American Refugees

A Review American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States (Encounter Books, 2023) by Roger L. Simon

Your eyes do not deceive you: the South is growing in population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since 2020 domestic migration trends have led to five of the top seven destination states being in the South—Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Indeed, between 2023 and 2024, the South gained nearly 1.8 million new residents—more than any other U.S. region—and over 400,000 of those newcomers were domestic migrants. Such “internal migrants” come to the South for a variety of reasons, including political affiliations. According to a New York Times piece entitled “Sick of Your Blue State?” (Apr. 18, 2024), so many blue state conservatives, fed up with liberal politics, have been relocating to Southern red states that real estate agents in South Carolina have begun to cater to these refugees with a website called Conservative Move. The well-known novelist, screenwriter and journalist Roger L. Simon, who migrated from Los Angeles to Nashville in 2018, is one such domestic political migrant.

The climax of American Refugees takes place when Simon relates the story of a debate he helped organize between the Republican primary candidates for Tennessee’s newly drawn 5^th Congressional District in 2022. Either intended or not, this moment alone holds everything perceived to be right or wrong about the oft-discussed topic of internal migration the last decade.

This debate was billed as a new way of doing politics, not only for these Southern folk but for the nation. Simon’s employer, The Epoch Times, arranged to have experts question the candidates as opposed to journalists. The names of these experts carry weight: Gordon Chang, a geopolitical analyst with a focus on China; Dr. Carol Swain, a retired Vanderbilt political science professor and frequent commentator on all the large media mouthpieces; and Dr. Wilfred Reilly, best known as the author of Hate Crime Hoax (2019). One might have thought that the South was being given its due. It was finally garnering national attention. It was being recognized as a pivotal region on the grand stage.

However, what transpired was inadvertently humorous. After so much planning and backroom dealing, only one of the three leading candidates showed up to the venue outside Nashville.

But do not let that detract from the lights and cameras, the streams on the worldwide information highway. Imagine his great spectacle all pieced together by the mouthpiece of Falun Gong—a Far East spiritual movement founded in my own short lifetime—under the roof of a Free Mason lodge. Few “A Rabbi and a Priest Enter a Bar” jokes could compare to this reality.

Simon at this time had been in Nashville for about five years. He had spent his professional life writing in Los Angeles after having been born and raised in New York. Through his connections in media, he quickly acquired a certain level of influence in Nashville’s upper strata—or at least its political circles. However, his prominence lends slim insight into the internal migration phenomenon, as his view mostly—almost entirely—revolves around the world of politics.

The title does not help the book. This is certainly not the story, but a story—meaning what Simon has written is read better as a memoir. Simon writes that he wants this book to serve as “a kind of Fodor’s guide to red states,” yet he dwells in the personal. This memoir does not sing the praises of his new home—not of the landscape nor the history nor the people, but only of the tax policies. Aside from a few lines about cow pastures, the only destinations mentioned are Nashville and its ritzy suburbs. His perch is best portrayed in his retelling of an evening spent at a Nashville Asian fusion restaurant. He and his table mates discuss the incipient violence about to undo America. These elderly gentlemen—Simon is an octogenarian and nearly all the friends and acquaintances he mentions are retired—talk on and on over their bowls of Miso soup about the war to be fought by … they don’t say.

I do not want to disparage the author—in fact, I commiserate to a degree. A closer reading of this book reveals an issue many newcomers to Southern cities have encountered: there are no natives about, or at least none easily to be found. Simon does not lament this explicitly, or perhaps he failed to mention or never noticed the absence of born and bred Tennesseans. As conspicuous as it may seem to some, this paucity of natives in the most sought-after Southern in-migration enclaves is lost to many. Just about every friend or politico Simon writes about is from elsewhere. This could be, from a cynical point of view, the nature of the political world—those with money and ambition travel to more amenable environs et cetera.

Furthermore, his coterie of retired friends and acquaintances illustrates that much of this migration is composed of retirees. Recently, the Charleston Post & Courier wrote about Jasper County, South Carolina being the fastest growing county in the state and the ninth fastest in the United States overall in 2023. According to the data, those fifty-five and older seniors make up the vast majority of the new residents. Hilton Head and its beaches and golf courses cannot be resisted along with South Carolina’s fiscal conservatism.

What does this portend for the red states mentioned in Simon’s work? He does not scrutinize this point—it is, again, really a memoir, so statistical analyses are few. But we can surmise this internal migration is only a temporary good. Yes, Simon and his fellow refugees bring glamor and prestige—necessary requirements for influencing national trends—but the fruits are few and far between. It seems the only positive economic development described by Simon since his arrival in Tennessee is the opening of a California-based fast-food chain, In-and-Out. One supposes the natives’ and refugees’ progeny can flip burgers for Nashville’s endless tourist flood.

If there is no economic opportunity, then there can assuredly be no culture making. Without the all-important dollar, there will be no families, no homes. This lack is already evident. Nashville, during my few hours bar crawl downtown in 2019, is saturated in pop country music, which according to the American Conservative, is now the “nation’s soundtrack”—the most popular music genre in the U.S.

Will these new Southern residents take up old ways? Will it be Sharpsburg or Antietam? Assimilation requires a certain benevolence on the part of the elite within these red states. They must welcome their new arrivals, but there must also be an acculturation on the part of the latter. The native elite must be confident and assertive while also adaptable and discerning enough to take what is good from the influx while separating the bad. What Simon describes in American Refugees is a non-responsive elite. Much of what is good in this memoir are his attempts to inject a bit of vigor in those so comfortable with what they have—Simon and his troop grind against the established pols of Nashville for much of the narrative, for there is little reason to relax: after all, Tennessee and the South writ large did not prevent the revolution from entering.

This book was published in 2023 yet reads as an ancient text—the second half of 2024 contained decades. Simon inveighs against the excesses of Silicon Valley, the lockdown, and the corruption of the previous regime, but we can now say—at least for a significant portion of Silicon Valley—those responsible for the last decade’s bout of hysteria have been not only brought mostly to heel but increasingly into the fold.

These new arrivals have not left, and it does not seem in their interests to return from whence they came. They are of many types: some are here to escape redistribution; some the racial and gender hysteria; some simply want to golf; others crave the weather. Those from elsewhere are capable of great good—look no further than the coast of South Carolina and the duck hunting fields preserved by Northern industrialists in the early 20^th century. For native and arrival alike, it is not a time to gripe anymore. It is a time to build.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Thomas Ellen

Thomas R. Ellen is a writer in Charleston, South Carolina. You can find more of his work on his Substack, The Metic.

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