What's The Matter With Texas (And Florida)?
The two biggest Southern states aren't attracting people from other states like they used to -- and they're highly dependent on immigrants for population growth. Meanwhile, the Carolinas are booming.
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For many years now – and I say this as a longtime Californian – the American dream has been embodied by Texas. Outsized, prosperous, growing fast, big ambitions, yet still affordable: Texas seems to be what California was a couple of generations ago, the place to go to make a good life.
So why aren’t Americans moving to Texas anymore?
Maybe that’s an overstatement. Lots of Americans are still moving to Texas – more than 77,000 Californians last year alone – but apparently a lot people are leaving Texas as well. Florida too, as long as we’re on the subject.
The second- and third-largest states have been piling up population like crazy for decades. As recent as 2023, these two states alone accounted for more than half of all net internal migration – people moving from one state to another.
But in the last two years, that’s changed. The Carolinas are eating Texas’s and Florida’s lunch. Overall, all net domestic migration is going to the South, while all other regions have a net loss. But where in the South people are going has changed.
North Carolina is now the #1 destination for people from moving from state to state. Texas is still second, but it’s now barely ahead of South Carolina, which has one-sixth of Texas’s population. And the bottom fell out of Florida’s net domestic migration. Together, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee account for 60% of all net domestic migration (though Georgia isn’t as much of a factor as the other states.)
It’s important to note that the net part of the domestic migration papers over a lot of things. Yes, 100,000 Californians moved to Texas in 2024 – but 45,000 Texans moved to California, and that number has remained more or less the same for a decade or more. Some 52,000 Texans moved to Florida in 2024 – but 45,000 Floridians moved to Texas.
We Are Stuck
Part of what’s going on, of course, is that people aren’t moving as much as they used to. As many observers have suggested, they’re stuck. If they don’t own houses, they can’t move to high-cost locations (and in Texas and Florida, the job-rich locations are pretty high cost). If they do own houses, they’re locked into low interest rates they don’t want to give up.
And we can see this in the numbers. Between 2023 and 2025, state-to-state movement dropped by more than half – from more than 700,000 to only about 350,000. That’s only about 1% of the population per year moving from one state to another. (Historically, the number has been around 3%.)
State-to-state migration, of course, gets all the headlines – even though it’s only one of three basic components of population change and, as noted in the previous paragraph, it’s declining and therefore becoming less important. Not long ago I got a call from a reporter looking at report from U-Haul and wanting to talk about the “mass exodus from California”. I had to explain that while, yes, many people are leaving California from other states, California’s population is actually going up (if only a little). The reason is the other two basic components of population change: international immigration and natural increase (births over deaths).
As many other observers have noted, fertility rates are down sharply and natural increase is barely a third of what it was a generation ago. So in many cases the only way a state can increase its population is through international immigration.
This has been happening in California and New York for a long time. Net outmigration to other states from California and New York is in the hundreds of thousands. But natural increase accounts for some growth – and international immigration has made up the rest of the difference so that both states have populations that are stable or at least increasing slightly.
Texas and Florida Depend On Immigration
What’s not always well understand, though, is the population growth in Texas and Florida – two red states with a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric – have also depended on international immigration for population growth.
During the Biden era, international immigration to Texas accounted for as much or more population growth than state-to-state migration. In 2025 the international number dropped sharply – but it was still a lot higher than the net state-to-state migration number.
Florida is even more dramatic. Domestic migration plummeted in 2025. International immigration dropped by more than half – but it was still seven or eight times as high as net domestic migration (178,000 versus 22,000).
Both states still added a lot of people in 2025 – but the increase was a lot less than in previous years, and that was because of both a drop in international immigration and a drop in state-to-state migration. (Natural increase holds pretty constant from one year to the next and, not surprisingly, in Florida it’s usually a negative number because of the large older population.)
So what’s the matter with Texas – and Florida?
Is It White Flight?
Part of it, frankly, might be the weather. Texas and Florida are both getting hotter, presumably because of climate change. And that makes the more moderate weather in the Carolinas and Tennessee look better. Summer temperature in Austin in 10 degrees hotter than Nashville. Same for Florida and North Carolina.
A community center in a refugee neighborhood in Houston.
Part of it may also be culture – and all the international immigration. Despite being controlled by MAGA Republicans, both Texas and Florida are very diverse states, with
