Americans are more likely to move from Louisiana to New York than the opposite

Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana, shot his shot.

He took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that business leaders worried about the imminent mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani might consider his own state as an alternative. New Yorkers were going to embrace socialism, he wrote, and “we know what that looks like. It’s going to be a mess.” So why not swap the Hudson for the Mississippi?

Look, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, as Michael Scott once said. But there are at least two problems with Landry’s pitch.

The first is that the idea businesses and business leaders are about to engage in a mass exodus from the city is silly. New York is already enormously expensive, but rich people stick around because of its social and cultural advantages. “I’m going to leave the city” has been a threat so long that The Daily Show compiled annual examples stretching back to Barack Obama’s first year in office. Many of those examples featured clips from Fox News, the channel still based on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

The other problem is that Louisiana is a particularly unappealing destination for New Yorkers.

The Census Bureau compiles annual data on where people are moving within the U.S., the most recent of which covers 2023. From it, we see evidence of New York’s population drain, with 31 states and D.C. receiving more residents from New York than New York gained from those states. In total, about 178,000 more people moved out of New York to other states than moved from other states into New York.

Now that’s New York broadly, not just New York City. It’s safe to assume that many of them were moving from other parts of the state, where more than half of state residents live. Nonetheless, the data are fascinating, showing (for example) that 46,000 more New Yorkers decamped for Florida (for some reason) than moved from Florida back north.

That was the biggest differential between New York and other states, followed by North Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Many of the states that sent fewer residents to New York than they received are located in the Sun Belt, comporting with the pattern of Americans moving from (colder) Northern states to (warmer) Southern ones.

That said, eighteen states sent more new residents to New York than they received. Foremost among them was Massachusetts. But there were also a few Sun Belt states — including Louisiana.

In 2023, about 1,600 people moved from Louisiana to New York. Only about 500 moved the other direction. These numbers are roughly the inverse of migration between New York and Alaska — with more than twice as many New Yorkers deciding to decamp for the frozen North than for the Bayou State.

This doesn’t mean that no one will move from New York to Louisiana or that Landry’s pitch won’t convince some people to do exactly that. It simply suggests that there might be some other reasons that there were 43 states to which New Yorkers were more likely to move during 2023.

Photo: New Orleans from the air, 1943. (National Archives)