Migration and its Challenges

Nearby Asheville is having soaring population growth since COVID taught Americans that (a) some of them could work from anywhere, and (b) the government would lock you down if it wanted, which sucks a lot more in a major city than it does somewhere where there is easy access to outdoor enjoyments. As a consequence -- mirroring areas like Jackson Hole and Denver, but at an even faster pace -- Asheville has had massive migration made up of rich people: the city's median income has soared 36%!

The downside to that is that prices are also soaring, as more dollars chase a more-or-less fixed amount of goods. It now costs more to live in Asheville than in Chicago or Atlanta. Even the homeless can't afford Asheville's cost of living; those who want to own a home, well, good luck with that. One of the big challenges is that the people the rich want to work for them can't afford to live nearby. The rich migrants bring tax revenue, so you can invest in schools and public transit and public safety. Your workers and their families won't profit much from this, because they'll have to live out of town -- and since they're the people you'd need to be your public safety workers and schoolteachers, it'll be hard to draw them even at relatively generous salaries. 

Meanwhile, here in a far-flung and rural county, we have a different kind of migration. My informal survey of car passengers taken whenever we have to direct traffic around accidents or fires and the like indicates that about a third of the population is now non-English-speaking Hispanic. At the last census, just four years ago, the population of Hispanics of all races was about two percent. I don't know how many of these people the census missed -- I'd guess almost none of them have legal status, and while the census is desperate to capture them it's very hard to do so. Still, plainly there has been a massive population change in these four years.

Unlike the rich people moving into Asheville who are driving out the indigenous population that they want to service them, these poor people from Latin America came to work but can't add to the tax base. As a result, a recent survey of the school system shows it under extreme strain -- it suddenly has to serve a much larger number of children than was predicted five years ago, on a tax base that if anything has shrunk due to inflation and economic hardship. 

Nevertheless, we also have a housing crisis, because these people need to live somewhere and various government agencies and charities are willing to pay for that. Thus, the cost of living here has skyrocketed even well outside the city. If you wanted to live here and commute to Asheville, you'd still find it tough to buy a home. 

Asheville gets the better deal: it at least has the ability to plan for the problem and fund those plans with increased taxes on people who can afford to pay them. Here, there's no more money to pay for increased services, but the array of service needed has suddenly increased quite a bit: for example, we need a lot of teachers, nurses, and government workers of all kinds who can speak Spanish. We don't really have any, not to speak of. Students who don't speak English still need to be taught, somehow, but that means that teachers are scrambling to try to figure out how to do that -- to the detriment of those students they were planning to teach, who get much less attention because it has to be divided. Those students were already badly served by the school system even before this crisis. Now it's struggling to feed everyone with its insufficient number of lunchrooms and kitchens. 

I've written about all this before. Notice that while language matters significantly, otherwise many of the challenges of mass migration are the same whether the migrants are rich fellow Americans or poor folk from awa'. Wealth can be a buffer, but it creates its own distortions (and indeed another wave of mass migration as current residents are driven out by rising prices). Mass migration is disruptive in and of itself. 

It's not really an objection to the people coming in as if they were inferior people: it's an objection to communities and cultures being destroyed, when those things are where we get almost all of the sense of meaning we derive from human life. 

A culture is defined as "a way of life." Ways of life exist among people who live together and share personal connections. You don't know and can't know everyone, but you do know the nice lady at your favorite coffee shop, or library, or bar; you know the people you met at church, or work, or school. You grew up participating in institutions like a church or the Boy Scouts or your town in your home state, with its local sports teams and friends you know from interactions around the place where you live. Together you have built a culture, and it really does depend on the stability of all those things. 

While you get a certain amount of your sense of meaning in life from philosophy or your personal engagement with religion, most of your sense of meaning and being important comes from your interactions with other people. Those are the people who are part of your culture, including your family. When the institutions, including the family, are badly disrupted you lose the connections that make your life meaningful and worth living. 

Publications are run by people who favor migration; Republican ones seem to want us to accept that this is economically rational behavior, and Democratic ones pretend it's about justice when it's really about driving down their political donors' labor costs. Leaving aside talk about crime, or race, all of this is really destructive and imposes vast costs. It's nothing personal. I like the Mexican migrants much better than the rich Yankees.* I would far rather work on my Spanish to converse with the former than have to endure listening to the latter lecturing, in perfectly good English, about how much they're going to need to change things down here so things won't be so backwards and ignorant. 

A little more cultural stability would be a good thing for everybody. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to move, but I am suggesting that we need a new way of thinking about all this that takes this basic human good into account. It doesn't seem to fit anywhere in our national dialogue, but it needs to because it's having significant destructive effects that we don't know how to think about, talk about, plan for, or address. 

UPDATE: A very old post from 2006 on the same topic. There's a lot of harmony in spite of the nearly-twenty years that has passed, though back before the decades of sporadic mass migration I was more open to the idea of it than I have become. The depressive effect on American wages was apparently less clear to me then, too.

* I use the term in the specific sense of 'disagreeable loud-mouthed rich folk from up North who moved down here for the weather even though they hate the South and want very much to abolish it' rather than the more respectable use intended by some of our valued and respected comrades from New England. I gather the term means something honorable there.