The old saying that Americans have been moving from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt fails to capture either what has been happening from 1990 to the onset of the current recession in 2007 or what is happening today.
Demography is destiny, or at least a significant part of it, and America’s changing demography has had enormous consequences in every realm of life. Americans historically have been a mobile people.
But the old saying that Americans have been moving from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt fails to capture what has been happening from 1990 to the onset of the current recession in 2007. And there are entirely new realities due to the recession that are remaking states and regions in important ways.
First, let’s consider the period from 1990 to 2007. In some states—notably New York, New Jersey, and California—immigrants poured in and Americans left. Some states had robust growth both from immigration and internal migration—the megastates of Texas and Florida and also the “sand states” of Nevada and Arizona which, during most of this period, had the nation’s highest percentage of