I call them refugees .... or in my previous line of work - "Internally Displaced Persons," IDP.
Down South we know it well - we saw it before anyone else did. Legions of nasally sounding Yankees from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and other dirty and threadbare places. They came for the winter and stayed from Miami to Atlanta, Raleigh, Northern Virginia in numbers not seen since the Great Unpleasantness.
People would joke about Snow Birds and in south Florida a snark or two about Miami-Dade being "the Lord's waiting room" - but that wasn't the story, not even close.
They were coming here to escape high taxes, anti-family policies, crime, unions, and a general hostility to small business up North. Lots of great professionals came down here simply because they saw it as the best place to raise their family and run their business. One thing we noticed though was that not all "got it" for the reason they came here to begin with. They soiled their nest and then came down here and started voting in ways that soiled the new one.
The West is seeing their own version of it as well in the last couple of decades; IDP from the People's Republic of California and its client states to the North. Look at voting patterns from Colorado through some parts of Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, and islands in Texas. Many get it - but some don't. I think though that on balance at least 51% of the refugees are trying to avoid repeating their home-state's mistakes. The natives sure don't want to become "that place" - and there is where the turn is coming. There is a reason for it, one well covered by Merrill Mathews in Forbes,
If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future. Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.
...
red or red-leaning states dominate the top positions while blue states have the dubious distinction of dragging in last. In the economic outlook section, for example, the top 20 states are bright red or lean red, while eight out of the bottom 10 are very blue: New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon and Rhode Island.
Most of the “poor states” states, as ALEC calls them, have the highest personal income tax rates and the largest unfunded state pension liabilities. But instead of taking the red-state approach by lowering taxes and/or cutting spending, the blue states tend to want to raise taxes even higher, just like their White House mentor.
The result of their overpromising and overspending, and their knee-jerk response to solving their fiscal problems by raising taxes, is that people are increasingly fleeing the blue states. As commentator Michael Medved points out: “Between 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of ‘residents lost to other states’ were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as red states in which Republicans generally dominate local politics: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia.”
