The domestic information comes from the research of demographer John Johnson, who documents the places where Americans are going and the places that they are leaving. Texas, as you might guess, is a good example of both. The areas around Dallas, Houston and Austin — the so-called Texas Triangle — are attracting newcomers from all over the country. Most of the dry, windswept counties of west Texas are not; some of them are experiencing net population declines.
But some of the data Johnson has turned up is more surprising. Americans are moving to mountainous counties in western Montana and Idaho. More strikingly, they are heading out to the area Johnson calls the Northwoods, settling in northern Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and even the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, long considered a declining backwater of played-out mines and dying small towns. Rural New England, previously thought of as a fading region, is also attracting newcomers.
But as Johnson points out, “The Sunbelt is still hot.” This includes, somewhat surprisingly, southern Appalachia, coastal counties in Florida (but not the southern tip of the state) and perhaps most stunningly of all, quite a few counties in the much-maligned Ozarks, among them areas of northern Arkansas.
Johnson focuses on the losers, too. They include the lower Mississippi Valley, most particularly the Delta counties of Mississippi; the Great Plains in the dry territory west of the 100th meridian; and in a certain way, California. That state continues to attract newcomers from Mexico and Central America, but it is a loser in domestic migration. Between 2020 and 2024, Johnson finds, 1.47 million more people moved from California to another state than came into California from another state.
My longtime Governing colleague Bill Fulton has gone over Johnson’s data carefully, and comes up with a number of firm conclusions. When you add it all up, Fulton writes, Americans are moving to pretty places, counties with scenic advantages, even if those counties are still emerging from a long period of economic decline. Fulton doesn’t mince words. The plains west of the 100th meridian aren’t very scenic, aren’t gaining much in new economic activity, and so, as he puts it, “a region that has always struggled economically is slowly, inexorably, dying.”
WHAT ONE CAN CONCLUDE from Johnson’s data is the plain reality that virtually every region in America has changed with immigration in recent years, whether the newcomers arrive from another part of this country or from somewhere else. We know that the Deep South has been altered profoundly in a conservative direction, to some degree by the influx of northerners who moved in with the advent of air conditioning. Vermont has become a substantially different place due to the migration of left-leaning New Yorkers, among them the state’s senior senator, Bernie Sanders. Western capitals such as Boise and Salt Lake City have become outposts of liberal ideology brought there by internal migration, much of it from California.
But American city cultures have changed just as much from the arrival of international newcomers, most of them from this hemisphere. There are many examples, but I’ll focus on one: Garden City, Kan., a city of about 28,000 people. In 1960, its population was composed overwhelmingly of people who were born in this country, nearly all of them in Kansas and many of them lifelong residents of surrounding Finney County. In the 1970s, the local council approved the building of a meatpacking plant. Garden City has never been the same since. The new industrial development attracted immigrants from Myanmar, Somalia, Vietnam and especially Mexico. Now roughly 55 percent of Garden City’s inhabitants are of Latino descent, and 26 percent were born in other countries. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic reinvention than that, but it has happened. Fifty years ago, Garden City’s Main Street was the sort of place you went for standard midwestern food. Now most of the top restaurants are Mexican, Vietnamese and Filipino. Unemployment in Garden City is no worse than the national average, but crime rates are disturbingly high.
Fulton cites a couple of other striking cases. One is Utica, N.Y., where I spent quite a bit of time myself in the 1990s. Even then, as it experienced a decline in its overall population, Utica was being changed by newcomers from Bosnia, who blended into the city’s population in part because they were white. But since then, Fulton reports, Utica has become a haven for refugees from around the world, most notably from Africa. The refugees have become fixtures in Utica’s burgeoning yogurt production facilities.
Fulton’s other focus is on Marshalltown, Iowa, the all-American small town with a history not unlike that of Garden City. Today, immigrants are the backbone of the local pork-processing industry, and 50 different dialects are spoken in the local schools. The New York Times recently quoted the town’s mayor-elect to the effect that as a result of Marshalltown’s immigrant transformation “you have more energy in the community.”
THERE’S NO DOUBT that places affected by heavy in-migration are losing a civic culture that once was their leading source of pride. Old-timers walk down their town’s Main Street and hear conversations in languages they can’t understand. They are exposed to culinary customs they had never experienced before and confronted with foods that taste strange to them. There are new and unfamiliar religious practices. All of this is unsettling, to say the least, and for some long-time residents, a source of profound anxiety.
It’s true of domestic migration as well. The hip culture of Salt Lake City is about as foreign to conservative Mormons in that city as Filipino street food would be in Marshalltown. Most of the old-timers manage to get used to it. The question is whether the country as a whole has benefited.
The evidence is pretty clear that immigrants don’t steal jobs from local workers. Economists are in unison about that. But whether they serve to depress wages isn’t quite the same story. Most experts insist that immigrants are filling jobs the locals don’t want, but the possibility remains that locals might want the jobs if the pay weren’t so low. The proportion of immigrants in construction jobs is twice as high as in other types of work, and the vast majority of these jobs are non-union and very low-paying. Could a more generous approach from employers bring out a cadre of qualified local construction workers? I don’t think that question has been fully answered.
ONE THING THAT IS CERTAIN is that the Trump administration wants Americans to have more children in the places where they live and want to stay, reducing the need for large-sale immigration in the (very) long run. Vice President JD Vance has said the country needs to “go to war against anti-child ideology.” The massive spending bill passed by Congress last year included a provision aiming to deposit $1,000 into an account for American families that produce children between now and 2028. It’s not clear whether the administration wants simply to discourage immigration from abroad or to help poor people in depressed industrial towns raise families where they have always lived.
One thing we do know is that pro-natalist government policies have had very little success over the many centuries in which they have been tried. They didn’t work for Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1980s. They didn’t work for the Roman Emperor Augustus in the first century BC. Donald Trump is an authoritarian president, but he’s not as powerful as Augustus was two millennia ago. If Augustus couldn’t do it, probably Trump can’t.
So it’s a pretty safe bet that there won’t be any boom in the American birthrate any time soon. Formerly stable communities in diverse parts of the country will have to accept lots of unfamiliar newcomers, both from other countries and from faraway American towns with different habits and cultures. They will need to get used to it. History suggests they can.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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