White people, black people and business from all over America and the world, are heading to the South—where taxes are low, unions are irrelevant, and people love their guns.
“The flyover states have become the passed-over states,” Bill Maher opined in his closing soliloquy of his HBO show this past Friday. “That’s why red state voters are so pissed off. They don’t hate us, they want to be us. They want to go to the party.”
And that’s not according to some conservative think tank. It’s from the latest annual United Van Lines report. And those folks know a thing or two about where people are moving from. And to. “The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve ever seen in history,” Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said at a news conference back in 2010 when those electoral college numbers were announced.
When I told my friends in New Jersey nearly fifteen years ago that I was packing my bags and heading South, they thought I’d lost my mind. Why, they wondered, would I give up the food, shopping, and close proximity to New York City to live anywhere else, especially a place like Oxford, Miss.? I might as well have told them I was moving to Mogadishu.
Having disposed of the economic arguments, I knew that one question lurked: “Okay, but what’s it like living with a bunch of slow-talking, gun-toting, Bible-thumping racists?” The Bible thumpers proved to be more caricature than anything. The people I met didn’t impose their religion on me. They tried to live by the standards of their faith. Sometimes they did; sometimes they didn’t. But the pervasive pursuit of those standards made the South a better place to live.
And it isn’t just white folks like me who’ve been heading south over the past few decades: it’s black people, too. Indeed, the percentage of the nation’s African-American population living in the South hit its highest point in half a century, as more black people moved out of declining cities in the Midwest and Northeast.
That news came on the heels of a series of corporate defections from the Garden State. Hertz, the car-rental company, moved its headquarters — and its 550 jobs — from New Jersey to Florida, and Sealed Air Corporation moved its headquarters and 1,300 jobs from Elmwood Park, New Jersey to Charlotte, North Carolina. And there are countless others like it.
“Twenty years ago, the question at Daimler was, ‘Tusca . . . where?’” Andreas Renschler, who served as the plant’s first CEO, said on the day of the plant’s 20th anniversary, in 2013. “Today, our most talented people are waiting in line to work here.” In 2012, the plant shipped 5 billion dollars’ worth of Alabama-made vehicles to 135 markets across the globe. Half the vehicles sold by Mercedes in the U.S. were made there.
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