I guess I hoped that conservative-for-other-states was still centrist enough not to make things worse here.

My condolences, Heebie, but I think this only makes sense if you assume an unrealistic amount of rationality in people. People are tribal. If people are moving to be closer to their tribe (which isn't the only reason for moving, but often contributes; that The Big Sort discussion seems relevant), they probably aren't going to become less devoted to their tribe afterwards.

I was thinking they'd stay the same level of devoted, but that they weren't rabid before the transplant. That they were mostly the low-information politics-is-gross level who was moving for cheaper cost of living.

I wondered how many Texans are native period, as the state has had such an influx of migration over the past generation. Turns out 17% born outside the US, 22% born in the US outside Texas.

I suppose immigration from abroad may counteract the trend you're thinking about. Immigrants don't themselves vote, but their children do. In the same exit polls, Hispanics/Latinos went 64% for O'Rourke, 35% for Cruz.

Demographic inevitability arguments are justifiably no longer as prominent with what happened in Florida, but the shift in Texas still seems to be positive, if as much due to organizing as to demographics. Presidential GOP margins:
2000: +21.3%
2004: +22.9%
2008: +11.8%
2012: +15.8%
2016: +9%
2020: +5.6%

Or Cornyn's races, to have the same candidate over time:
2002 (open): +12%
2008: +12%
2014: +27.2%
2020: +9.6%

Hmm - one of the links said 40% nonnative Texans, I thought.

Oh look, 17+22= almost 40. Will wonders never cease.

3.3 actually makes me feel better than anything I've seen in a long time. I moved to Texas in 2000, and started hearing "Texas will turn blue!" arguments almost immediately, and lost faith in them by the end of the decade. But that is genuine movement over 20 years.

Isn't this just a Simpson's paradox situation, where the transplants are further left within each racial group, but since they're whiter than native Texans they're further right overall?

I didn't actually check that claim, but people who move between states should have higher "openness to experience" and so should generally be further left. Real conservatives live within 30 miles of where they were born.

Non-white people can move states too.

And people actually pushed to move by housing costs might be even less white than average. Looking at the Texas transplant demographics might be interesting, actually.

The non-white Unfogged commenters expressed revulsion at the idea, though.

9: Yes, and I'm pretty sure that transplants are also Blacker than native Texans (Black percentage in Texas has increased significantly, and the reverse Great Migration is a big thing), but they've gotta be way way less Latin in a way that will make them much whiter.

I've never heard of the reverse Great Migration.

I finally found how to get the state-level data via the Census's tools (S0701). %s of Texas residents 2021 vs. those moved from out of state within the year before response:

Hispanic/Latino (any race): 40% of all / 22% of interstate movers
White non-Hispanic: 39.5% / 51%
Black: 12% / 14%
Asian: 5.3% / 3.7%
Other race: 10.2% / 5.6%
Two or more races: 23.8% / 15.5%

This is fascinating, though. I can't wait to vote for all these young, college-educated black kids when they run for office.

14 surely omits undocumented immigrants from Mexico and central America, though.

Not that they are able to vote.

And about the same picture using instead the combined 2017-2021 ACS data with a bigger sample size, so the above wasn't a pandemic oddity. Except more Asians in that period (9% of movers).

16: The ACS tries its damnedest to reach them, and tries to allocate for what it knows about underresponse. But I was calculating the column "Moved; from different state"; that will have some undocumented immigrants but the "Moved; from abroad" column should be mostly them. (The latter is 0.7% of the population having moved from abroad in the past year.)

14: Nice! I think that backs up what I was saying. Or at least the part that transplants are significantly more likely to be non-hispanic whites than non-transplants are and that this explains most of the gap. The further claim that non-hispanic white transplants are to the left of non-hispanice white non-transplants would still need some evidence, but it seems really plausible to me.

More specifically, I think non-Hispanic white transplants are more likely to be college graduates than non-Hispanic white native Texans.

Oh yeah, the data also has educational attainment, which may be equally politically salient. Let's see. In the 5-year data, of population 25+ (which is 65% of interstate movers):

- Less than high school graduate: 15% of all / 7% of interstate movers
- High school graduate inc. equivalency: 25% / 18%
- Some college or associate's degree: 29% / 29%
- Bachelor's degree: 20% / 28%
- Graduate or professional degree: 11% / 19%

are to the left of non-hispanic white non-transplants

What's relevant here is that state-wide elections are essentially binary: in a Cruz/Beto election, there's a ton of room between the median native-born Cruz voter and the rightmost Beto voter (native or otherwise), so transplants have plenty of room to move the Texas GOP somewhat left without altering outcomes of races like this.

The test, I'd think, would be either a (somewhat) less conservative state-level party and/or transplant-heavy places choosing less extreme GOP candidates in primaries.

22 last seems like very high level of graduate and professional degrees for both all and interstate movers. 11%?

24 me

Keep in mind that the typical person with a graduate degree is a public school teacher or nurse.

I hadn't heard the statistics in the OP before; that's interesting, as are the hypotheses in the thread.

13: From the graph here ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration ) it might be too soon to be calling it "Great."

24: Looks like the nationwide rate is 13.1% (S1501).

And rising at a noticeable clip. (This is all of the population 25+, 1-year survey data.)
2000: 8.9%
2010: 10.4%
2015: 11.6%
2021: 13.8%

(13.1% is 2021 5-year, 13.8% is 2021 1-year.)

12: How many black Katrina refugees settled permanently in Houston?

Heebie, thank you for this. I'm eagerly reading the comments to see what people's theories are, and for evidence (of course). It's a subject I care about deeply, and .... I've been pretty sad/angry/depressed about the situation for a long time, so your post can't make me feel worse.

32: Looks like 18% of the pre-hurricane city population were still in Texas in 2006, and 25.5% of its Black residents. Multiplying out, that gets to about 89,000 migrants to Texas, of whom 85,000 Black. (Margins of error in the percentage estimates probably throw off these numbers a bit.)

Wow. How much did NO shrink by?

Population of the city/parish dropped 53% from January 2005 to January 2006, going from 67% Black to 59%.

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Tim's new company's benefits plan makes you jump through hoops to get wellness credits to get money off of your health insurance premiums up to $1400 per year ($700 per person.). You get these points for getting a flu shot, fulfilling a care gap (pap, skin check) or getting an annual physical.

The care gap has to be while you are insured by them, but the physical (which is worth 500 points can be earlier). They have two requirements I find unusual. They want a cholesterol check. I had one this year, but a lot of doctors only do that every 5 years around here if you're healthy. And our local BCBS won't cover that as preventive at an annual exam.

They also want BP documentation, height, weigh, and a waist circumference. I have never, as an adult, had a doctor measure my waist circumference. Is this routine in other parts of the country? The Blue Cross plan is NJ and the wellness credit people are called MyEvive.

I don't know how I can ask my doctor to fill out a form with a measurement she didn't take.

|>

37 last: zoom call?

I don't think those things you mention are routine parts of wellness checks, but they might be fairly common for corps that have these wellness programs. Can't hurt to ask the doctor. (A nurse could do it & hand it off to the doctor for signing, maybe.)

On the cholesterol check, maybe you could ask the wellness program directly how they expect you to get something without insurance coverage for it, and maybe they'll have a way to pay for it? If not, I guess you figure out the out-of-pocket cost in advance (the hospital or office will probably refuse to quote anything upfront, but yelling at them for long enough might yield it up) and see if it's worth the discount.

36: Has it recovered? (I feel embarrassed to ask such googleable questions, but I'm not in a stop-and-look-it-up context.)

I hate Tim's insurance company so much. Not saying you shouldn't get the $1400 discount, of course.

Speaking of health, there's a hidden downside to constant coughing that nobody mentions.

Maybe I'll ask my doctor for purple drank.

I've never heard of them asking for a waist circumference for this sort of thing. But I don't have much experience with them.

It sounds like an unusually blatant means of discriminating against fat people, which would be about right I guess.

Moby, have you scheduled your colonoscopy yet?

I have covid. I'm not supposed to schedule things.

39: I did actually get my lipids checked this year, because it had been a while, and she did an A1c and BMP. I guess I can measure my waist myself and send it over myChart. They have the other data.

45: I think it's so they can encourage weight watchers or one of their other apps. The basic recommendation thing included a depression screening.

I did google and apparently it's a better predictor of diabetes than just BMI.

I don't think you can spread Covid if you schedule via phone or online, unless you use 5G.

It sounds like an unusually blatant means of discriminating against fat people, which would be about right I guess.

Yeah, I think the ACA explicitly exempted such programs from laws against employment discrimination by health status. They can penalize smoking too.

50: not sure if it's discrimination: they give you money to join a smoking cessation group, not to be a non-smoker.

Out of an abundance of caution, I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do.

In my head, the average Texan native comes from a family that's lived somewhere rural for generations, and they moved to the suburbs but still pretend they're on a farm when it's time to vote.

I could be wrong, but my strong impression is that families living in the same place in the rural west for multiple generations was not particularly common among Euro-American settler types. Once people got the idea that picking up stakes and moving to a new settlement is a reasonable way of bettering your lot, more families will end up doing that repeatedly than becoming well enough off to think they should stay put. Or at least that seems to have been the pattern of multiple lines of my ancestors.

Lots of criminal abusive dads moving their kids across the west all William Nilliam, or at least that's what I learned from the Little House books.

Has it recovered? (I feel embarrassed to ask such googleable questions, but I'm not in a stop-and-look-it-up context.)

Still well below its pre-Katrina numbers, but well above its nadir.

07/05: 454,865
08/07: 273,000
2008: 336,644
2010: 343,829
2020: 383,997

So up to almost 88% of previous. Although apparently, like many/most cities, it lost a few percent during COVID.

Interestingly, Black fraction of population was roughly flat from '90 to '10, and has dropped since then. Doesn't appear to have grown much, if at all, whiter in the last 30 years, which I think runs against conventional wisdom.

Nader was the worst.

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From Bluesky:

last weekend a restaurant made me download a *microsoft word* file containing its menu. in *2023*. in *san francisco*. if you do not know how to share your menu in a format other than microsoft word I do not trust you to make a bouillabaisse that won't poison me.

"Little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages" for the 20's?

Oh, I have a single invite code if anyone wants.

|>

John Cryer is there.

I've never seen Pretty in Pink, so I had to infer the point he was making.

55.last: Are you saying that the Black percentage has gone down, but the (non-Hispanic?) White percentage has stayed level, with the difference coming from Hispanics and Asians?

40: Not really, no. The permanent reduction is closer to 1/4 or 1/3 than to the 1/2 in the immediate aftermath. But for people in lower income brackets, a lot of the time if you've been somewhere for a year then you might as well be there for good. So if it took a neighborhood a year to rebuild after Katrina, in a good many places that meant the people were gone.

Way at the other end of the scale, lawyer friends mine who were displaced to Chicageaux are still there eighteen years later.

Anyway, data from 2005-06 or so are likely to show a noticeable jump from LA people going to TX and staying.

61 was strictly ex recto and anecdata. I see that JRoth has done something resembling actual research. Is that allowed at Unfogged?

60: More or less. Categories shifted over the 30 years discussed, so it's not all apples-to-apples. Mixed Race seems to have filled in some of the gap alongside a substantial Hispanic increase (Asian is a small number at all dates, 2-3%)

62: lol. One thing I came across said that unflooded neighborhoods are at or above pre-Katrina numbers (saying nothing about racial makeup), so all the loss is coming from Lower Ninth and the like. I'm not sure if that means huge decreases in those areas or just substantial. Living 30 years in SWPA, I know there's a really big difference between a 40% drop and a 65% one.

Ah right, I meant to mention Mixed Race and then forgot. Makes sense that'd be a big part.

There must be some interesting writing and research about the differences in southern cities between reverse great migration recent transplants from the north and local populations who never moved regions in the first place. I'd guess that the double-migrators are much more successful on most measurements, but what I'm curious about is whether those differences continue on to their kids.

64.last was supposed to be Black-specific but I see I didn't say that.

I can't compare before-after, but here was the racial breakdown by Public Use Microdata Area in 2017-21. Hispanic/Latino is regardless of race, all the others are non-H/L. All these parishes are in the metropolitan planning area.

Central New Orleans: 19% white, 70% Black, 4% Hispanic
Northeast New Orleans: 29% white, 60% Black, 7% Hispanic
South New Orleans: 48% white, 39% Black, 6% Hispanic
North Jefferson Parish: 57% white, 18% Black, 18% Hispanic
Central Jefferson Parish: 69% white, 9% Black, 15% Hispanic
West Bank Jefferson Parish: 34% white, 44% Black, 14% Hispanic
Northwest St. Tammany Parish: 86% white, 6% Black, 5% Hispanic
Southeast St. Tammany Parish: 68% white, 19% Black, 7% Hispanic
St. Bernard, Jefferson (South) & Plaquemines Parishes: 51% white, 31% Black, 10% Hispanic