AMERICA’S OTHER WAVE OF REFUGEES
NOWADAYS, I live among immigrants and refugees. They come seeking a place where they are free from tyrannical governments, where their businesses and money are safe from destruction and confiscation, where they and their families feel safe and included. Moving here may have been difficult, and finding a place to live can be challenging. But they feel the sacrifice is worth it for a better life.
No, these aren’t illegal immigrants (or “migrants” as we’re told to call them nowadays) from Guatemala, Mexico or Venezuela. They are, in the title of Roger Simon’s new book on this migration, “American Refugees.” They’re part of the great mass migration away from blue states (especially, but not exclusively, New York, California and Illinois) in favor of red states where taxes are lower, intrusive government bureaucracy is less and political violence is uncommon.
Knoxville, where I live, is getting a lot of them. In past years, there was a flow of such people to places like Nashville — Simon himself, a famed screenwriter and now migration trendsetter, sold a house in the Hollywood Hills to set himself up in Music City several years ago. The mass migration drove up Nashville real-estate prices and traffic to the point where many people are now coming three hours east to Knoxville, a nice university town by the mountains where housing costs are — or at least were, pre-migration — lower and traffic is more manageable.
(Plus, our downtown isn’t choked with pedal bars and shockingly dissolute bachelorette parties.)
We’ve found a lot of the transplants quite congenial. We’re not big partiers, but we’ve made some new friends, and we’re spending more time hanging out with migrants from the Upper East Side, Los Angeles and Chicago — as well as one family from Hong
Kong. Some of the people who have moved here are quite well off, others not so much.
I was talking a while back with a retired Oregon state trooper who had duty trying to guard a federal building in Portland from antifa and in disgust took retirement sooner than planned. He had intended to move to Illinois to look after his parents post-retirement, but instead he moved them down to Knoxville, too. The assortment of bumper stickers on his large pickup truck made clear he didn’t bring leftist politics with him. Given that his folks were from downstate, I doubt they did either.
And talking to them has been a relief. When the blue-state exodus started, I was afraid the people coming here would bring bad habits with them, the way the Californians who moved to Colorado or Idaho have done. But those people were fleeing high taxes and congestion, rather than leftist attitudes. The people moving now are more like internal variants on Cuban or Venezuelan immigrants, eager to oppose what they fled their homes to escape.
In fact, as Simon notes in his book, in Nashville the immigrants have had the impact of stiffening the local politicians’ spines. Living in a red state, people can become pretty complacent; those who have fled from blue states that went rapidly downhill are less so. Native Tennesseans may not realize how fast things can go bad and may be slower to recognize the camel’s nose in the tent.
The city of Knoxville is one of those blue islands in a red state. (It’s actually a blue island in a red county.) I don’t know if the migrants will tilt it red or not — in a smallscale version of the nationwide Great Sort, right-leaning people now tend to locate outside the city, under the governance of Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, a libertarian-conservative type, while lefties tend to settle in the city proper.
It’s a bit sad Americans are so eagerly sorting themselves into red and blue, but in a cultural environment that’s taken “The personal is political” to the next level, I suppose it’s inevitable. The good news is in our federal system Americans are free to “vote with their feet” and leave jurisdictions that don’t make them happy in favor of places they find more congenial.
And of course it’s not just Tennessee: The Post’s own contributor Karol Markowicz has decamped for Florida, where she seems quite happy soaking up the sun and learning to shoot (a classic transitional move for bluestate refugees). She’s one of many doing that.
But whatever state lines we cross, we’re all under the same national government. Voters might wish to ask this election year which they want to choose: the political model refugees are moving to or the one they’ve chosen to flee.