The Golden Horde* Is Already Here

The Anonymous Conservative has a nice little article detailing the slow collapse of Detroit. Read it first, then come back.

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Welcome back. Now I want you to think about what is going to happen as Detroit collapses, and what is, in fact, going on all over the United States, albeit without as much fanfare. The Blue Model of governance is collapsing in Detroit, Chicago, Puerto Rico, California, and so on. (See also here). What is happening? People are leaving those cities and states in droves. Have been, in some cases, for decades. They are going to move to those fewer and fewer places that are not yet savaged by the Blue Model. They already have. And they have brought their dysfunctional views and politics (i.e., the Blue Model) with them.

A recent article at Real Clear Politics discusses the demographic trends:

Virtually every fast-growing metro region in the country is located far from the Eastern Seaboard, and increasingly outside of California. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Phoenix each gained more people last year than either New York or Los Angeles, which are three to four times larger. 

Among America’s 53 largest metropolitan areas, nine of the 10 fastest-growing ones are in the Sunbelt: Austin, Orlando, Raleigh, Houston, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville and Tampa-St. Petersburg. The only outlier is Denver, which has become a destination for people and companies fleeing higher priced areas, particularly the West Coast. 

Perhaps even more revealing are the trends in domestic migration. The leaders in total domestic net migration parallel almost precisely those that have experienced the strongest total population growth, led by Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix; together these metro areas added 150,000 net domestic residents. In percentage terms the big winners are Austin, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Raleigh, and Orlando. 

So which states are losing out among domestic migrants? The biggest loser is the home of our likely next president. New York experienced a net out-migration of 160,000 between 2014 and 2015. Over the past five years its metropolitan area has lost 701,000 net domestic migrants after suffering a population loss of nearly 2 million in the first decade of the new millennium. Chicago and Los Angeles also have experienced net out-migration as have some cities—such as San Jose and Washington, D.C.—even as they experienced impressive economic booms. 

These latest numbers confirm the likelihood that highly suburbanized areas, particularly in the Sunbelt, will continue to represent our demographic future. For all the hype and hysteria surrounding the urban revival, dense cities are not irresistible lures to most people. For the most part, they are experiencing sub-normal, and even declining, growth. The most urban of our urban cores, New York City, illustrates this slackening of population. For one year, the Big Apple grew at 1.2 percent (2011), above the national average of 0.7 percent. Yet, its growth dropped in 2015 to 0.6 percent, well below the national average. Brooklyn’s population growth declined in half from 2011 to 2015, while Manhattan’s declined by two-thirds. The only borough to show strong growth has been its poorest, the Bronx.

Of course, the foregoing only describes the situation within the United States. People have been fleeing failed nations for decades, heading to Europe and the United States for the most part. This will accelerate as more and more nations collapse. They are also part of the Golden Horde.

In the normal course of events, these failed states would collapse until they reached a stable level of complexity ... and, if necessary, the population would also fall through death and/or emigration until it also reached an equilibrium point between what the land could support given the social and technical proficiency of the culture. But travel is so much easier in this day and age, so the choice (if the would-be emigrants have a choice) is emigration.

The Golden Horde is not a sudden storm and flash flood; it is a trickle, that turns to a stream, that then becomes a river.

* I've always thought the term "Golden Horde" was inappropriate since it derives from an organized Mongol government; a truer analogy would be the Germans and Huns that slowly infiltrated, then overran, the weakening Roman Empire, but I don't have a catchy descriptive phrase for this.