Rust Belt Expatriates And The Diaspora

How many people moved away from the cities of the Rust Belt? Knowing the answer to this can play a role in their comebacks.

Detroit Lions football fans at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ, September 22, 2024. Source: facebook.com

So the Super Bowl is set, and the Detroit Lions are not in it.

It was tough watching my Detroit Lions go down two weekends ago to the Washington Commanders in the NFC divisional round of the playoffs. However, the Lions, historically one of the National Football League’s sad-sack teams, had a spectacular season. The team had an explosive, high-scoring and entertaining offense, and could make a case for being the nation’s most popular team during the 2024 season.

That kind of popularity isn’t something that Detroiters are accustomed to, but it’s something that played out over the course of this season, and last season as well. The Lions’ success meant fans were willing to pack visiting stadiums across the country. The picture above shows Lions fans cheering their team in Glendale, AZ, but there were similar takeovers at games in Houston and San Francisco as well.

I noticed this, and it got me thinking. Yes, there are plenty of Detroiters who love traveling to follow their winning team. For the first time in a generation, the Lions are playing well enough for their fans to follow them. But there are plenty of former Detroiters in the country who moved away and proudly retained their fan cards. What’s more, there are children of former Detroiters who inherited their fandom from their parents, and religiously follow them today.

Take my brother, 14 years younger than me. He was barely two years old when our family moved from Detroit. Since then my brother’s lived in central Indiana, Chicago and New York City over the next 40+ years. He’s a New Yorker now, having been in Brooklyn for 17 years. He married a Brooklyn native. They have a child together. But my brother’s a die-hard Detroit sports fan.

My point is, Detroit ex-pats and the broader Detroit diaspora is out there. There’s a Detroit diaspora because there are so many Detroiters who left for other places. In 1970, Detroit’s six-county metro area had 4.4 million people. Fifty years later in 2020, Detroit’s six-county metro area had… 4.4 million people. There were plenty of people who were born, lived and died there, and people who migrated there as well. Yet the only way that an entire metro area can go 50 years with virtually no change in population, without a substantial decrease in births or increase in deaths, or both, is for there to be a huge net loss in migration.

Members of the Detroit diaspora can be found anywhere.

This leads to an interesting proposition for Rust Belt cities like Detroit. From an economic and social standpoint, the narrative around the Motor City is perhaps better than at any other time in my (long) lifetime. And as the narrative about the city continues to improve, it’s conceivable that there’s a portion of the diaspora that might be willing to return. If they did, they could figure prominently in Detroit’s long-term revitalization prospects. The same can be said for Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and other Rust Belt cities.

Sound crazy? It’s not.

Quantifying the Rust Belt -> Sun Belt Migration

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to find research that quantifies Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration. Seems to me there’s an academic or PhD candidate who wrote a paper on the outflow of residents from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest from, say, 1970-2020, but I haven’t found it. So I decided to make a crude estimate. Let’s see how it works.

I set out to look at population growth figures for all 50 states between 1970-2020. I classified all 50 states by what I determined to be their Rust Belt, Sun Belt and non-Rust/Sun Belt type. Using my judgement I categorized 13 states as Rust Belt, 15 states as Sun Belt, and the remaining 22 as neither. You can see my how I designated them on the map below. It’s one version of a Rust Belt/Sun Belt framing at a state level; your map may look different:

My next step was to analyze decennial population growth for the designated Rust Belt and Sun Belt states, and compare their growth rates with the total growth rate of the U.S. over the same period. In this step I found that between 1970-2020 the total population of the U.S. grew by 63%, from 203.4 million to 331.4 million. That works out to a 10.3% increase per decade.

Of course, we know that the nation’s growth wasn’t distributed equally, so I grouped the states by their designated categories and analyzed their growth rates. The Sun Belt-designated states grew by 119% over the same period, averaging a 17% increase per decade. Non-Sun/Rust Belt states grew by 67% over the period. Their growth rate of 10.9% per decade is essentially the same as the 10.3% rate for the U.S. overall. The Rust Belt states? They grew by just under 19% between 1970-2020, or about 3.5% per decade. This table shows how each category grew by decade:

Should be no surprises here. The fifteen Sun Belt states significantly outgrew the 13 Rust Belt states over the entire 50-year span. The greatest differences occurred during the 1970-1990 period, when Sun Belt states were growing at nearly 11 times the rate of Rust Belt states. Sun Belt population growth slowed from the 1990s onward, and Rust Belt population growth moved upward slightly over the same period. However, it looks like Sun Belt states grew by nearly five times the rate of Rust Belt states, for a 50-year period.

For me, going beyond this to accurately estimate the number of people involved in a Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration between 1970-2020 would be a fool’s errand; I’d defer to anyone who’s researched this or has the statistical chops to figure it out. There are too many other variables to account for, like differences in international immigration numbers by state, or birth rates and death rates by state.

But the next analytical step I took started with a simple question – what would the population of each state be if all states grew at the same national growth rate of 10.3% per decade from 1970-2020? Starting from the 1970 population base, I estimated that today’s Rust Belt states would cumulatively have about 41 million more people than in 2020. The Sun Belt (-39.7 million) and the non Sun/Rust Belt states (-1.7 million) would be smaller.

Again, there are other variables I’m not considering here. But it’s clear that Rust Belt states were the driver of domestic migration in the U.S. for the past half century, and 41 million over 50 years is a decent starting estimate.

Let’s examine the potential impact of this on the one state I’m mostly concerned with here, Michigan. If Michigan had grown at the same rate as the nation between 1970-2020, it would have had a population of about 14.5 million in 2020, instead of the actual 10.1 million. That’s a difference of 4.4 million people. If metro Detroit represents about 40% of Michigan’s population, then the metro area’s potential loss due to outmigration since 1970 would be almost 1.8 million.

That’s a lot of Detroit ex-pats.

The Appeal to the Diaspora

It’s clear that not everyone with a direct or indirect connection with Rust Belt places will even consider coming back. Many left and never returned, especially if no family was there to attract them. Most established deep roots where they live now, like my brother (and my sister as well, who’s lived in the DMV area for more than 30 years). For many more, the Rust Belt’s economy, weather, parochialism, and other factors are enough to dissuade them. But tens of thousands of Detroit Lions fans attending a football game in Arizona, and understanding that not all of them traveled from Detroit, suggests that there’s a segment that would come back under the right conditions.

Historically, that’s how ex-pats and diasporas work. Some will, and do, return. A good recent example is the number of Black migrants moving from the Rust Belt and to Sun Belt locales, between 1990 and today. Many observers might fold the return of Blacks to Southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh/Durham or Dallas into the overall Rust Belt/Sun Belt framing. But putting it into the context of the Great Migration that preceded it between 1910-1970, when Blacks fled the rural Jim Crow South for greater freedom and economic opportunity in the North, changes the perspective.

All of my grandparents moved to Detroit from rural Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas in the 1920s. None of them had good experiences in the South. None of them would’ve returned if you paid them. My parents, and their generation, established good lives in the North, and stayed there. But many of the same economic opportunities that boosted my parents’ generation evaporated as I grew into adulthood. The image of the South began to change in the minds of younger generations. Instead of viewing the South as a source of painful memories, many young Blacks developed an allure for the South. It became something that was exotic and familiar at the same time.

Atlanta might be the leading Sun Belt city in this regard. A big part of its growth since 1970 has been its attraction to middle class Blacks moving in from Northern cities. Most, I’m assuming, had no direct connection with Atlanta. But Atlanta’s place as a hub for prominent HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) made it easier to market the city to emerging young Black professionals.

In the end, I have no doubt that Rust Belt cities will completely rebound, perhaps even surpass previous economic and demographic peaks. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when and how. An economic boom could be a part of it. People seeking refuge from the impacts of climate change could factor into it. Getting greater access to the world’s largest singular source of fresh water in the Great Lakes will play a role.

But I think many people are seeking a lifestyle they can’t have where they currently live, and will look at the region their family once called home as an alternative as well.