Free Market Migration: Sometimes You Just Got To Move

It's interesting to note how often the phrase "nation of immigrants" gets uttered concerning the foreigners coming into our country. However, we often forget that there are internal migrations going on in the form of relocation to were the jobs are. It's not just retirees moving down South. I've heard Rush Limbaugh say this numerous times "You have to move to were the jobs are. It's that simple." The OTBL bloggers would tell us this is how free market economics works. He buddy, you get no guarantees...

Here's an interesting story about displaced auto workers moving from Michigan to Wyoming where jobs are plentiful in the current oil, gas and coal boom. Hopefully this citizen migrants know the boom and bust economy of Wyoming. This story centers around Gillette, Wyo., a town that was booming when I went through there in 1979 and a town that was busted when I went through again in 1984.
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Wyoming jobs lure workers

Labor-starved state recruits Michigan residents, who are happy to be free of auto-industry woes.

by Kirk Johnson / New York Times

GILLETTE, Wyo . -- Houston Mellentine, 10, held up the rattlesnake tail he kept in a box. "Killed it right over there," he said, pointing to the edge of his family's dirt front yard.

His mother, Melissa, sat in a folding chair as the sun set one recent evening, eying the snake's tail in her son's hand. "They don't have rattlesnakes in Michigan," she said somewhat longingly, at least not in her old front yard.

But then, Michigan has few of the types of jobs that brought the Mellentines here.

Labor-starved Wyoming, with its energy boom in coal, oil and natural gas, is vigorously courting the workers of the Rust Belt -- in particular, those in Michigan's struggling auto industry. And the workers are responding, and adjusting to a very different life in the West.

Wyoming economic development officials and company representatives are planning their third recruiting trip this year, visiting job fairs next month in Flint, Lansing and Grand Rapids. A billboard depicting a lush Wyoming will go up on the highway outside Flint on Sept. 20 and be seen by an estimated 65,000 people a day.

"Michigan has been very good for us," said Ruth Benson, the director of the Campbell County Economic Development Corp., who has twice led recruiting expeditions to depressed cities in Michigan.

So far, about 1,500 Michigan residents have signed up to receive job postings through the Wyoming work force Web site, and at least several hundred, employers and recruiters say, have moved to the state.

Read more @ the Detroit News.