Earlier, in the ongoing Daily Kos Elections “Most District” series, we wrote about the congressional district with the highest rate of people born in the same state as where they now live: New York’s 27th district, a district in Upstate New York that’s about as prototypically Rust Belt as they come, and one that swung sharply in the GOP direction in 2016. For counterpoint, let’s look at the opposite, the district with the highest rate of people born in a different state.
You might think that, by some rule of basic mathematics, this district must necessarily be one that was great for the Democrats in 2016, an extravaganza of non-white and/or college-educated voters, whose extensive travels have made them tolerant and inquisitive. Well … no, that’s not the case at all. The district with the highest level of people born in a different state is Arizona’s 4th congressional district, which spans much of the western portion of the state. About 64.4 percent of the district’s population was born in another state, much higher than the national average of 26.5 percent. It’s also Arizona’s reddest district, and one of only two districts in Arizona that moved in the Republican direction from 2012 to 2016, even while the state as a whole moved closer to becoming a swing state.
There are a couple factors that explain that: one is that the districts that have the highest levels of people born in different states tend to be the ones in states where the population has grown dramatically in the last few decades. In other words, it’s found in all parts (both the urban and cosmopolitan parts, and the rural or exurban parts) of states where there simply weren’t a lot of people living there a generation or two ago. Nevada and Florida lead the way, but Arizona’s not far behind on that category. And two, by definition the category “born in a different state” necessarily excludes “born in a different country,” so it’s not going to be a place with a lot of immigrants, either highly educated immigrants (like New York City or the Bay Area) or poorly educated immigrants (like California’s Central Valley or Texas’s Rio Grande Valley). It’s going to be, instead, a place with a lot of people who’ve moved from a different part of the country.
College and the post-collegiate search for work are two main times in people’s lives when they tend to pick up and move, but there’s one other time when people get mobile, and that’s retirement. It can be motivated by better weather, readily available golf, or just the search for cheaper real estate where one can sell a house in a major metro area, buy a replacement with only part of the proceeds, and then live comfortably off the rest of the equity. And Arizona’s 4th has all of those things in spades (at least if you call 120-degree days in the summer “better” weather).