a map of the 50 existing states and just combine neighboring states until only 20 were left but i'll be honest i actually did this i chose what states to keep and which ones to merge i calculated the new state populations the new state areas and even wrote a little about each new state i ended up creating which took me about a day's work the reason it took me so long is because i kept running into the same issue where no matter how you combine states you're still always going to have these long unapologetic straight lines that just don't take any of their surroundings into consideration and so the result of combining states is always more or less a bunch of states that still suffer from the same issues as before so i decided to scrap that whole portion of the script altogether instead over the course of my research for this video i stumbled upon a 20-state arrangement that the u.s actually already uses courtesy of the united states geological survey that appears to remedy many of the specific problems i brought up a minute ago you may or may not have noticed that a lot of the troubles i went over dealt with the allocation of water resources so it comes as little surprise that the map that spoke out to me was one showing the water resource regions of the country which totally ignore current state boundaries to focus on the real hydrological units that constitute the land creating each state around essentially a single drainage area dividing the country like this has a number of benefits first each state comes equipped with its own natural transportation routes to serve as the primary avenues to access the interior of a state this also gives each state complete control over their water resources or in other words each state achieves full water sovereignty and is no longer dependent on management from multiple states or borrowing water from neighboring states looking more closely we'll find what used to be nevada and utah have been replaced with the great basin a state defined by its sheer lack of water while this might sound like a horrible idea what this would allow the state to do is adapt more appropriate water management regulations such as banning uses of water not related to human survival this means no watering your lawn for green grasses in the middle of a desert no water parks no golf courses and most importantly no irrigation intensive agriculture while banning most forms of farming across an entire state might seem extreme with a setup like this the purpose of each state would become far more clear and agriculture would become the duty of other states with much more access to water like those of the midwest here we can see the lands above the ogallala aquifer have been consolidated into just two states based around the missouri river watershed and the arkansas river watershed rather than the eight it's split between now allowing for far more swift and decisive action to be taken against its depletion consolidating the ohio drainage basin brings west virginia into a far larger more economically diverse state that hopefully be better equipped to handle and improve the poor conditions found currently altogether i don't know about you but i definitely like this better than what we have now as everything feels more natural and i could really see some of these developing specific cultures and identities of course that's not to say there aren't any anomalies or issues with this layout because the rio grande is used to define much of the country's southern border its drainage basin is cut in half between the us and mexico resulting in what's essentially a panhandle that follows the course of the river the same happened to the great lakes basin where the placement of canada's border breaks the southern portion of the watershed into a narrow region extending from minnesota all the way into new york's lake ontario coast besides that however i think the character of the east coast has been pretty well preserved breaking it up into new england the mid-atlantic and the south atlantic gulf though it should be noted that each of these aren't based around a single watershed as the rivers here become much smaller than in the middle of the country and rather each state is a collection of smaller river basins that all empty into a single area a similar thing happens with california where it's easier to group all the numerous smaller rivers coming from the coastal mountains than to make each their own entity but don't worry what these states lose in their internal connectivity is made up for by the greater accessibility they get through having a coastline problems emerge when looking north however where we find what's called the soros red rainy watershed here we see international borders again interrupt our plan only unlike the southern border this one between the us and canada doesn't follow the river but rather runs straight through it leaving only an uneven sliver of the true watershed named for the rivers flowing through it all of these waters empty into canada to lakes like winnipeg and lake of the woods and eventually to the hudson bay this creates a really fractured and not really navigable state that would probably be better off traded to canada for the rest of some of our watersheds like the missouri and columbus ironically our borders used to accommodate this but the us and canada actually swapped these lands in order to have a straight line instead overall organizing the country like this seems like it would improve how the individual states and therefore the country as a whole operates though it wouldn't be without flaws of its own to tell the truth i'm not even the first person to suggest to this and actually it was a man named john wesley powell who after personally exploring and mapping much of the american frontier derived a similar blueprint for western states all the way back in 1890. unfortunately when powell presented this map to congress it didn't get far and instead we ended up with what we have today okay well if you didn't like the thought of radically altering the country's internal borders well i don't blame you in 1912 when these borders became final the u.s had a total population of only 95 million or less than a third of what it is now if these borders were drawn for far less people then maybe what we need isn't fewer states but rather more states to account for the growing we've done since then in particular over the past century a clear hierarchy of states has emerged at the top of this hierarchy is california and texas the two biggest and not coincidentally the two most populated states in the entire lower 48. the sheer size of these states has led them to dominate the field and allowed them to overpower many of their surrounding states to the point where we have to ask is it really fair to let some states be way bigger than others in california as many as six states have been proposed to be made out of one most recently by this guy tim draper a venture capitalist who collected and spent five million dollars trying to get his idea on a ballot in 2016. since then however he's given up the six california's dream in exchange for a three california's model though i gotta be honest i don't know if these are the same lines i would have drawn across the state texas on the other hand was admitted into the union under the provision that if texas ever wanted to it could break itself into as many as five constituent states though nothing was written about how to actually break the state up the most popular way to do this came after the 2008 election from the website 538 which suggested breaking texas into the plainlands el norte new texas the gulf land and trinity however if california is only broken into three states the argument could be made that texas only really needs to be broken in two the easiest way to do this would probably be to use the texas colorado river which runs pretty cleanly straight through the middle of the state this would result in a north texas containing dallas fort worth and houston and a south texas with cities like san antonio el paso and corpus christi austin texas the current state's capital is actually bisected by the colorado river placing parts of the city in both states meaning they'd both likely want to find different capitals while austin would act as the bridge between them of course california and texas are both well aware of the advantages that come with their massive sizes and therefore would likely never agree to something like this okay now over the course of making this video i couldn't help but be reminded of the video i made about a year ago about the problem with africa's borders where i looked at the current issues plaguing the continent and tried to come up with other ways of splitting it up in that video i used three main characteristics to divide up the whole of africa race religion and language which felt like what the european colonists had ignored when they drew their borders so let's take a look and see if basing the divisions of the country on these factors makes any sense starting with the easiest of the three english is by far the most widely spoken language in every state and even in the places where the second most common language spanish is most popular along the country's southern border still less than 30 percent of the population here uses it so to break up the country by any linguistic lines would really just be nonsensical the same can be said for religion where unlike africa which was nearly perfectly split between islam and christianity two notably different religions in the united states there's no question that christianity is the sole dominant religion to see any sort of difference we need to look at the breakdown of the different branches of christianity which splits the country into three or four different large pieces and a number of smaller denominations but considering one of the foundational principles of this country was the separation of church and state it just feels a little backwards to literally define states based on their biggest churches and so finally that leaves race or in this case ethnicity which yeah is where things get complicated looking at a map of the country by largest ancestry group we'll find only six groups represent more than five percent of the country's population german english african mexican irish and italian some of which have formed a solid block while others have more sporadic non-continuous distributions however one thing a map like this is good at showing is settlement patterns the english were the first to arrive via the east coast and establish a population providing a baseline stock across the entire country on top of which later immigrant groups would build which is why today people of english ancestry don't really form a cohesive territory except in places where no one else wanted to live like the appalachians and rockies the germans primarily migrated over between 1820 to 1910 where advertisements for cheap land drove nearly 6 million immigrants across the atlantic unlike most other immigrant groups however the germans only came over if they had the money to buy farms meaning most germans bypassed the cities of the east coast in favor of buying up all the good farmlands in the midwest explaining why today the german ethnicity dominates much of the middle of the country and numbers nearly 50 million strong or more than half of germany itself african americans have quite the opposite tale to tell mostly being brought over through the slave trade from just under 600 000 people brought into the country the african-american population has grown to just over 40 million with their concentration in the south reflecting where slavery was practiced most commonly at 37 million people mexican-americans make up the fourth largest ethnicity and the fastest growing of all the major ethnic groups on account of the fact that we're still receiving large numbers of immigrants from mexico unlike most other immigrants to the u.s which entered the country through its east coast given their proximity to us most mexican immigrants have come directly over land across the u.s mexico border resulting in a distribution pattern stretching from southern texas through new mexico we really should have seen that coming into arizona and finally southern california lastly we have the irish and italians which have fairly similar stories both were driven to america as a result of extreme hardships experienced in their homelands and arrived to the country dirt poor meaning they mostly stayed in whatever city they arrived in for the irish that chiefly meant boston and philadelphia for the italians new york city giving both groups smaller more concentrated population centers around eastern cities but little else throughout the rest of the country overall however no matter how dominant one group may appear in a certain area a closer look reveals just how misleading a map like this really is in utah the most english state only 29 of residents profess english ancestry north dakota the most german state is only 39 german mississippi the most african-american state is only 38 african texas the most mexican state is only 33 percent mexican new hampshire the most irish state is only 20 irish and connecticut the most italian state is only 18 italian what we can see from this is that no single ethnic group holds anything close to a majority anywhere in the country so using a map like this is just plain inaccurate at describing who lives here by and large what we've learned from attempting to split the us by language religion and ethnicity is that these criteria just aren't really useful in defining specific regions of the country showing us that in a lot of ways the country is far more united than we may actually think [Music] okay and finally i couldn't talk so much about redrawing borders without coming up with some of my own ideas about how this all could be done now in my opinion the best kinds of borders are those defined by natural barriers as these are often what actually breed of many distinct cultural characteristics in a population coastal people are going to be different from desert people who are going to be different from mountain people who are going to be different from prairie people who are going to be different from forest people so what i'm going to try to do is draw some borders based solely on pre-existing boundaries namely mountains and rivers for mountains there are three main lines we can see across the country the appalachian mountains which section off the east coast from the midwest the rockies which put an end to the prairie and the cascade mountains which distinguish the interior deserts from the coastal forests for rivers i used many of the country's most notable and most navigable waterways to flesh out more of the country's interior the only problem with using rivers is that eventually they break into smaller and smaller streams until you're left with a whole lot of incomplete borders so it was at this point that i had no choice but to get a little creative and try my best at closing out these gaps to make some actual states in the end this is what i got 28 states plus hawaii and alaska all with borders based on the natural landscape to be honest i was surprised by how much parts of this resemble our current setup with the appalachians and its rivers carving up the east coast into a series of mid-sized states while the mini tributaries of the mississippi river ended up making a collection of much larger bodies spanning the country's great plains ending abruptly where the planes meet the rockies these states were probably the hardest to make due to the region's lack of water and therefore rivers to break things up so i ended up with this large gap in the middle where the great basin sits finally the cascade mountains of the pacific coast made things a little easier and we ended up with states not entirely unlike our current ones overall after looking at all these different ways of breaking up the country i think it's safe to conclude that we'll likely never see any of these replace what we have now so long as this model continues to work or at least not totally fail but what do you think is this better than this or this or do you think you could do an even better job at redrawing america's borders whatever you think be sure to let me know in the comments and send me pictures of how you'd split up the country over on twitter if you enjoyed this video you can thank my patrons who besides helping to support me and the channel also in the american spirit voted on the subject of this video so if you'd like to be a part of all of that there should be a link on screen that will take you over to my patreon besides that make sure to like the video and subscribe if you want to keep seeing videos like this thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 579,823

Rating: 4.8245258 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, America, united, states, border, mexico, canada, new, england, texas, california, midwest, west, virginia, nevada, ogallala, kansas, colonial, expansion, puerto, rico, washington, dc, statehood, east, coast, annex, histoy, us, native, land, florida, york, mississippi, river, mountains, appalachian, rocky, aquifer

Id: hnaRppzurpw

Length: 32min 53sec (1973 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021