Californication and Secondary Migration

NumbersUSA began studying the instability of mass immigration long before the current border crisis began. Our studies have been cited in scholarly literature over a hundred times and in more than a dozen languages. You can now find all of our studies and reports on our website.

Is your state like Idaho? Are you losing ground rapidly? Do you still have the opportunity to save what makes your state special?

Is your state like North Carolina? Are you feeling the direct and indirect impact of federal immigration policies?

Our decades-long journey from sea to sprawling sea has brought us back to North Carolina.

“Love Hurts,” a NumbersUSA report about the loss of rural land and habitat in North Carolina is live on www.NCSprawl.com. This is the 17^th collaboration between Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz, and NCSprawl.com is the 7^th “micro website” we’ve created to democratize our findings, including the following:

• North Carolina has the 3^rd worst sprawl in the nation;
• The biggest factor (76%) in that sprawl is population growth;
• Federal immigration policies have a direct (25%) and indirect effect on North Carolina sprawl (the top sending states are all top immigration destinations); and
• 81% of NC voters say they want to grow either “much more slowly” in the future (50%) or not at all (31%).

Our North Carolina report continues the secondary-migration theme of our Idaho study. Americans are leaving states with high immigration-driven population growth. Our first study of California was prescient in stating:

“Aggravated traffic congestion alone has the potential to make Californians miserable enough to consider fleeing the state for some semblance of ‘greener pastures’ in other less crowded western states.”

Twenty years later, the “Californication” of the West is underway. This “secondary migration” effect is spreading across the country. Citizens in every state need to ask if they are prepared to lose additional ground to accommodate mass immigration, or if they will demand better policy from the people we elect to serve us?

“Here’s the irony,” NumbersUSA’s Leon Kolankiewicz says in an interview about our studies:

“Some of the best land to grow crops on and to grow cities on is the same land. And so by displacing the crop land with developed land, with urbanized land, you are undermining the very ability to feed the growing number of people that depend on greater amounts of food production.”

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