Planning the Next Great Migration

I’m out of potentially promising Northeastern states to cover so today am wrapping up the last couple of Southeastern states, namely Texas and West Virginia. In retrospect, I was probably too hard on Texas in suggesting that out-of-state migration should be avoided. There were a fairly good number of cities and towns that passed my search criteria, some large enough to absorb thousands of migrants every year without blinking. True, the governor is a nut and the regime far from democratic, but perhaps you approve of these things. True, the power grid is a disaster, but ... but maybe you can buy a generator? If you move there you had better prepare your life on the assumption that no public services, including basic utilities, can be relied upon. Still, it’s certainly possible to look at eastern Texas and see it as a better-than-the alternative destination for Christian conservatives from the soon-to-burn Southwest.

Missouri, in Colin Woodard’s take on American regional cultures, is Appalachian in the southern half and Midlands in the northern half. It has two large, diverse metropolitan areas, Kansas City and St. Louis, at the western and eastern edges of the state respectively. However, its government is entirely dominated by the rural areas, and in the present climate of what Will Wilkinson terms the “Southernification of rural America,” we may presume that it would join the Confederacy or Red republic if the Union broke up today, whatever the urbanites might think of that.

Louisiana as a whole is more French- (and Catholic-)influenced than any other state; for example, the state is administratively divided into parishes rather than counties. As noted, southern Louisiana’s heavily French-influenced Cajun culture is unique in the United States; many residents still speak a Louisiana dialect of French as their first language. Most Cajuns are rural, attached to the land, and not wealthy enough to move readily. Sadly, sea level rise plus land subsidence due to fossil fuel extraction is chewing away at the land rural residents need to live on, and many places are heavily poisoned by the chemical industry. Parts of the largest city, New Orleans, are already below sea level; that will become increasingly difficult to manage. Already, after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, poorer neighborhoods were never fully rebuilt. An increasing number of residents will be forced out of their homes in future, and for them, communities farther north in Louisiana will often be the most congenial choice. Out-of-state Anglophones who just like gumbo should perhaps refrain from taking up space in those communities.

Six million of Georgia’s less than 11 million people live in the northwestern Atlanta metropolitan area. Augusta, on the eastern border, has a metro area population of 600,000. The third-largest metro area is Savannah in the southeast, 400,000 people, along the Atlantic Coast in the high-risk zone. That tells you which areas may be most unsustainable.

If conservative government is your main reason for choosing a Southern state, note that Georgia’s demographics are now such that, if everyone gets to vote, the state is now purple. The state government is trying to ensure that not everyone does get to vote, but as of this writing there’s a significant backlash to their efforts resulting in high turnout by newly empowered African-American voters, who are mostly Democrats. It’s difficult to imagine this state staying out of the Confederacy if the Union splits up, between its cultural ties and its geographic location. However, if that were really important to you, this might not be a safe bet.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of small cities that have good-looking economic numbers are located within the Atlanta metropolitan area. That area encompasses several whole counties, so some portions are more urban than others, but still, you shouldn’t want to add to that level of sprawl. Inland cities with more modest metro areas tend to have above-average unemployment rates, so migrants might not be easily employed. Rural areas, including large parts of the southern and eastern portions of the state, are generally quite poor and, unless you want to buy a farm, have few economic opportunities for outsiders. For these reasons I’d suggest that out-of-state migrants should not consider Georgia as a destination. Here are a few examples of smaller urban areas that might be of interest to current residents thinking of leaving Atlanta:

As noted before, I’ll be presenting Southeastern states in alphabetical order as well. That means starting with Alabama, which is a bit unfortunate since I have very few potential destinations to recommend in that state. While you know that I wouldn’t personally care to end up in any Christian nationalist region, some of the Southeastern states are in much better shape than others, and Alabama has a generally weaker economy and fewer opportunities. That said, it would have room to accept some migrants. In smaller towns these might best be mostly people with local ties and/or those who have a way to make a locally suitable independent living and actually improve the economy rather than just filling an existing job-role. 

I wish to make another brief digression from the book text to comment on a current issue. Paul A. London wrote a column in 2021 about the Republican “war against cities,” which I cited in my last post. He noted that the cultural phenomenon of rural hostility towards diverse, wealth-generating cities has a long history (as does the opposite phenomenon of urban contempt towards rural areas). At the moment, the Republican Party is deliberately using its power to make life harder for urbanites, “especially,” London says, those in Blue regions “that vote for Democrats and have large minority populations.”

London mentioned anti-urban federal tax policy changes as an example of the “war on cities.” He might also have mentioned the effective nullification by conservative judges of the Voting Rights Act and acceptance of vote-suppressing measures that hit more populous counties harder. But these official acts are just meant to make city residents poorer and more voiceless in state legislatures. They wouldn’t go so far as to seek to put urbanites’ lives at risk, as extreme factional polarization encourages, right? Well, I’m afraid that can no longer be counted on.

In the last post I talked about the fact that the ecological collapse of the Southwest is already starting. That process is now irreversible, given the long-term drought that is the predicted result of climate change. At most, a wet year here and there will put off catastrophe for a few years; it will not reverse the trend that must, probably sooner than we think, lead to the virtual abandonment of overgrown desert cities such as Las Vegas. The climate-related problems other threatened regions of the U.S. face are not quite so imminent, but because they are grave, Americans would be wise to avoid moving to those regions, and to consider moving out if they are already there.