Senior Migrants

Covid prompted families and young metropolitans to migrate in search of a better quality of life in the open spaces, they relocated from the northern states or from California to Colorado, Texas, Montana and Utah, but also to Georgia, North and South Carolina. Their parents, on the other end, have been migrating after retirement to Florida, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico for at least twenty years. The Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada used to be sparsely populated, in Montana, for example, until the beginning of the millennium the population was just 800 thousand people, these states were poor states and Indian reservations still abound. During the war, the atomic bomb was tested in the great desert expanses of Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

The appeals of these states for the retirees of the baby boomer generation are several: the hot and dry climate of the desert, the low house prices and tax breaks (in Arizona the state pension, social security is not taxed, and Nevada does not have an income tax). According to the Census Bureau, more than a million Americans over the age of 65 move every year, the most popular destinations after Florida are Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.

Retirees have brought the comforts of metropolitan life with them. Hospitals, community centres, golf courses, bars and restaurants, which offer discounts to seniors, have blossomed like tulips at the beginning of spring in the towns of the semi-desert areas of the Southwest. Schools, on the other hand, have closed and the reason is simple, these migrants have no children to send to school and so why finance them?

In the United States, schools and all services for young people are financed with property taxes, a tax applied to all buildings. Developers in New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona have found a tax loophole for seniors: the gated communities, plots of land surrounded by walls for over 55 years old residents who do not pay property tax. Children and grandchildren only come to visit; they are not allowed to reside there.

It is easy to imagine the social impact. In cities like Phoenix, Nevada, or Tucson, Arizona, there are entire neighbourhoods of seniors and the local economy revolves around them. A paradise for physiotherapists, doctors, dentists, but also for sports centres for retirees, in these suburbs there are no young people and children, nor schools, daycare centres, bars, and discos.

If there was little life in Nevada and Arizona before the arrival of the retirees, in New Mexico there was a community of artists and hippies who from the 1960s onwards had moved to a state considered quiet, a thousand miles away from the metropolises of the East Coast, the traffic of Los Angeles and the politics of Washington DC. Taos, a small Native American village, was home to artists, musicians, leather craftsmen, iron craftsmen, weavers, and many hippies who had made a very specific life choice: to live outside of rich and imperialist America. Today is just another attraction for tourists.

Santa Fe’, not far away, used to offer a wide range of small shops where you could buy the works of these artists and artisans for little money. Most of these residents did not vote, they were not interested in politics. Those who did vote did so for the Republicans, as in all the surrounding states.

Santa Fe’ was a town built in Mexican style where everyone knew each other. The houses were very cheap compared to the rest of the United States and it was full of young people dressed in eccentric clothes. There were families and children, schools and bars where you could listen to music every night. Today Santa Fe is a city of 85,000 inhabitants, a huge suburb populated by people who work for the senior economy and for tourism, the old centre has become an art gallery/amusement park for rich American tourists, the prices are the same as Rodeo Drive. It has become a sort of Mexican Disneyland. And like Venice, Florence, Barcelona and many other cities, Santa Fe has lost its charm.

Following the internal migration phenomenon the propensity to vote Republican has also changed, in the last 8 presidential elections New Mexico has voted for the Democrats 7 times. Biden won 54 percent of the votes against Trump's 44. States like Nevada and Arizona have become swing states, always in the balance between one candidate and another. In Nevada, Republicans won the presidential elections from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump with a margin of 48 percent against 46 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won by about 2.5 percent over Trump. Very small margins.