Geographic mobility: Its promises and discontents
Americans are a remarkably mobile collection of people. You might argue it’s in our DNA. By the time of our nation’s founding, the Western Hemisphere had already been swarmed by restless settlers who left their more complacent European neighbors behind. The Indian tribes they encountered were in many cases nomadic or semi-nomadic. And because the United States has long been the most open nation on earth when it comes to immigration, we’ve continued to absorb a restless spirit.
It’s not surprising, then, that Americans have regarded geographic mobility as a sign of success. If you were to live in one place your entire life, even attending college in your hometown, you might be perceived as having made some kind of mistake.
To be sure, geographic mobility can open the way for actual success. Some places, even within the U.S., strain under a stultifying economic hierarchy, where a scarcity mindset prevails or family connections and social status seem to matter more than talent. At a localized, even neighborhood level, some places are economic ghettoes of intergenerational self-sabotage and victim-think.
The go-getter can escape such places within the U.S. to states like North Carolina, Tennessee, or Utah, which have greater abundance and a more open talent market. He can move from the city to the suburbs, from the small town to a city, or vice-versa. Or he can move from abroad to the U.S. and fully reinvent himself and his family. Three of the nation’s 10 richest men – Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and Jensen Huang – are immigrants. Only one of the remaining seven (Warren Buffett of Omaha) still lives in the city where he grew up.
Geographic mobility has long been seen as fundamental to economic mobility. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted 190 years ago, “the chief circumstance which has favored the establishment and maintenance of a democratic system in the United States is the nature of the territory that the Americans inhabit. … God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.”
As the historian David Potter observed, this boundless continent enabled Americans “to fulfill the promise of mobility.” This promise is accentuated by federalism, which allows each state to form its own rules of the game. In other words, if things aren’t working out in Baltimore, you can always go west. If the taxes are too high (or the values don’t match) in New York or California, you can flee to Florida.
‘Why Would I Leave?’
Not by strong preference, but by the finger of fate, I ended up pursuing my undergraduate degree in my home city. As I worked to put together a strong journalism portfolio in college, I simply assumed that I would be heading somewhere else for a newspaper job after graduation. (It was the 1990s, when newspapers still ruled the world.) Ultimately, after working in the newspaper business, I escaped to New York – a city of outsiders – for graduate school.
But I had a conversation in the summer of 1995 that changed my perspective on geographic mobility.
First, some background: In high school, in the late 1980s, I had a geography teacher, who as an ex-Marine, had seen the world. “Boys,” he said – it was an all-boys’ school – “let me tell you something. If you ever get a chance to travel, take it. Don’t let some little-Suzie-[Profanity] hold you back.”
An opportunity to take his very-American advice soon arose. When I was a junior in high school, I lived in what was then still Communist Yugoslavia in Zagreb. (The Berlin Wall fell in November of that academic year.) I attended school there. I muddled through Marxism class like everyone else. With my friends and girlfriend, I roamed the streets of a humane Austro-Hungarian provincial city whose splendor had been adulterated by 20th-century Communist architectural banality. And I found myself with a front-row seat at the unraveling that would lead to years of war.
When I returned five years later to cover the war as a budding journalist, parts of the newborn country were torn to shreds. A school in Zagreb had just been hit with a Serb cluster-bomb attack. (I myself had a close brush with death in a bombed-out frontier town.) During that adventure, I met up for coffee with my old high school girlfriend. She was now finishing up college, and worried about the trajectory of the war, which was rolling along under the feckless watch of European “peacekeepers.” Mainly, she was lamenting the lack of opportunity in her young nation.
“Why don’t you go to America?” I asked. “There are endless opportunities.” (And no war.)
Without hesitation, she shot back: “Why would I leave Zagreb? This is my home. This is where I was born. This is where my family is.” She was determined to live her entire life in a war-torn country smaller than West Virginia.
She was not an American girl.
Geographic Mobility and Economic Mobility
Within the U.S., there are a number of states where most residents cannot say “This is my home” in the same way as my Croatian friend. In Nevada, for example, only 27% of the population is native-born to the state. In Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wyoming, Delaware, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, the native-born populations are well below 50%. In general, Western states are where native-born populations are the weakest.
Utah bucks the trend. At just over 60%, it is the only state in the West where the native-born population exceeds the national average (57%). Louisiana has the nation’s highest native-born population, at nearly 80%. Michigan and Ohio are close behind, along with Mississippi and a collection of other Midwestern/Rust Belt states.
At first glance, there seems to be a connection between social mobility and geographic mobility, at least as measured by native-born population. According to Archbridge Institute’s 2025 rankings, Louisiana ranks 50th in social mobility, and Mississippi, which has the nation’s fourth-highest native-born population, ranks 49.
It seems to make sense: People move to where the opportunities are, right? But economically mobile states do not map neatly against geographic mobility. Minnesota and Iowa rank in the top 10 for both social mobility and native-born population. Utah is ranked number one in social mobility, even with its high (for the West) native-born population.
Interestingly, the states with the highest proportion of immigrants – California, New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Nevada – are all in the bottom 15 states for social mobility, as is Texas, which has a large raw number of immigrants. All six have the highest shares of adults in the nation with limited English proficiency. New York, California, and New Jersey are also all in the bottom five states in terms of the percentage of middle-class households. The wanderlust that we associate with the pursuit of the American Dream doesn’t necessarily create immediate prosperity, at least not at the state level.
But in those struggling immigration-heavy states, it is important to note that many immigrants themselves are much better off than they were in their home country. And for individuals languishing in intergenerational poverty, some have argued that an interstate change of scenery is in order.
Yet people are not merely pawns on an economic chessboard. Each place has an incentive to create an enduring sense of home. That requires a sense of meaning and belonging. That requires a culture.
The Pillars of American Culture
Historically, culture in America has endured based on three pillars – faith, freedom (which implies duty), and family.
Faith – the “cultus” (which in Latin also means worship) in culture – provides for most people a unifying cultural script. The sociologist Robert Putnam has estimated that about 50% of social capital comes from religion. Many city planners prior to the 20th century understood this: In my hometown of New Orleans, the center of the city is St. Louis Cathedral (begun in the 1720s). In Salt Lake City, the centerpiece is the Salt Lake Temple (begun in the 1850s).
In a certain sense, the idea of culture without cult is an impossibility, since man is an inherently religious creature. If he doesn’t worship God, he will sprinkle incense at the altar of money, personal prestige, technology, politics, ideology, and so on. The past 15 years have given us a stark lesson in this: With the rise of the “nones,” many Americans simply replaced religion with “woke” ideology, climate worship, neo-Marxism, nihilism, etc.
But false idols fail to unite the soul to God and thereby fail to unite souls to souls. While a culture without cult can in some sense exist, it will starve and become disordered for lack of this communal spirit. The brotherhood of man without the fatherhood of God has been tried by all of the most murderous regimes the world has ever known, from Europe to Asia. By the time I was living in Communist Yugoslavia, it was 45 years into its “struggle against religion.” Under the motto “Brotherhood and Unity,” it was in reality a grey dystopia of resentment and tribalism. Under the Big Brother-like gaze of a Marshal Tito portrait in every restaurant, bakery, bank and teen disco, a demoralized, aggrieved, and cynical populace slogged on.
But false idols fail to unite the soul to God and thereby fail to unite souls to souls.
Combined with a lack of economic and individual freedom, the Godless state engendered hopelessness, indolence and self-dealing. “Nema kruha (There’s no bread today),” said the surly lady at the bakery, even though my brothers and I could see loaves on the shelves behind her. Or, at the bank, the line snaked back as tellers chit-chatted amongst themselves obliviously. Just imagine your local DMV, but everything is the DMV.
Where there’s a God above, by contrast, a vigorous, generous, self-sufficient culture manned by engaged citizens can emerge, as my friend Bill Duncan has documented in detail. As John Adams put it in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Which brings us to duty. A demoralized population, lacking a communal spirit and driven by grievance, is no seedbed for the duties of citizenship. Free citizenship implies a sense of ownership of and responsibility for the community, finding common ground over points of divergence, and thoughtful debate rather than ad hominem attacks and sloganeering. A good citizen operates from an authentic fraternal spirit, which sees fellow citizens first and foremost as children of God, not merely economic units in a materialistic “collective.” Good citizenship forms the requisite sense of responsibility for freedom to be both possible and meaningful. Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to say those who do not engage directly in political life “are unfit to live in a free community.”
Perhaps the most powerful motivation behind the free citizen’s sense of duty is family. Strong families produce strong citizens with deeper roots in the past and a larger stake in the future. Aristotle conceived of family as the natural seed of civilization, out of which grew villages and then city-states. Numerous observers, from Milton Friedman to Pope John Paul II, have described the family as the “first and vital cell of society.” A city or state with weak families will falter.
It is probably no coincidence that the two states with the highest proportion of births to unwed mothers – Louisiana and Mississippi – also scored the lowest on Archbridge’s economic mobility index. At the opposite ends of both scales, Utah had the nation’s best showing. Family stability gives a state massive economic and social advantages, as Brad Wilcox unveiled in Sutherland’s “Utah Family Miracle” report. To protect the treasure of strong families, Utah has enacted multiple Sutherland recommendations, from more robust reporting requirements to pro-marriage information in the K-12 curriculum to the creation of a task force on the challenges besetting men and boys.
But government cannot solve the weaknesses in religious participation, declining civil society, or family breakdown. Indeed, it may have contributed to declines in civil society by flooding the zone with government programs. It has certainly contributed to family breakdown by disincentivizing two-parent family formation among the poor, with disastrous consequences.
What local, state, and federal governments can do is respect religious freedom. They can resist the urge to hamper individual liberty and crowd out civil society. And they can throw open the doors to innovation and reform of the social safety net.
Given the long association between economic mobility and geographic mobility in the U.S., there should be no question as to the potential benefits for individuals. The fact that states must compete for talent, human resources, and the tax dollars they bring creates a healthy pressure to encourage innovative policymaking.
The other side of the coin is to retain talent and taxes. Places with a sense of meaning and belonging have a key advantage in this regard. The constitutional values of faith, family and freedom engender an interconnected populace, intergenerational strength and a robust civil society. Were there a restoration of these pillars of culture, more places would feel like home. More Americans would ask, “Why would I leave?”
Peter Reichard is chief development officer at the Sutherland Institute in Utah. He has served as a public policy organization executive and researcher for more than 20 years.
