"Stay East, Gray Lady, Stay East!"

The New York Times is never really at its best when it tries to cover areas west of the Mississippi River, or maybe even the Hudson. (Case in point: a September 2, 2006 article entitled "Youthful Binge Drinking Fueled by Boredom of the Open West." Nuff said, although this article took up dozens of inches of column space.)

Now the Gray Lady reports, in an article by Kirk Johnson on Sept. 13, 2006, that "[l]abor-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."

Is this a significant new economic trend? Not according to the article:

"By the standards of the nation's past great labor migrations - the
industrial revolution in the late 1800's that filled urban factories with
former farmers, the Dust Bowl diaspora to California in the 1930's, the
tide of blacks from the South in World War II seeking work in northern
factories - what is happening here is an aberration, historians and
geographers say."

So, basically, they admit that by NYT standards this is a fluff piece. Oh well.

Wyoming officials apparently are pushing hard to recruit folks from Michigan, with multiple recruiting trips and even a prominently located billboard near Flint that will be seen by 65,000 people a day. Previous efforts to siphon off Hurricane Katrina refugees were less successful, a fact the Wyoming recruiters attribute in part to the fact that Michiganders are "akin to Wyomingites in the ways and wiles of work" and "also have an inner toughness, ... that can only come from surviving harsh northern winters."

The Wyoming jobs apparently include driving trucks and working on the local police force. After all, who better than Detroit-trained cops to keep all of the new immigrants in line?

"Michigan is attractive, [Police] Chief Adriaens said, because the police
training is excellent, but the job market is not. 'We've tried some other
areas that had depressed economies, but they weren't the same,' he said."

Apparently the new immigrants are encouraging their friends and relations to move with them.
The article quotes one 19-year-old who has landed a lucrative job driving a dump truck in Wyoming (and is trying to get his parents to move there too) as stating that "nothing is going to happen in Michigan in the next 10 years at least, and there's money out here to be made."

But don't worry - it should be easy for the Michiganders to reach critical mass and seize political power, given the low population density of Wyoming. Perhaps the immigrants might be able to rename the state "New Michigan" to ease any homesickness they may feel?