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Comment by jeffmk | Hacker News Reader

    1. West Virginia
    2. Pennsylvania
    3. Delaware
    4. Montana
    5. Oklahoma
    6. Vermont
    7. New Jersey
    8. Kentucky
    9. Connecticut

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I'm not too surprised by the makeup of this list. West Virginia and Kentucky are resource extraction states that are primarily focused around coal, and Oklahoma is focused around oil & gas. New Jersey and Connecticut have high taxes, and are having a wave of retirees leave and take their spending dollars with them. Vermont has very low population growth and is also facing a demographic issue just like Jersey and Connecticut.

Pennsylvania is also a huge producer of coal and natural gas. I believe northern New Jersey produces a lot of coal as well.

The demographic and internal-migratory questions remind me of the EU and the problems faced by e.g. Greece. I wonder if it will result in a campaign against internal migration. Is freedom of movement within the United States explicitly part of the Constitution?

I believe so. The campaign against internal migration is happening in the sense that people in western states that aren't California are pissed at Californians for moving to those states and driving up housing prices.

NIMBYism is pretty much a de facto campaign against internal migration. It's not much of an issue in the fastest growing states, but certain states with hot economies but stagnant or declining populations, like Massachusetts or California, are affected by it.

> Is freedom of movement within the United States explicitly part of the Constitution?

Interesting question. Not explicitly, but the Federal Government reserves the right to regulate "interstate commerce," which is a power granted specifically to prevent hard state borders, among other things.

States/municipalities do have mechanisms to screw with people from other states via tax and transportation manipulation. But, for the most part, I've never heard of any animosity towards local residents from other states, and I live and work in a city whose metro-area spans three states. Immigrants from other regions are different beast though.

It is governed by the Privileges and Immunities clause under the authority of the States (not Congress) and has been judicially recognized as a fundamental right tied to that same clause since at least 1823.

It was considered so fundamental during the drafting process that there wasn’t a need to enumerate “freedom of movement” specifically.

Internal migration is much more common within the US than within the EU, and societal norms are much more accepting of intra-US relocation.

Based on the data I can gather from a brief search, it looks like in 2017, 58% of Americans live in the state of their birth [1]. Because many people move states and then move back (for college or a temporary job or something) then it's reasonable to think that perhaps 50% of Americans move states at least once in their lives.

In 2016, 93% of EU residents were living in the nation if their birth; 4% were from outside the EU and 3% from another EU member nation [2]. (In the US, 14.4% of the population are immigrants, and this is ~20% of the total global immigrant population [3].)

Furthermore (and in the absence of any supporting data), I think that the assimilation process is for the most part easier for Americans moving between states, especially those who are at least second generation American. While there are definitely strong cultural differences between US regions, we generally all regard each other as American (although this is surely different for those from American territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam or American Samoa). Relocation may also be quite challenging for minorities, especially those moving to whiter states. But for the typical white American moving states, it is probably easier to relocate than for an Italian moving from Calabria or Napoli to Lombardia.

I've lived in 8 states and I think that some half-hearted jokes about dating cousins or eating possum are about the most trouble I've gotten by hailing from the Ozarks. In my experience there are also larger biases against neighboring states (sports rivals) than far-away states. Freud's narcissism of small difference and all that.

That being said, since at least the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, there has been some local to regional resistance to internal migration. Interestingly, today much of the resistance is put forth by residents of less economically developed regions against those from more well-off places moving in, pricing the locals out, and changing the culture. These changes are a sort of Californication, the gentrification of mountain towns by richer and more liberal whites, rather than poorer immigrants bringing down property values or taking manual labor jobs. While there is little by way of legislation against this, there is talk of some [3].

[1]: https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/mobile-stuck-us-geograp...

[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

[4]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-...

People willing to relocate for work benefits employers, though this tends isolate individuals from their extended families (which may seem like a plus, until you, say, have kids but no grandparents to shuttle them around; or unwell elders without anyone left to care for them).

San Francisco certainly don't want any outsiders moving in!

Kentucky's primary resource extraction historically was tobacco more than coal, more traditionally a part of "tobacco road" with the Carolinas than coal country with West Virginia. As tobacco has waned the tobacco companies retrenched to the Carolinas and left Kentucky shifting in the wind. That coal so dominates the national and rural conversation around Kentucky today is a huge sign of whose interests are in play in the discussion and that it has convinced so much of Kentucky itself that that's what is causing the economic problems is a shame, if not a sham.

(IMNSHO, Kentucky should have been in the vanguard of legalizing and growing THC and selling it to other states. That it hasn't and that it isn't, is a huge economic blunder on the part of the state, and I'm feeling it is high time Kentuckians shut up about coal, but what do I know.)

All states whose major industries that have suffered from recessions in the past year. Agriculture, mining, transportation, utilities, and certain manufacturing areas have been hit by hard over the past few years.

The reason the "economy" is still doing well is because these are a very small percentage of the economy. The entire agriculture industry is literally a rounding error compared to the major sectors. These industries could disappear and the "economy" would still look good by GDP.

https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=51&step=51&isur...

Tech is clustered around a few areas in the US, driving tons of population growth and money to those areas causing other areas to depopulate (directly or indirectly). the irony is those places receiving the growth want it the least, at least if you ask their indigenous populations (most CA voters are extremely anti growth, for example).

I think there would be a lot to gain by incentivizing growth to occur in a more balanced way across the US. there's so many second order industries (like construction and countless others) that would benefit massively from this, along with the populations they support as well.

Currently, all that tech wealth just gets dumped into higher and higher real estate prices, not really benefiting anyone much. it could be put to so much more productive use in states/cities that actually want growth.

So much of the tech industry has built incredible remote work tools as a part of their products and services to other industries and yet surprisingly still seems so mindless a centralizing force in its own efforts. Not a single member of GAFAM is missing remote work tech in their portfolios, but all of them still want employees to start primarily and almost exclusively in either Mountain View/Palo Alto or Seattle/Redmond depending. It's almost a sadly hypocritical stance compared to what they are trying to sell their remote tools for, a sign perhaps that they don't really trust those same tools and aren't dogfooding them enough.

Software has almost the largest ability of any industry to be built entirely through remote work, yet seems almost the most afraid to do so, at least based on the attitudes from all the largest employers specific to the industry.

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